Asked if he had any plans as he turned 100, the old man joked, “I may go on forever. Statistics say that very few men die after the age of 100.” The old man was Amos Alonzo Stagg, and when he died in 1965 at 102, he was a somewhat forgotten figure in sports history in part because he created so many things that do not seem to us as things a person would have had to dream up. Weren’t these things always so? … He did not invent the game of football, but “all football comes from Stagg,” Knute Rockne once said.
Amos Alonzo Stagg retired as kicking coach for a junior college in Stockton, California, on this date in 1960. He was 98 years old and had been a football coach continuously since 1890. (He is seen on the cover of Time from 1958.) Almost every play formation and tactic that one may associate with football—including the huddle, the end-around play, the forward pass, the lateral pass, and even shoulder pads and pads on the goalpost legs—was an innovation Stagg developed himself or had a hand in developing in his seven decades, most of them as a head coach, and most of them as the head coach at the University of Chicago. He was the first coach to put numbers on uniforms.
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