Sport: Old Single Winger

Princeton’s Charlie Caldwell, voted 1950’s top U.S. coach, says that he really learned what modern football was all about on Oct. 25, 1924, a day of massive frustration. Charlie, then a fullback, spent that afternoon backing up the line of a good Princeton team pitted against Knute Rockne’s celebrated Four Horsemen. Notre Dame won, 12-0, and it was probably a merciful score.

Just Enough. Recalls Caldwell: “I felt as if we were being toyed with . . . I don’t believe I made a clean tackle all afternoon. There would come Layden, or Miller, or someone. I would get set to drop the ball carrier in his tracks and someone would give me a nudge, just enough to throw me off balance, just enough pressure to make me miss.” Charlie mulled over what had hit him, and decided: “We . . . had been subjected to our first lesson in what might be called the science of football.”

Caldwell was and is a stalwart disciple of the single-wing offense, but throughout his own coaching career he has developed the system with fond attention to the scientific blocking and cross-checking perfected by Rockne, “the master coach of them all.” This week Caldwell’s coaching rivals, admirers and all other true 50-yard-liners can read his studious progress review, Modern Single Wing Football (Lippincott, $5). During the war years, relates Coach Caldwell, the T, “the oldest of the basic offensive formations . . . was exploding all over the place.” But he “couldn’t believe that T was sounding the death knell of the Single Wing.” To prove that “an old Single Winger dies hard,” Caldwell borrowed some T trimmings (flankers, men-in-motion, split ends, etc.), at war’s end went back to Princeton as head coach and hit paydirt by winning the Big Three title four years straight. His crowning glory was last season’s Princeton team, “the personification of the modern Single Wing,” which rolled up 349 points while winning all of its nine games.

Timely Point. Despite his book’s 109 diagrams, canny Charlie gives away few trade secrets not already charted by enemy scouts. But, he points out, the very popularity of the T among U.S. coaches has helped the relatively few Single Wingers: “A T-team . . . has to give up at least several days of practice to its preparations for a solid Single Wing, if its members . . . are not to be completely confused.”

With West Point still reeling from effects of the mass expulsion, Charlie Caldwell raises a timely point: “How can a football player keep up with his studies?” Speaking for Princeton, where “education comes first,” the coach answers emphatically that it can be done. He adds: “Football, if anything, tends to help . . . [It] teaches them how to get the full value out of an hour of study.” Caldwell claims that in some years as many as two-thirds of the squad have actually improved their grades during the playing season.