From the Coach's Bookshelf - Brett Perkins' Frantic Francis

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Despite having a career record of 158-57-11 and being a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, Francis Schmidt is one of the most underappreciated college football coaches in the game’s history. An incredible offensive mind, Schmidt brought success to Tulsa, Arkansas, TCU and Ohio State during the 20’s and 30’s. He believed in a wild, wide-open, daring style of offense and created a playbook of more than 200 plays – unheard of at the time. His coaching lineage can be traced over the years to include Sid Gillman, Bill Walsh, and Mike Holmgren. But Schmidt was an eccentric character who alienated many of his players, the media, and members of the coaching fraternity with his paranoid, brusque and profane personality.

Brett Perkins writes a detailed, anecdote-filled account of this mainly unknown coach who, in many ways, changed the way the game is played.

Amazingly, despite his unusual personality and the important infl uence he had on the game of football, Francis Schmidt has never before been the subject of a book. Even those who study football history know little about him. Sportswriters – the initial gatekeeper’s of a coach’s legacy – were entertained by Schmidt, but after time they were also alienated by him and a coach must sell himself to the press if he wishes to secure his legacy in writing. Schmidt, however, despite his many attributes, was unable to do this. He was too preoccupied with his relentless thoughts, too caustic with his opinions, and his unusual sense of humor could only make up for so much. Additionally, Schmidt’s unpopular habit of running up scores, his short stay on college football’s main stage, and his inability to build an iconic relationship with one school hindered his reputation. Despite having a mountain of friends, Schmidt had no close friends. Furthermore, Schmidt and his wife, Evelyn, never had any children. When all hope for a well-earned legacy seems lost, a loyal child can often provide the last line of offense, usually with a well-slanted article or book. Because Francis Schmidt operated somewhere between oddness and madness, it has always been diffi cult to determine which stories about him are true and which are myths. Everything he did had a manic quality, making even the outlandish tales hard to dismiss. But the truth is fascinating enough. He worked eighteen hours a day, devoting most of his waking thought to football, and even a few hours of sleep failed to interrupt his passion. He kept a pad and pencil hanging from his bedpost so he could jot down ideas that came to him in the night. Besides coaching his own team during the football season, Schmidt attended as many games as possible, whether they were at a university, a teachers’ college, or an all-black high school. He fi lled notebooks with endless notes on what he saw, always looking for variations of plays or formations that might be new to him. There weren’t many. The diagramming – or creating – of football plays was his most famous obsession. Schmidt worked at creating plays the way a chain smoker works a cigarette. Using Xs and Os to represent players and arrows and dashes to represent movement, Schmidt was a mad scientist seeking a cure for touchdown deficiency. His mind seemed unable to disengage from this pursuit, and he frustrated all who knew him by mentally disappearing during conversations, parties, and bridge games. There had to be a million possible plays, and Schmidt seemed determined to discover and document every one in a notebook, on a napkin, or on random scraps of paper. This prodigious output was always his blessing as well as his curse.

Francis Schmidt had a playbook that was ten times larger than those used by other coaches before him. Among those many plays were things fantastic, beautiful, over-engineered and standard. Schmidt’s playbook was long ago stripped like an abandoned car in Queens, its parts scattered among other clinics, playbooks, and hungry coaches. But Schmidt’s great influence lay not in the exact implementation of his plays but rather manifests itself as a philosophy – a philosophy that says: consider the entire spectrum of offensive football and then shoot the works. It’s a philosophy that was completely at odds with the football establishment during Schmidt’s career, and only through a chain of followers has his futuristic concept fulfilled its promise. Schmidt constantly commented on how much fans enjoyed open football. Today’s game of football – the most popular spectator sport in America – is so revered in part because of the innumerable possibilities on every play. And if there was one thing that makes Schmidt important it was his obsessive, groundbreaking exploration of possibilities.

Remember the three plays Boise State sprung on Oklahoma in the 2006 Fiesta Bowl? Football fans talked about them for weeks afterward. Even today they are the plays people reference when reaching for an example of football at its most thrilling. One play was a hook and lateral, one was a Statue of Liberty, and one was a pass thrown by a wide receiver. All three were part of Schmidt’s standard repertoire. As a matter of fact, if one of Schmidt’s peak Ohio State teams were to perform today, fans would be dumbfounded at the audacious plays unfolding before them. As popular as football is right now, it only showcases a percentage of Schmidt’s razzle-dazzle. “If this man (Schmidt) were alive today,” said Sid Gillman decades after Schmidt’s death, “I wonder what advances he would be making in offensive football because he had no peer in this category.”

“If this man (Schmidt) were alive today, I wonder what advances he would be making in o ensive football because he had no peer in this category.”
- Sid Gillman

Adaptations from ‘Frantic Francis’ by Brett Perkins by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 2009. Available wherever books are sold or from the University of Nebraska Press (800-848-6224) and on the web at www.nebraskapress.unl.edu.

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