Evy: The Championship Season

Sept. 19, 2010

• Cast Your O’Brien Quarterback Award
• Vote for R. Stanzi as a Premier Player
• 24 Hawkeyes to Watch
• Download your Iowa Hawkeye iPhone app!
• gohawks.com
• Iowa Football wallpaper

EDITOR’S NOTE: The UI Athletics Department will celebrate the Forest Evashevski era of football at the UI Saturday with the staging of its second “Throwback Game.” The 2010 Hawkeyes will wear uniforms that have the look of the 1960 team – Evy’s eighth and final at the UI – that won the Big Ten Conference title when they entertain Ball State at 11 a.m., Iowa time inside historic Kinnick Stadium. The following is a excerpt from the book, “75 Years With the Fighting Hawkeyes,” by Dick Lamb and Bert McGrane. It talks about the significant coaching decision made by Evy in 1956 that paid off handsomely for the Hawkeye football program.

Thursday, April 5, 1956, was an unrecognized but notable day in State University of Iowa football history. That afternoon marked the first meeting of the Hawkeyes and the Wing-T, balanced line attack that was to bring them from the Big Ten obscurity of 1955 to the top of the football heap in 1956. That was the day Coach Evashevski explained the offense to his players and gave them their spacings, starting count and formations. Four days later they scrimmaged.

The development of the 1956 team is told in the records. It won the Big Ten championship for the first time since 1922, it earned a Number 3 rating nationally, and it won the Rose Bowl game. It was the first Iowa team in 16 years to defeat Notre Dame, and it was the team that shattered Ohio State’s unmatched string of 17 consecutive conference victories. Evashevski was named Coach of the Year by the Washington Touchdown Club, the Los Angeles Times and the Kansas City Rockne Club. His goal of making Iowa “respectable” in football had been accomplished in stunning fashion.

When the 1956 football prospectus was issued by Eric C. Wilson’s Iowa Sports Information Service, it carried a line in a preview of the season:

“It appears that Iowa will use mostly the Single Wing with balanced line instead of the multiple offense of recent years, with unbalanced line.”

The Hawkeyes did use some features of the Single Wing, notably the blocking, but the tactics were different than anything the Big Ten had seen previously. Iowa became an efficient demonstrator of the Wing-T. The radical change in attack was to establish Evashevski’s teams as a fast, razor sharp attacking force, loaded with deception. The 1956 season became a milestone in the school’s football history.

The story of the switch in offenses began with Dave Nelson, head coach of the University of Delaware, a close friend of Evy and his teammate at Michigan. Nelson, employing a multiple offense against Delaware’s opponents, decided that his Single Wing type of blocked was inadequate in meeting the defenses employed against his team. This was primarily because the exchange of the ball preceded the fake left an offensive blocking weakness which it was not possible to plug effectively. So he installed the T formation where the fake preceded the actual exchange of the ball. Therefore, anytime a man was faking he could plug a hole created by a pulling lineman and not get leaking defensive men into the play situation. In this way Nelson was able to open up new offensive innovations and at the same time retain the advantages of single wing blocking. The result was highly effective.

When the 1955 season was over Evashevski reviewed his own situation and appraised the material he expected to have available for 1956.

“I could see coming up an entirely different type of lineman that we had had,” Evy explained. “So I sat down with Dave after the 1955 season and told him I was real interested in his attack. I could see an entirely different group of boys on our field. I could see Frank Bloomquist and Gary Grouwinkel and Bob Commings, three very maneuverable guards. I could see big tackles like Alex Karras and Dick Klein and Frank Rigney, who were not especially good movers. Then I could see our ends, who had good maneuverability – Jim Gibbons and Frank Gilliam, who also had speed enough to pull. We had an explosive type backfield and we had the guy who could make the big play in Kenny Ploen.

“We had to find a way to utilize Kenny to the best of his ability. He was not a really good Split-T man. He was poor on the option. You knew how Jerry Reichow could do on that play but where you put Ploen in he like to get back and look things over. Well, this is how we came to change, so I conferred with Davey about this type of attack. I had felt for a long time that he was one of the finest coaches in the game.

“We put in the Wing-T in spring practice. We tried to improvise and improve upon the offense and I think we did. We featured the bootlegs. We made a study of football that went back into the `20’s and found that with the Single Wing in vogue it actually was just aiming at one point. This was one dimension of football, as I called it. When the Notre Dame abox came in it provided a two-dimension attack, based on the buck lateral and the Harlow series of shifts and spinners at Harvard. Immediately after the second dimension came in the scores kept going up. This went along until once more the defense was catching up and Don Faurot came in with the Split T at Missouri.

“I took that apart and tried to find out why the Split T was an immediate success and decided that it was because a third dimension had been introduced to football. The quarterback either gave the ball to a halfback, or threatened to keep as his second dimension, or to pitch out to a fellow trailing as his third. We tired to work this into an offense where we always had the three dimensions but were we also added a fourth dimension. With it we could threaten the middle with the fullback, threaten both blanks or go off tackle with the halfbacks, and the quarterback, by virtue of the bootleg, could fake the pass or endanger either flank. The fourth dimension always provided the possibility of threatening a different area.

“That what I think made the Wing-T a real successful offense. But I have said a number of times that it was very definitely Davey Nelson’s offense. I’ve said that in all my clinics and I would be guilty of plagiarism if I failed to recognize the man who had the basic idea. I think we put an individual touch to it. A lot of teams have tried the Wing T and every one of them has taken part of the Iowa offense or Delaware offense and used it. It became ofe of the most copied offense outside the Split T.”

The significance of Iowa’s switch to the Wing-T, and the ability of the Hawkeyes to adjust to and most effectively execute their new offense, made no great impact in advance of the season. Iowa generally was consigned to seventh place in the Big Ten previews. Perhaps the “how wrong can you be” cliché originated just about then for the Hawkeye team made extremely bad guessers of most analysts.

TOMORROW: More on Evy’s and Iowa’s championship season.