Bill,
In your opinion, why do you think the ND box or the balanced SW is much harder to defend than the unbalanced version and does the age group matter?
I don't think age grouping matters at all. Balanced line = easier to teach & harder to stop. Ed Racely (#1 living SW "guru" in America) shares this opinion with me - we visit frequently. See Sports Illustrated article about Ed Racely at BOTTOM:
In the early 1960's I did a Masters Thesis on the "EVOLUTION OF OFFENSIVE FOOTBALL IN IT'S FIRST 100 YEARS". It was published in the "ATHLETIC JOURNAL" (great, but now defunct magazine). If I ever come across it in my files - I will put in on this site.
10 BEST COLLEGE DIRECT SNAP COACHES (LISTED BY WINNING %)
1. *Knute Rockne (BALANCED LINE) Winning % = .881
2. *Percy Haughton (BALANCED LINE) Winning % = .831
3. *Hurry Up Yost (BALANCED LINE) Winning % = .830
4. Bob Neyland (BALANCED LINE) Winning % = .828
5. Jock Sutherland (UNBALANCED LINE) Winning % = .811
6. *Charles Daly (BALANCED LINE) Winning % = .804
7. *Henry Williams (ran BOTH) Winning % = .786
8. Gil Dobie (UNBALANCED LINE) Winning % = .783
9. Wallace Wade (UNBALANCED LINE) Winning % = .765
10. *Pop Warner (UNBALANCED LINE) Winning % = .732
7 other great direct snap coaches worthy of mentioning are : Red Sanders (BALANCED); *Howard Jones (BALANCED); Francis Schmidt (BALANCED); *Bernie Bierman (UNBALANCED); *Fritz Crisler (UNBALANCED); Carl Snavely (UNBALANCED); and *Charlie Caldwell (UNBALANCED).
* = wrote a book (Neyland didn't write a book, but his playbook has since been published by one of his former players - Andy Kozar).
PS: Frank Leahy (balanced line ND Box until midway in his career switched to "T") Won 107/LOST 13/TIED 9 (4 NATIONAL TITLES)
Even "Bear Bryant" (voted the best College Coach of the 20th Century) was balanced line direct snap when he started coaching in 1936, until going to the Pro Set, & then ultimately the Wishbone in the early 1950's (until his death in 1983).
SINGLE WING 101
The best place to trace the single wing's first run through football history is an unlikely one: the 800-square-foot office over the garage of Ed Racely's stately house on a waterfront bluff on Cape Cod. Racely, age 80, worked a long and profitable career as the co-owner of a road-building business, but way before that he was a little boy with a passion for football. He played guard in a single wing offense in high school in Walthill, Neb., and growing up, he wrote to famous football coaches like Wallace Wade at Duke and Gen. Robert Neyland at Tennessee, requesting copies of game programs. Racely never stopped collecting: He now owns thousands of DVDs, VHS tapes and even 16-millimeter films (with five projectors), documenting the evolution of the single wing. "People ask me all the time who started the single wing," Racely says. "I tell them it was President Theodore Roosevelt."
The line is delivered like a joke, but this much is accurate: In 1905 Roosevelt advocated for college football rule changes designed to make the game safer by outlawing dangerous mass-momentum, closed-formation plays like the flying wedge. These rule changes gave rise to the game of modern football, including the forward pass, the single wing and all the formations that succeeded it.
Glenn Scobey (Pop) Warner coached at Carlisle (Pa.) Indian School from 1907 to '14. In 1908 Warner published a correspondence course for coaches, and in 1912 and '27 he wrote books outlining his football philosophy. In the '27 edition, under the chapter heading Formation A, Warner wrote, "This formation has been referred to as the 'Carlisle formation,' because it was first used by the Indians.... I have used this formation or variations of it ever since pushing and pulling the runner was prohibited in 1906." The book includes diagrams depicting what clearly came to be known as the single wing: an unbalanced line (a guard, two tackles and an end on one side of the center; a guard and end on the other); a tailback lined up in a shotgun position; next to him a fullback; up at the line of scrimmage behind the guard, a blocking back; and outside the strongside end, a single wingback, who later became the source of the formation's name.
The single wing relied on slick backfield ball handling (including mind-boggling 360-degree spins and fakes by the backs) and precise pulling and blocking on the offensive line. It would be the dominant formation in football for nearly half a century, employed by such legendary coaches as Knute Rockne of Notre Dame (who tweaked it with his famous box formation, in which the four backs shifted into a square, largely to confuse defenses), Fritz Crisler of Michigan and Carl Snavely of North Carolina. Single wing tailbacks would be the glamour players in the sport. Because of strict substitution rules and a conservative strategy that often involved punting before fourth down, single wing tailbacks were run, pass and kick athletes. Thorpe was a single wing tailback. So were George Gipp of Notre Dame, Ernie Nevers of Stanford, Nile Kinnick of Iowa and Tom Harmon of Michigan. Belichick's father, Steve, was a single wing fullback at Case Western Reserve, and Belichick played in the single wing in junior high and against it in prep school. "You found a guy back then who could do all three things and stay on the field," says Belichick. "And the guys who could do those things became your All-America, Heisman Trophy single wing tailbacks."
The last of them was Princeton's Dick Kazmaier in 1951. On Racely's big screen, Kazmaier comes to life in a 13--7 victory over Penn at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, the Tigers' 16th consecutive victory in a streak that would reach 24 games a year later. Four years earlier Michigan had won the national championship with a single wing backfield so dazzling in its deception that it had been nicknamed the Mad Magicians, and Princeton was similarly remarkable. The cameraman often lost sight of the ball.
The last NFL team to run the single wing was the Pittsburgh Steelers under head coach Jock Sutherland in the late 1940s. In the ensuing years successful college single wing tailbacks were forced to choose a position in the NFL. Paul Hornung arrived in Green Bay from Notre Dame in 1957 and became a running back (albeit one who threw frequent option passes). Billy Kilmer, one of the last single wing tailbacks in major college football, came to the 49ers from UCLA in '61 and eventually became a quarterback with the Saints and Redskins.
When the single wing died, it was the T formation that initially replaced it, followed by the I formation and the various two-back pro-style offenses. The passing game matured. Rules were altered to allow more frequent substitutions. The single wing became a novelty. Princeton continued running it through the '60s. "It was so different, it gave us an edge," says Cosmo Iacavazzi, a fullback on the 1964 Ivy League championship team, stating a theme that would be echoed much later.
The last outpost of the college single wing was Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where Keith Piper ran it until 1992.
