Francis A. "Close the Gates of Mercy" Schmidt (College Football HOF Coach)

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Story of Francis Schmidt, Buckeye icon




By Denton Ashway
sports@forsythnews.com
UPDATED Sept. 3, 2008 4:30 p.m.

Pity poor Ohio State.

All the Buckeyes have done the past two seasons is reach the BCS Championship Game. Just because they?ve laid two of the biggest eggs in the history of title games, they?ve aroused disdain from sea to shining sea.

No one wants to see them back for a third debacle. Except for their loyal legion of diehard fans, Kirk Herbstreit and any potential opponent in the next championship tilt.

That hardly seems fair. Ohio State possesses a wonderful football history, and its myriad traditions stack up with those of any school. The marching band performing the script Ohio, with the sousaphonist dotting the ?i? dates to 1936. The ringing of the 2,420 pound Victory Bell dates to 1954.

They play in the famous ?Horseshoe,? Ohio Stadium, receive buckeye leaves for great plays, and gather to sing ?Carmen Ohio? after every game.

And every player who participates in a victory over hated rival Michigan, ?that school up north,? receives a pair of miniature gold pants engraved with his name, the date and the score of the game.

That tradition owes itself to Francis A. Schmidt, the man who ushered Ohio State football into its modern era of national importance. He was the first coach of national prominence to be hired at Ohio State, in 1934.

At his introductory press conference, scribes wanted to know how he would tame Michigan. The Bucks had just lost 9-of-12 to their rivals, including two straight shutouts that cost coach Sam Willaman his job. Schmidt had a ready reply, coining a new phrase.

Continued......

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'Way ahead of his time'
Francis Schmidt jump-started Ohio State football in 1934 with game plans filled with trick plays. Seven seasons later, he was gone, and his legacy of innovations faded.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
By Tom Reed
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH


FILE PHOTO
Schmidt's early teams earned the nickname "Scarlet Scourge" for piling up points.


Dispatch file photo
Francis Schmidt, shown at Ohio Stadium in 1937. He was fired three years later.

In the 1930s, Ohio State football players with places to go and appointments to keep walked past the 15th Avenue home of Francis Schmidt at their peril.

At any moment, regardless of the hour or season, the upstairs window could fly open and the excitable Buckeyes coach would holler, "Hey, you sons of (guns), get over here. I got something to show you."

A summons to the dean's office might be met with less trepidation.

"(Former player) Jack Smith told me that he and a couple of teammates were called up to Schmidt's bedroom one spring day, and there were all these index cards spread across the bed," Ohio State football historian Jack Park said. "Schmidt kept those guys up there for an hour showing them the plays he drew up for that season."

Each play, scribbled by using stubby, colored pencils, was more audacious than the last. Shovel passes. Double laterals. Spread formations.

What the bewildered Buckeyes of the leather-helmet era couldn't conceive is that they were witnessing the future of wide-open football as taught by an eccentric, profane law-school graduate.

"A lot of the plays they're using in the pros right now, we used back then," former Buckeyes fullback Jack Graf told The Dispatch in 2003.

The idea of Ohio State as an incubator for imaginative offense runs counter to its reputation. Big Ten titles and national championships have been won with the fundamental precision of Paul Brown, the numbing orthodoxy of Woody Hayes and the conservative, sometimes Victorian tenets of Jim Tressel.

But from 1934 to 1940, the most exciting, high-risk college football was played in Columbus.

"Schmidt was the antithesis of Woody Hayes," said Kent Stephens, College Football Hall of Fame historian and curator. "There was no 'three yards and a cloud of dust' with him. He was so different from what you consider the typical Ohio State coach to be."

Schmidt led the Buckeyes to two Big Ten titles before his odd ways and impracticality spurred his resignation. Four years after leaving Ohio State, he was dead at age 58.

He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1971,

Schmidt is best known in Ohio State lore for his early success against Michigan and founding the Gold Pants Club, but his legacy is largely forgotten. The two-story brick house where he and his wife, Evelyn, lived on Fraternity Row is now rental property for college students.

BuckeyeXtra - The Columbus Dispatch : 'Way ahead of his time'

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Francis Schmidt, Ohio State's head coach from 1934 through 1940, was a master of the razzle-dazzle offense. Quarterback Tippy Dye recalls that Schmidt's playbook contained more than 300 plays that were run from seven different formations. With such a complicated offense, Dye frequently wrote the number of each play on 3x5 cards and carried the cards inside his helmet. During timeouts, Dye could quickly look through the cards to remind himself of the many plays.

During Ohio State's 1934 game against Michigan, Dye was tackled soundly on an end run. His helmet flew off, and his play cards scattered across the playing field. Curious Michigan players immediately examined some of the loose cards, but apparently they didn't learn much -- the Buckeyes defeated the Wolverines 34-0.

BuckeyeXtra - Buckeyes have had their share of head-scratchers