Driving Man

(See Cover)

On the field a burly, red-shirted figure burst into the Michigan State backfield and almost blocked a quick kick. On the sideline a rumpled, prowling man in brown slacks and unbuttoned shirt scowled and grabbed a telephone. "Who came in on that?" he demanded from an unseen watcher high in the stands over Palo Alto's Stanford Stadium. Coach Hugh Duffy Daugherty. master craftsman of the most intricate offensive in modern football, was at his appointed task of trying to keep track of every block and tackle of every player on the field.

Michigan State's men tried the T, the split T, and the single wing. But none moved consistently against Stanford's solidly briefed and heavier line. At half time the score was tied 7-7. Daugherty had a new tactic ready. Coming out for the second half his team shifted to a weird formation--a single wing to the right with the line unbalanced to the left. Disconcerted and caught unprepared, the rugged Stanford line split wide open. State's Halfback Clarence Peaks knifed ruthlessly between linemen cut down by blockers they never saw. Before the Stanford team could diagnose the new offense, Daugherty's boys had scored two touchdowns. That was the game; when the final whistle blew, Michigan State was the winner by a comfortable 21-7.

It was the kind of spectacular resourcefulness that the nation's football men recognize as a Daugherty specialty, a resourcefulness that has made him, in the short space of three years, a marked and admired man in a savagely competitive trade. But as Daugherty fought his way across the swirling crowd on the field to offer his condolences to Stanford's Coach Chuck Taylor, nobody recognized him. Once the game is over, Daugherty looks like anything but a big-time football coach.

Irreverent Newcomer. For Daugherty has neither the portentous air nor commanding presence of the typical big-time football coach. He is cheerfully irreverent in a profession of solemn ulcer cases, a merry man with an Irishman's gregariousness and a leprechaun's smile. He has known the bitterness of defeat, when in 1954 he inherited a team of Big Ten co-champions and lost six out of nine games. He has known the joy of triumph, when his Spartans last year rolled over Big Ten opposition and into the Rose Bowl to defeat U.C.L.A. 17-14. Of his last year's success, Daugherty is deprecatory: "I should give a lot of credit for last year's success to my staff. That's only fair." Daugherty waits until the listener nods approvingly. Then he flashes his broad grin. "I don't see why I shouldn't." he adds. "I gave them all the credit for what happened in '54."

Beneath the grin, Duffy Daugherty is one of the hardest-driving coaches in the country. He had slept easily before the game. But he did not sleep the night after. He explains: "I figure I've done everything I can to prepare the team for the game. But after the game I'm so keyed up I stay awake playing it over and over." Back in Michigan, he and his assistants would run the movies of the game again and again, noting which players missed their assignments, analyzing by elaborate tabulation which plays moved against which defenses. Then the blockers that had blundered and the defenders that had failed would hear from Duffy. Duffy never lets the same mistake happen twice.

This driving attention to detail is the chief and only secret of Duffy's "system." Coupled with the intricate "multiple offense" that he inherited from his predecessor, "Biggie" Munn (see color spread), it has made the Spartans the team to beat in the rugged Big Ten circuit. But Duffy is a raw recruit to the select and changing company of winning coaches. Until his one superbly successful season last year, few fans had ever heard of him. There is no question that he has arrived. Last year his fellow coaches all over the country bestowed the top honor: they elected Duffy "Coach of the Year" by the largest margin in the 21-year history of the poll.

Duffy's system starts long before the first green-and-white-uniformed players trot onto the gleaming grass to the heady acclaim of the stands. Last week it was no accident that the Spartans showed split-second, midseason skill. For four weeks, while the rest of the student body slowly drifted into a relaxed routine of classes, homework and dates, Duffy was driving his men in the bruising, gut-wrenching practice that is his trademark.

Grim Business. A typical afternoon's practice begins with calisthenics. Under Duffy, calisthenics are exercises with a difference. The yoman squad goes through its contortions with the determined en thusiasm of a platoon of boots bent on appeasing an exacting drill instructor.

Drenched with sweat, the players scatter into small groups to practice their individual specialties. Quarterback Pat Wilson, a lean, rock-hard honor student who plans to be a lawyer, plugs away at his most damaging weakness. If repetitious practice and Duffy's insistence can do it, his passing will soon measure up to the string-straight heaves of his All-America predecessor, Earl Morrall. Downfield, Clarence Peaks, the wondrously coordinated Negro halfback whom Duffy calls the best in the country, booms punts, squinting into the sky to follow the ball's spiral. Captain John Matsko, one of the Spartans' smallest (185 lbs.) linemen, snaps a ball back low and hard. A kneeling back spots it for the spinning place kicks of Dave Kaiser, the myopic end whose field goal won the Rose Bowl game last New Year's Day. Alert, always on the move, Coach Daugherty is everywhere. "Golden Toe," he calls to Kaiser. "Hey, Golden Toe. You think you can hold on to a pass, too?"

Duffy's is the only banter. There is no skylarking; this is grim business. Almost every player wears a reminder of just how rugged Big Ten football can be. Peaks runs with a brace on one knee; a leather wristlet, nearly as heavy as a Roman boxer's cestus, supports the thick right wrist of Sophomore Jerry McFarland, a Negro tackle out of Alabama. Tackle Pat Burke lisps through the gap where most of his front teeth once stood.

A Smile from the Animal. The squad jogs into position for group work. Off in a corner, guards and tackles begin to belt into blocking dummies, working in units of four, driving ahead, backpedaling and driving again with high-stepping precision. A pair of "scouting teams'' run opponents' plays at linemen, lashed by the snarling criticism of Assistant Coach Lou Agase, onetime All-Big Ten tackle from Illinois. "The Animal," the players call Agase, though off the field he is the mildest of men. End Coach Bob Devaney, a relatively soft-spoken taskmaster from Alma (Mich.) College, works patiently with backs practicing pass defense. Eyes flitting from side to side like a bingo player handling three cards, Halfback Red Kowalczyk backpedals frantically between two receivers, reaches up in time to knock down a pass. " 'At's the way to go," Devaney shouts. A moment later Kowalczyk is out in the flat, trying to keep an eye on a man gone deep, trying to guard against a hooking end and also defend his overloaded zone. (Fifty yards away, guards and tackles are running through a rugged blocking drill. A pair of blockers smash at one defensive lineman. "Growl at 'em," Duffy cries to Sophomore Tackle Fran O'Brien. Fran growls, is hit by surprise from the side. "What happened?" he grunts, peering up at Duffy from under the pile. Duffy roars with delight. "If they pull that on you in a game, Fran, you complain to the referee.")

Agase rounds up his linemen for what

Duffy calls Bull-in-the-Ring. Blocking dummies are set up at the corners of a three-yard square. Dead center between the dummies, Captain Matsko crouches in position. A file of burly linemen faces him from scant yards away. "All right," Agase bellows, "let's drive him out of there. Let's hit him!"

The first man hits Matsko headon, driving his helmet for the captain's belly. Matsko braces for the shock, comes up and under and tosses his attacker aside. Agase gives him no rest. "Get him out of there. Get him out of there," shouts The Animal. As soon as one man hits, another starts his charge. Matsko holds his ground. Again a helmet shoots for his belly; Matsko catches the thrust with his shoulder, brings up his forearm in a vicious swipe to bounce his tormentor clear. After six attacks he is still there. His face stretches into weird contortions as he fights for breath. But he has proved, once more, his right to his job as linebacker. (On the other side of the field, Guard Dan Currie slams his 235 lbs. into a blocking dummy, drives the dummy and the scrub who is holding it a good five yards. Assistant Coach Doug Weaver looks pleased. The scrub looks startled. Currie looks down right awesome.)

Toward five o'clock, the team begins to fade. The grunts of sheer animal exertion are modulated into long sighs of fatigue. Duffy whistles the men together. "You were logy," he says quietly. "I don't know why--maybe it's the weather. Now we're going to run you, because that's the only way you'll stay in shape. Let's take some wind sprints."

Grouped according to their positions, the bone-tired players take turns sprinting 50 yds. up the field. Half a dozen times they drive themselves along, blowing like broken-down wrestlers. "Dig it, dig it, dig it!" Duffy shouts at them. Then, as if they have not had enough. the players troop over to the stadium for one final exercise. In stocking feet, they make three running trips up the concrete stairs to the top of the great oval.

Rag Dolls & Rolling Eyes. Mornings, when the men are fresh, the routine includes a scrimmage. Scrubs and regulars, the boys smash into each other as if they were playing the big game of the season. "We're just dying to have some of you show us you're football players," Duffy tells them. "All you have to do is rack somebody up a few times and you'll play plenty for us."

There is plenty of racking up. Hard-driving second stringers like nothing better than knocking a varsity halfback loose from the ball. And Duffy is always there, watching every block, almost on top of every pileup. Hit hard, one boy rips out an oath, and Duffy tells him quietly: "All right, all right, son. We don't need any sermons this morning."

The team trainer gets a workout helping padded giants collect their wits or their wind after a particularly savage block. Practice, after all, cannot be stopped just because a first-string tackle has staggered out of the huddle, rag-doll limp, his eyes rolling in his head. Says Rose Bowl Hero Kaiser: "You see a guy out in a canoe on Red Cedar River with his girl and a blanket and you wonder what you're doing it for. But other times you get out there feeling good and you just plain want to butt heads."

Ts & Splits. With so much dogged making of muscle and butting of heads, fans are often fooled into thinking that football is a game for muscleheads. The men who play for Duffy Daugherty know differently. On autumn Saturdays, when the chips are down, the Spartans play a game as intricate and demanding as any yet devised. Where other teams are satisfied to practice and perfect a single style of attack--the single wing, which piles blockers into a bludgeoning phalanx ahead of the ball carrier; the T formation, with its quick-opening plays and tricky hand-off s; the split-T, which spreads the defense for exasperating option plays--Michigan State uses all three and adds even more. At any moment Duffy's quarterbacks may disconcert the defense with a bastard version of the T. In this maneu ver, the ball is snapped directly to the fullback through the T quarterback's legs, leaving the quarterback free to block ahead of the runner or tear downfield for a pass.

The newest stunt in Duffy's repertoire is the belly-series play, a baffling bit of ball-handling made popular by Georgia Tech. Up against a smoothly executed belly play, defensive linemen and linebackers are forced to make a quick choice between two potential ball carriers charging at them a scant two yards apart.

Bootleg & Belly. The trouble with anything so varied as Michigan State's multiple offense is that it can cross up its perpetrators as easily as the defenders it is designed to fool. All in all, Duffy figures that he must teach his players to block and run out of some 32 different alignments (i.e., any combination of eight backfield and four line formations). With the backfield, the job is not too hard. "Backs like to feel they're fooling people," says Duffy. "They don't mind running through plays. Teaching them is easy."

Teaching Duffy's system to the troops in the trenches--the linemen up front where the game is won or lost--is harder. Linemen must move quickly, learn to block automatically in any situation. "The worst thing that can happen to offensive football," says Duffy, "is indecision." But indecision is exactly what a coach could expect from a battered, bone-weary guard trying to sort out the right assignment from his memory of some 72 plays.

To save the sanity of his linemen, Duffy numbers every potential hole through which a play can move (see diagram).

Running from right to left, the holes are numbered from 1 to 9, beginning with the space outside State's right end. When he calls signals in the huddle, State's quarterback always names the hole through which the ball carrier will run. Offensive linemen need to learn only 25 "principles" of offensive operation, rather than a new assignment for each of State's plays, e.g., on a sweep around either end, linemen in the odd-numbered holes always pull out and lead the way. Even men block their opponents away from the play.

For all its variety, State's offense is essentially an infantry operation. "We are not a passing team," says Duffy. "We throw off a running action like the belly, or off the bootleg.* It has been proved in the Big Ten that you can win without a passing attack. Last year we averaged only ten passes a game."

Stay-at-Homes. Like the teams that face him, Duffy has learned the hard way that no single defensive alignment is satisfactory. "In the old days," says Line Coach Agase, "you'd line up in that seven-man box and everyone would fire in there. That's all there was to it." Today a lineman who bolts ahead unwarily is apt to find himself cut down abruptly from the side by a mousetrapping blocker. Instead, Michigan State's linemen stay "at home" and protect their own territory until they are sure where the ball is going. Says Duffy: "We expect to give up some ground. But we're trying to stop the long run, the play that will kill you. Our defense is like elastic--we'll stretch, all right, but we try not to snap." By the same reasoning, State's backs treat every play as a possible pass (which might mean a touchdown), only close in on a ball carrier when they are sure he will not suddenly throw over their heads to a lurking end.

Though they stay at home, Duffy's linemen are always busy trying to cross up offensive assignments. They may "slant," i.e., charge at a 45DEG angle and bypass the man directly in front of them; they may "loop," i.e., move a step or two laterally before charging; they may use a "stunting" defense, i.e., open a hole in the line for a linebacker to shoot into the enemy backfield. Always they must beware the too-easy charge, the opposition that seems to fade away in front of them, which warns of a mousetrap.

Between halves, Duffy analyzes the enemy's offense and orders new defense alignments. He says with satisfaction: "Last year, after our half-time talks, State scored 87 points in the third quarter. Our opponents scored seven."

Down Where They Live. Yale's Professor William Lyon Phelps once said: "Teaching is a great art, and the best college teaching is usually found in the department of athletics." Hardly a professor on State's handsome campus in East Lansing teaches a more complicated course than Duffy's yearly cram session in football, or teaches it better. But unlike his academic colleagues, Duffy also has to round up his pupils--a task to which he devotes himself wholeheartedly six days a week, eight months a year.

Unlike so many of his Big Ten colleagues "who suddenly succumb to psychosomatic lockjaw when the touchy subject of recruiting is mentioned, Duffy is refreshingly frank. "Our biggest job," says he of himself and his seven assistants, "is recruiting. The thing we do least is coach. Eighty percent of a winning team is material. More football games are won from December to September, when most of the recruiting is done, than from September to December."

As a recruiter. Duffy has few peers. In Michigan, where he finds more than half of his players, his friendly, gregarious nature keeps him on good terms with the men who can often influence a player to choose one school over another--the high-school coaches. He is at his best with proud parents. "Duffy is the finest football banquet speaker I've ever heard," says the president of the Michigan High School Coaches Association. "He gets right down where they live. He appeals to mom and dad." He always makes himself accessible, spends much of every day and night on the phone, garrulously cordial to an old alumnus asking for tickets, a high-school coach with a likely prospect for next year's freshman team, an old friend who just wants to chat, a mother worried about her son.

As coach of the Spartans, Duffy holds a lot of high cards in a cutthroat game, 1) He has a winning tradition. 2) Michigan State's campus, sprawled along the Red Cedar River at East Lansing, is lush, handsome, and adorned with ivy that many an Ivy League college might envy. 3) State has ideal facilities for impressing prospects, once they are lured to that campus. The young men and their families are entertained at the Kellogg Center for Continuing Education, a modern, air-conditioned and astonishingly plush hotel run by students taking hotel-management courses. 4) The entire university is football crazy: some 4,500 students went to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl game last January. Those who traveled by rail required six special trains, a feat of transportation described by the traffic managers of the eleven railroads that pooled equipment for the job as the largest non-military movement ever to head West.

In addition to grabbing off the top boys from Michigan, Duffy has also become peculiarly adept at skimming the cream of such diverse areas as central Pennsylvania and western Massachusetts. Until Duffy came along with his persuasive spiel, few topflight athletes from Massachusetts would have considered playing for Michigan State. Now. many of the best players in the state are heading West. Halfback Walt Kowalczyk, Tackle Pat Burke and End Tony Kolodziej are on this year's varsity, and some Massachusetts boys even show up at State without asking for scholarships. They simply want to play for Duffy.

To Tackle a Rat. One reason for Duffy's success as a recruiter is that he knows exactly the kind of young man he wants. He is looking for himself. He is looking for Hugh Duffy Daugherty, born in Emeigh. Penn. in 1915, a tough youngster who could hold his own among the other coal-miners' kids, a born athlete who insists that his first Christmas present was a football.

Duffy could hardly help loving football. His older brothers played; his father was a dedicated quarterback for the St. Benedict Athletic Club. "We used to practice tackling by diving over a coal cart after a rat," Joseph Aloysius Daugherty liked to tell his awed brood. "If we didn't get hold of both hind legs, we weren't any good." Family meals were regularly disrupted as father and sons leaped up to run through a disputed play on the living-room floor. On such occasions, mother resignedly played one side of the line.

By 1929, when the Depression hit, Duffy's father had moved out of the mines and was running his own store. He went broke, but he refused to go into bankruptcy. "It isn't the proper thing to do," said Joe Daugherty. Grimly, his family pitched in to pay off his debts. All during high school Duffy got 13-c- apiece for delivering special-delivery letters. From 16 to 18 he worked in a local shirt factory; from 18 to 20 he worked in a coal mine, getting up at 4:30 each morning to make work on time.

In 1936, after Duffy had worked for four years, his family was finally out of debt and he went to Syracuse University. Duffy insists: "I was a very, very average player." But he played a good enough guard to catch the eye of Assistant Coach Biggie Munn, and in his senior year Duffy was elected team captain. His broad features still glare out of the squad picture as they glared at opposing linemen.

When war was declared Duffy enlisted in the Army, went to OCS, and served 27 months as an officer in a port battalion in New Guinea. On the way to his overseas assignment, Lieut. Daugherty stopped off in San Francisco, where he met pretty Frances Steccati. Frances politely inquired how long the lieutenant would be in town. "About a month," said Duffy. Then he added casually: "We'll be married by then." They were.

Any Gorillas. In 1945 Duffy grabbed the first football-coaching job he could find, at Trinity Prep in New York City. That same fall he met his old coach, Biggie Munn, who was planning to return to Syracuse as head man. Biggie asked Duffy to come along. The salary was to be only $2,000 (Duffy's present salary is $16,000), but Duffy jumped at the chance. When Munn switched to Michigan State in 1947, he took Duffy with him.

Biggie rode to fame as one of the architects of the revolution that was to remake Michigan State. Under the leadership of President John A. Hannah, the little land-grant college of 7,000 students was growing into a big university (this year's enrollment: 19,000). But Hannah was having trouble lining up a large enough faculty; most of the men he wanted had never heard of Michigan State. A good football team, the president reasoned, would at least bring recognition. "If it meant the betterment of Michigan State," said Hannah then, "our football team would play any eleven gorillas from Barnum & Bailey any Saturday."

Biggie and hard-working Line Coach Daugherty supplied some exceptionally well-trained gorillas. Overnight, State became a major football power. All the offstage opposition mustered by its Ann Arbor rival, the University of Michigan, could not keep it out of the Big Ten. In a league where almost every school is a symbol of state pride, the rivalry between Michigan and M.S.U. became understandably bitter. This week the two rivals meet again, and Michigan's campus will be littered with signs reading "Cream MOO U," an unkind reference to State's beginnings as a cow college.

No Illusions. Despite such unkind cuts, upstart State now has $65 million worth of new buildings, including such symbols of affluence as a new library, an 18-hole golf course and a soccer team. In 1954, when Munn moved up to the post of athletic director, Duffy succeeded him on the football hot seat. In three seasons on the job, Duffy's curly auburn hair has picked up a heavy sprinkling of grey, but he shows no outward signs of pressure.

Duffy loves his job, and is jealously proud of his boys. "The public has the idea that football is a game played by a lot of tramp athletes. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I'm working with the best kids in the world. I'll match them for intelligence, loyalty--any of the qualities you like to see in young men--with any bunch in the world." But he has no illusions that football can make a man out of a nincompoop. "I have never made the statement that football builds character," he says. "Character is built in the home and in the church. But football will sharpen a boy's sense of values. He learns the value of hard work. He learns the value of being part of a team. He learns the value of playing to win. After all," he adds thoughtfully, "this country is founded on competition."

*In which, after faking to two other backs tearing around one end, the quarterback hides the ball on his hip, drifts wide to the weak side of his line before passing.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.