Feature: A New Beginning
EDITOR’S NOTE The following article has been adapted by Lou Prato from his book The Penn State Football Encyclopedia, and ran in the most recent edition of our print magazine.
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There’s never been a spring practice at Penn State or elsewhere in college football like the one in 1950 when Rip Engle became head coach of the Nittany Lions.
This one started late because of the unexpected resignation of the previous head coach. One of the spring practice segments lasted six weeks and was overseen by the freshman coach, who had never been on campus in the fall despite having been hired four years earlier. That coach and all his freshman players had spent the previous four seasons as the varsity team for a small state teachers college 150 miles away near Pittsburgh. Next came another two weeks of practice that Penn State’s upperclassmen attended voluntarily so that they could learn a radically innovative offense perfected by their new head coach. Finally, there was a third set of practices in late May just for those freshman players who had been unable to attend the previous eight weeks.
Unlike the spring practices of today, in which NCAA rules dictate practically every aspect of the 15 formal on-field sessions, spring drills in the decade after World War II were freewheeling, with loose regulations.
The timing of Bedenk’s resignation – just as spring practice was about to begin –threw the Nittany Lions’ athletic department into a tizzy. Athletic director Carl P. Schott wanted to conduct a thorough search for a new coach, partly because the hiring of Bedenk had been the result of internal political fighting that had caused Higgins’ designated successor Earle Edwards, another longtime assistant, to quit.
So, with spring practice needing to start without a coach, Schott and his advisory board brought Earl Bruce back from California State Teachers College, where he had been coaching Penn State’s freshmen. The unique arrangement with California had been set up in 1946 when overcrowded conditions at the University Park campus forced almost all Penn State freshmen, men and women, to matriculate at Cal and other schools in the state teachers college system. Under the agreement with Cal, Penn State hired Bruce from nearby Brownsville High School to coach the freshmen, and California resumed playing football after suspending the program for four years during World War II, with Bruce as its head coach.
On March 15, 1950, 80 candidates, not including 24 freshmen from California State Teachers College, reported to Bruce and his four assistant coaches at Beaver Field for the start of an expected eight-week spring practice session. Three of the assistant coaches were former Penn State players: Al Michaels and Jim O’Hora who had been hired by Higgins, and Tor Torretti, who had been retained by Bedenk. The fourth assistant, Frank Patrick, a Pitt grad also hired by Bedenk, was the only one being considered for the head coaching vacancy.
Engle was still at Brown University with nary a thought about Penn State on March 4, 1950, when Joe Bedenk suddenly resigned as the Lions’ head coach after one season. Bedenk, a longtime assistant under Bob Higgins, had taken the job after Higgins retired at the end of the 1948 season. However, Bedenk was never comfortable as the team’s leader. He decided to quit coaching football altogether and concentrate on his head coaching duties of his beloved Penn State baseball team. Later, Bedenk rejoined the football staff for another two years.
Engle was surprised when the Penn State athletic director called asking if he was interested in discussing the head coaching position. He figured he probably wasn’t Schott’s first choice, since the press had reported rumors that Pittsburgh Steelers coach John Michelosen and veteran head coach Clark Shaughnessy had been contacted.
Engle had plenty of sensible reasons to dismiss Penn State’s overtures. He already had turned down opportunities to coach at Yale, Wisconsin and Pitt, and those jobs seemed to have much more potential for immediate success than the one at Penn State. He also was familiar with the internal politics that had forced the bungled hiring of Bedenk and the departure of Edwards. They were not unlike the backstabbing circumstances that had embittered Engle’s college coach at Western Maryland, Dick Harlow, to Penn State. Harlow had played for the Lions and had been their head coach, but when he returned to Penn State after World War I, it was as an assistant coach. He left the school in 1920.
Despite his concerns, Engle decided to listen. That the factionalism continued was obvious by the stipulation from Penn State officials that Engle retain all the current assistant coaches, including Bedenk. This was – and is – highly unusual, because new coaches normally get to choose their own staffs. Engle wondered how he would get along with them, especially the three who were former Penn State players, and particularly Bedenk.
And why leave Brown at this juncture? In the six years since being promoted from an assistant to head coach, he had turned the struggling football program around. The team had lost only to Princeton in ’49 and was 7-2 the year before. Brown football was on the verge of cracking the big time, and he was the man responsible. He was also developing a reputation as an innovator with an offensive formation known as the Wing-T, in which the quarterback was under center and one halfback lined up as a flanker, behind an end. He was only 42 years old, and if his success continued as everyone expected, there would be many other coaching opportunities ahead.
Engle was not unfamiliar with central Pennsylvania or with Penn State. He had grown up about 150 miles southeast of State College in the small Somerset County town of Elk Lick (now known as Salisbury) and had coached high school football for 11 years in Waynesboro, just across the border in Hagerstown, Md. He had talked about Penn State football many times with his uncle, Lloyd “Dad” Engle, who had played alongside Harlow on the unbeaten 1911 team, and he had spent many hours kibitzing with Harlow about the Nittany Lions.
Before he made his final decision, Engle talked it over with Harlow. Although still angered by what had happened to him, Harlow encouraged Engle to accept the position. Dad Engle said the same thing. It’s a great opportunity and a challenge, they both told him. He felt so, too. He also figured he might be able to make Penn State into a national football power again – if everything went right. He would have job security, too, since academic rank and tenure came with the offer.
There was a one significant caveat: He had to retain the current assistants. But he also was told he could hire two new coaches. After discussing the stipulation with Harlow, Engle called Schott and accepted the job.
Schott and James Milholland, president of the board of trustees, introduced Penn State’s new head coach at a special luncheon on the final day of the previously scheduled spring practice. Later that afternoon, Engle watched a scrimmage with Duquesne that was to be the climax of the spring drills.
The assistants were surprised by how quiet Engle was. His hair was prematurely white, which made him look older than his 44 years. But he seemed like a nice man. After the practice game, he asked Bruce if he could speak to the team. Sure, Bruce said, after all, it’s your team now. The players were excited about meeting their new coach for the first time, and Engle gave a little pep talk about the future. At the end, he asked how many of them would come back for two more weeks to learn his Wing-T system. They all agreed enthusiastically, and even some of the assistants were surprised. “We had to be taught the new formation first, then we had to teach the players,” O’Hora recalled. “It wasn’t easy.”
By the end of the day, The Daily Collegian had published a rare extra edition that included a flamboyant front page saturated with coverage of Engle’s hiring. In an interview with reporter Tom Morgan, Engle explained how his new players would have to learn his innovative offense after decades of using the power-running single-wing:
“‘You can call it a simple combination of the T and single-wing and we always use a balanced line with it…’ He added that he anticipates little trouble in ‘switching the boys over’ from Penn State’s unbalanced single-wing… Our most important problem may be in finding the right kind of quarterback.’”
Back in Rhode Island, Engle asked two of his Brown assistants to join hm at Penn State but they declined. So, Engle asked his graduating quarterback, Joseph V. Paterno, if he would postpone law school for a year and help him get through the first season. The 23-year-old Paterno agreed.
Paterno became Engle’s closest confidante. As Penn State slowly regained prominence in college football in the 1950s, Paterno received almost as much credit as an assistant as Engle did as the head coach. Engle never left Penn State, and Paterno never went to law school.
Still, Engle had “a lot of misgivings” when he took the job. “I had never met these coaches,” he later told author Ken Rappoport for his book, “The Nittany Lions: A Story of Penn State Football.” “They were all single-wing coaches. The whole staff that was here had been here long before me... and then Joe had never coached, although I knew he had great possibilities. It was a pretty precarious situation, and I just wondered how smart I was, really. But we worked real hard together, and it was the greatest thing that could have happened. I always say I owe so much to these coaches here.”
After losing three of its first five games and tying one in 1950, Penn State reeled off four consecutive victories, including a thrilling 21-20 upset over archrival Pitt in a historic season finale delayed a week because of a record 23-inch snow storm in Pittsburgh. The players were so happy they carried Engle off the field on their shoulders and all the way into the locker room.
Collegian reporter Marv Krasnansky summed up the game and the season in his front-page story of Dec. 5: “Taking over a squad that at first looked too clumsy and awkward to master the intricacies of the winged-T, Engle knitted a team that in the last five games played as if they worked the system for years.”
What may have been the longest spring practice in the history of college football, and certainly a unique one, had paid off and then some. Rip Engle and Joe Paterno were on their way to being enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame.
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