By most standards, Frank Leahy might be the most underrated college football coach in history.
This is someone who compiled a record 107-13-9 as a head coach at Boston College and Notre Dame. If you are wondering, that was the second-best career record when Leahy left coaching, and it's still the second-best career record today - more than 70 years later. He's only behind Knute Rockne, one of the legends of the game despite coaching what must have been an almost completely different sport in the 1920s.
Leahy played on two national championship teams at Notre Dame under Rochne, and won four more mythical national titles as a head coach at South Bend. (Kids, there was no such thing as a playoff back then. They took a survey to determine the best team in the country, and everyone thought it was a little silly back then too.)
Yet the college football fans of today may know a little about Rockne, thanks in part to a movie with a co-star by the name of Ronald Reagan. ("Win one for the Gipper.") But Leahy's reputation never came close to Rockne's as the years went by. What happened?
Ivan Maisel wanted to know that too. He's one of the veterans of covering college football, and if he didn't know much about Leahy, well, few others did too. So he dove into the subject, and the result is the book "American Coach" - which will fill you smartly in on all of the details.
For starters, Leahy came out of the Midwest to play football at Notre Dame. He wasn't the best athlete on the team, and he certainly wasn't the biggest. But Leavy worked the hardest and probably studied the game the most. It didn't take long for him to figure out that coaching was the next logical step in his career. Sure enough, he bounced around at three schools during the 1930s, finally landing at Boston College. After two years as an assistant, Leahy moved up to be the head coach of the Eagles. Three he did something remarkable: he won. How about a record of 20-2, in a place that's not exactly the cradle of coaches?
It caught everyone's attention, including the administration at Notre Dame. There Elmer Layden was doing well as the football coach (47-13-3), but not Rockne-level well. He jumped to become the head of the National Football League, and Leahy was an obvious candidate as a replacement. After going 24-3-3 in the next three years - including a national title - World War II interrupted things and Leahy headed for the Armed Forces. After the War, he came back and promptly won three national titles in the next four years. High standards were set.
But as Maisel nicely points out, the rules sort of changed in the Fifties. Notre Dame had a boatload of talent before that, as many returning veterans turned up on the South Bend campus after serving their country. The supply eventually ran out by ND standards, and administrators there didn't seem too comfortable with the image of the university being something of a football factory. Leahy did the best he could and still won plenty of games. But Notre Dame wasn't Notre Dame.
There were other issues going on as well. Leahy was such a driven personality that he started having health problems - and not insignificant ones. . His family took a decided back seat to football in the fall. There's a great story about how some of his eight children and some neighborhood kids started to play a pickup game in the front yard one day. Frank went out to join the kids ... and soon ordered them to start drills. The other kids soon asked to play somewhere else.
More importantly, Maisel reports that a faked injury scheme that was used when the Fighting Irish were out of timeouts didn't sit well with some of the school leaders. Leahy wasn't exactly fired, but he was given a little push out the door.
And his coaching career stopped right there. There were flirtations with other colleges and the pro ranks, but nothing came together. Leahy's health continued to be a problem, and his skills in leading football players didn't translate at all into the business world - where he was taken to the cleaners regularly. Leahy died of heart failure in 1973. He was only 64.
Leahy's legacy was complicated even before he died. Maisel points out that the coach didn't get along with that many of his peers. Perhaps that played a big role in the way Leahy was passed over for several years before his induction into the College Football Hall of Fame.
The sport of college football has gone through a variety of waves over the years, as changes seem to alter everything every so often. That has involved everything from rules changes to conference alignment to monetary matters. We're going through a big one now, as athletes now receive direct payments and conference lineups seem to change by the week.
Leahy proved to be a perfect match for a particular place and time in college football, but never had the chance to adapt and thus failed to be one of those coaches who seem to last forever. That makes him a good person to study for those interested in the game's history. What went right, and what went wrong?
"American Coach" may have trouble drawing in readers who aren't too interested in someone who was coaching more than 75 years ago. But Maisel's rich portrait works nicely in explaining what went right and what went wrong. Fans of sports history should find this worth their time.
Four stars
Learn more about this book from Amazon.com.
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