Red Blaik

Red Blaik (born February 15, 1897, Dayton, Ohio, U.S.—died May 6, 1989, Colorado Springs, Colorado) was an American college football coach whose teams compiled a 166–48–14 record during his tenures as head coach at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York.

(Read Walter Camp’s 1903 Britannica essay on inventing American football.)

Blaik was a superb athlete at Miami University in Ohio and at West Point, where he became an All-American end while playing for Army (1918–19). After resigning his army commission in the cavalry (1922), he briefly entered a real estate business before returning to West Point as an assistant coach in 1927. As the head coach at Dartmouth (1934–40), Blaik led his teams to a 45–15–4 record, including a 21-game winning streak.

His coaching career at Army (1941–58) yielded a remarkable 121–33–10 record and two consecutive national championships (1944–45). The championship teams were two of the most dominant teams in college football history, owing in part to the manpower shortage at nonmilitary schools during the war years. Blaik, together with Fritz Crisler of Michigan, was a strong advocate for two-platoon football (in which players were assigned exclusively to either the offensive or the defensive unit) as substitution rules were fiercely debated in the years following the war. In 1951 his 45-man team was reduced to 1 player when the other members, including his son, were discovered to be cheating on tests and were dismissed from West Point for violation of the honour code.

Blaik wrote You Have to Pay the Price (1960) and The Red Blaik Story (1974). He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1964. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1986.