The Story of John Heisman and Pop Warner’s Deception Feud

For many, many years over a century, deception has been a big part of football and success on the field.

The offense is trying to deceive the defense so they can gain an advantage.

But never was this more evident than two of the legends of the sport in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Pop Warner and John.

John Heisman.

Now, our story starts with a play that's so deceptive that the rules makers had to ban it.

John Heisman, Pop Warner both claimed they invented it, and.

And for 25 years, they stole it back and forth with each other.

And they had other ideas come up that the rulemakers really had to cringe an eye at.

Now, stay with me till the end, because there was a score of 222 to nothing.

It was not arrogance.

It might have just been some revenge.

Now, quick question to set on the table.

Who do you credit more for deceptive plays in football, John Heisman or Pop Warner?

Now, John Heisman coached multiple sports besides football, including basketball and baseball.

Still, sports writer Fuzzy Woodruff dubbed Heisman the pioneer of Southern football, especially at this time, as he was the head coach at Auburn, Clemson, and then Georgia Tech and later Rice, in addition to his later years when he was a little bit more up north in Pennsylvania at the University of Pennsylvania and, and at Washington and Jefferson.

Now, Warner cut his teeth on a fly while studying at Cornell, hadn't really been around organized football in high school.

He had played some pickup games with.

They took a pig's bladder tied at both ends and a playground type of game.

But it was at Cornell when the coach one day walked by, this very large man, big strong guy, a little bit older than the rest, Pop Warner, and asked him to try out for the football team.

And Warner did.

And the players on the team, recognizing he was a little bit older than them, end up starting to call him Pops.

His real name is Glenn Warner, but Pop Warner is what stuck with him even to this day.

Now, it was at Carlisle, though, you know, after Cornell, where Warner really came into his own and really started some big innovation.

He didn't just coach Jim Thorpe, but he built an entire offense around him and through imagination, a single wing and the imbalanced line formations that shifted like a hammer right before the snap and where tackles would flinch and they might even hear the ringing in their ears all the way to next Tuesday after a game.

They met three times in their careers as coaches, different schools of course.

Now it's a Deep south's oldest rivalry and they it's for good reason because these two teams still have good games and good rivalries even to this day.

But Heisman used a particular play, play where he hid the ball by having one of his players tuck it under their jersey.

Auburn ends up winning this game 12 to 6, some say on the basis of that single play that would made the difference in that one score victory.

Following year they played each other once again.

Same coaches, same teams, different venue.

This time it was Georgia that came out 12, 6.

Pop Warner's team used the early huddle and onside kick innovations to sort of surprise and befuddle the Auburn squad of Heisman.

So these guys sort of had a niche in their teeth against each other, you know, right from the get go playing in that southern football.

They played in Pittsburgh and the pit players famously overheard Heisman's pregame speech.

And that's what John Heisman sort of defined.

Well that was the big difference in the game.

I don't know how you could say that with 32.

Nothing must be revealing all the secrets of what he was going to do in that speech.

But that was sort of the claim and it sort of just, just got under the craw even more of these two coaches as they bantered back and forth and really didn't like each other.

He unveiled a masterpiece against Harvard, you know, who was a powerhouse in that era.

The quarterback had slipped the ball under his jersey and a teammates feigned left and the ball carrier, the QB went right that ball under his jersey.

And that's your forbidden playoff payoff, forbidden history payoff.

They had to outlaw genius to stop that play that both Heisman and Warner had deployed.

Heisman sort of ran at first though, but Warner wasn't without his bags of tricks.

But at Georgia Tech, Heisman answered not with deception, but with law.

Now he was a showman who was a lawyer and he, he didn't have to hide the ball anymore once he got up into the the 20th century.

He tried to get people to do legalize the forward pass.

Is a big proponent of that.

And if you purchase perfected, the center snapped.

He built the jump shift where every back moved in unison.

And it was a dance so disoriented it would later be banned as well.

So only having one man in motion is where that rule came out from.

But it was most famously that really hit the peak of this rivalry.

Heisman had not forgotten a little decevious thing that Cumberland College had done the spring earlier by beating his baseball team with a bunch of ringers.

Yeah, the Cumberland College have brought in some semi professional or maybe even professional players from the Tennessee area that they were in when Georgia Tech came to play just to make sure that they defeated the Georgia Tech baseball team, which was very good in those days, very highly touted.

This really got into the craw of John Heisman.

He was not going to take this lightly and he held a grudge and it was that 5 that next year that he would unleash it.

But Cumberland came into some financial problems.

They decided to drop their football team.

But John Heisman, that lawyer, he has said, oh, not so fast, my friend.

You have a contract with us and if you break this contract and don't come to Atlanta to play my Georgia team, we will sue you.

And it was like $3,000 at the time, which was a monstrous amount of money.

Cumberland could not afford to pay that fine.

So it was better for them to gather a bunch of students and they grabbed some fraternity brothers and some other people that were willing to go, never with very little football experience, put them on a train, send them to Atlanta, and they had to face the wrath of John Heisman, who never, never punted in that game.

He refused to punt.

He refused to stall or to do any plays, were to have his players lay down.

He wanted him going full throttle in this game.

When dust settled, that scoreboard ran an unbelievable 222 to nothing Georgia Tech over Cumberland's zero.

It remains the greatest blowout in the game's history.

It's really kind of quite astonishing as a matter of fact.

100 Some miles to the or 300 some miles to the north, we had Pop Warner looking at these wires come over, reading a newspaper, seeing the score.

He was astonished, he was disgusted.

He called it unsportsmanlike and unforgivable what his old nemesis Heisman had done.

But again Heisman says hey, his players listen to my pregame speech.

They knew everything we were going to do.

But eventually Heisman ended up going over in coaching at the University of Pennsylvania.

And that leads us to and then dubbed Washington and Jefferson.

And that Washington and Jefferson coaching assignment.

When Heisman left just a few years later, I was over by another famous coach, Earl Greasy Neil.

It propelled Washington, Jefferson and being called the best team from the east.

They ended up getting the bid in the Rose bowl.

The smallest college ever to go play in a Rose bowl game even to this day.

And they had to go up against the Cal Wonder team of Andy Smith, the powerhouse of the year multi national championships in a row.

They were the big boys on the block and ended up being a scoreless tie.

Little W and J held off these mighty Cal Golden Bears in that game and went on to live in infamy.

We have a book on that When Greasy met the Wonder Coach available on Amazon.

You can find it on pigskindispatch.com in our store.

You'll get some more details on those two great coaches.

Three and all if you count throw in Greasy Neil, but really in particular Heisman and Pop Warner.

That's who we're really celebrating in their rule their things.

And not only do we salute them, but we salute two numbers not on a jersey but in the rule book.

The men who had have the game ban their best plays in order to stop them.

Now.

Thanks for joining us today.

Till next time everybody have a great gridiron day.