Allen Hasn’t Forgotten Way to Win

No one cared about the spread. Las Vegas didn’t even post a line on the game. ABC yawned. Thousands of people managed to stay home on game day. A bowl wasn’t at stake. The polls ignored it.

Morningside College vs. Northwestern Iowa is not your basic stop-the-presses intersectional encounter. For one thing, Morningside had lost its last 15 games. The game was at 4:30 p.m., not because of television but so it shouldn’t interfere with dinner. Besides, lights are expensive.

Morningside needed a gimmick. It was in danger of dropping football, to say nothing of a lot of other things. Sioux City was losing population. Apathy was endemic.

Its principal claim to fame is that it was, so to speak, the coaching birthplace of George Allen. Now, George Allen is one of the registered geniuses of his profession, a coach who should be in the pro Hall of Fame, the most successful coach, in winning percentage (116-47-5) in pro football history, a Super Bowl coach. There is very little about X’s and O’s George Allen doesn’t know. There is nothing about motivation he doesn’t know.

He had coached at Morningside 41 years ago--successfully. The school thought it would be a nice gesture if George came back this year as a kind of symbolic salute, an attention-caller. A stunt.

They thought George would make an appearance, talk at a dinner, hit a television station or two, get a plaque, wave to the crowd, ride around in an open car. The usual drill in these kinds of things. Just a bit of weekend nostalgia. Auld Lang Syne. After all, George Allen is 72.

Hah!

George Allen is not a weekend anything. George Allen did not go back to Morningside the Friday before the game. George went back two weeks before the game. George pulled out the depth charts, went over the offensive and defensive line stunts, the backfield schemes.

George went out on the sidelines, rolled up his sleeves, did his patented lip-pulling with his fingers, clapped his hands, gathered the team about him and gave them one of his standard George Allen pep talks (“Confidence wins more games than trick plays,” he explains) and, in general, acted like a coach getting them ready for the Orange Bowl.

Allen was in his element. “We put in the nickel defense,” he chortles. “We worked with the special teams. We went over zones. We told them what we wanted. I reminded them that I was the guy who got the special teams introduced on television in a Monday night game once over the combined opposition of the network and the league office.”

George stressed defense. George always stresses defense. The team not only went on two-a-days (practices) but three-a-days. It was vintage Allen. Deacon Jones, Merlin Olsen, Ron McDole, Billy Kilmer would have understood perfectly.

George fanned out. He went to the stockyards, he went to service club luncheons, he sold season tickets, he led cheers at the Boys Club. He wore a cap with the Allen slogan “110%” emblazoned on it.

He was in his 70s? He jogged three miles every morning. He ran up the stadium steps.

Hollywood would love the ending. Little Morningside (enrollment: 1200) won the football game, 31-13, its first victory in two years.

The special teams blocked a punt and the defense forced five turnovers, three fumble recoveries and two interceptions. You didn’t need to see the coach wiping his lips to know this was a George Allen game.

George Allen felt as if he had just beaten the Dallas Cowboys for the conference championship. “It was ‘Field of Dreams’ and ‘One Second to Play’ rolled into one,” he glowed. Forty-one years rolled away in one afternoon.

George signed with Morningside originally after sending out (by actual count) 829 letters requesting employment. He got two responses, one from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and one from Morningside. His salary was $3,900. A year.

Morningside won its second game as well (against Southwest Minnesota State, 21-13), but, by then, Allen was on a plane back to his permanent post as chairman of the National Fitness Foundation, another job he takes with sleeves rolled up and hands clapping. He is currently preparing for the 90-nation First World Congress on Fitness, Nutrition and Sports next May in Chicago, a program for which he is the originator.

George was not surprised his team won. His original Morningside team won its opener, too, in 1948, 33-0. His professional teams won their openers 13 out of his 14 years.

Allen subscribed to the Dizzy Dean theory that you can’t win them all if you don’t win the first one. Allen always proposes to win them all, exhibitions, playoffs, Bowls--or home openers in Division III in Sioux City.

George Allen never had a losing season in 14 years in the NFL, won five divisional championships, made seven playoffs and one Super Bowl, and his teams never finished lower than third with seven firsts, five seconds and two thirds.

That’s like a .360 hitter not getting into the Hall of Fame. He makes the Sioux City Hall anyway. It’s doubtful if any other coach will ever win his home openers there 41 years apart.