Keith W. Piper: The Single Wing Coach Who Could
It's been said that concepts, schemes and formations in football never truly disappear. Rather, they are repacked and tweaked for the modern game. But in Keith W. Piper’s case, there was no need to repackage anything. He simply took the single wing formation that fell out of the mainstream in the early 1940s and implemented it during his time at Denison University from 1978 to 1992.
The name Keith W. Piper may not immediately jump out to college football fans, primarily because Denison University is a Division III school, located in the small town of Granville, Ohio. Despite campaign efforts from both his former players and from single wing apologists alike, Piper is not in the College Football Hall of Fame since his winning percentage in slightly below the .600 standard to get in. Though Piper received praise from gridiron legends such as Paul Brown and Woody Hayes, he never actually coached at a Division I program, or in the NFL, or so much had a book published about his offensive philosophy until his son published a posthumous treaty compiled of his father’s notes regarding the single wing.
Furthermore, the single wing in and of itself is arcane to many football fans now and was so even during Piper’s time, since it’s a formation used at the youth level and at a small percentage of high school teams across America. Created by Glenn '"Pop” Warner in 1906, the formation was brought about after a rule was passed down that required seven men to be on the line of scrimmage, outlawing the tandem and wedge formations commonly used at the time to shove runners down the field. By incorporating a wingback, unbalanced line and backs closely aligned to one another, Warner’s teams could either hit the outnumbered opponents at the point of attack, use deception to fool opponents with fake handoffs and reverses, or use the formation to utilize the new forward pass rule that was established that same year. It as the standard formation throughout the 1920s and 1930s until the Clark Shaughnessy’s T formation took thank in large part to the success Stanford Indians and Chicago Bears, both of whom won championships using the T.
But for a man like Piper, the past was alive and well, for he was a man with an affinity for the past, as clearly indicated by journalist Mark Blaudschun when he wrote about Piper in 1985,
In this era of MTV and fax machines, Keith Piper is an anachronism, a 70- year-old football coach in a young man’s game, a man living in a 181-year-old farmhouse, a man who thinks a trip to Gettysburg to feel the ghosts of the Civil War is more fun than breaking down game films, a man who lines his team up each week to play single-wing football, a formation used by Rockne, Stagg and Warner rather than Paterno, Bowden and Osborne.
If it’s true that a football team’s scheme and philosophy is a reflection of its head coach, then the Denison Big Red squads that ran out of the single wing formation were preservationist of the gridiron past.
Born in Niles, Ohio in 1921, Piper’s passion for the game was sewed in the early 1930s, when Piper witnessed Paul Brown running the single wing offense at Massillon High School. Piper said of this experience,
I remember watching Massillon [Ohio] High play the single wing in 1932. Paul Brown was the coach. They'd run a play and there'd be nobody left standing on the field. The system just turns me on.
By the time Piper enrolled in high school, his fascination was no longer tangential, securing a spot as a center on the Niles McKinley High School football team that ran the single wing. After serving in WWII, Piper arrived at Baldwin Wallace College in Berea Ohio, where he had the opportunity to continue playing in the single wing as a center, earning All American honors for his play.
Following graduation from Baldwin Wallace College, Piper joined his alma matter as a coaching assistant for three years before moving on to coach linemen at Denison University from 1951 to 1953. In 1954, Piper was promoted to being the head coach of Denison, amassing a 6-2-1 record in his inaugural campaign.
After having initial success for the first few seasons while running his offense out of the T formation, Piper struggled to maintain a consistent winning program following a Denison record of 8-1 in 1957. Eager to find a solution to his problems, Piper went against the grain of the football world and ran out of the single wing formation in 1962.
At a time when only a handful of college football programs across the country still utilized the single wing, most notably Princeton University, Denison found great success with this formation, going 7-1-1 in 1962 and 8-1 in 1963. His reasons for resorting to such a vintage offense was found in one player who transferred to Denison from Ohio State – halfback Tony Hall, who Piper described as being “built like a fireplug.”
After playing on the freshman football team at Ohio State, Hall, backing up eventual NFL legends Matt Snell and Paul Warfield on the Buckeye’s varsity squad, decided to transfer in his junior year for more opportunities to play. As a result of his transfer, Hall received almost every opportunity to play, becoming the starting single wing tailback in which he handled the ball nearly every play for the 1962 and 1963 seasons.
Following Hall’s graduation, Piper’s single wing didn’t produce the same stellar results as the previous two years, going 6-3 in 1964. Piper eventually retired the single wing formation at Denison for 13 years and subsequently strung together some impressive 7 and 8 win seasons in that timeframe. But from 1973 to 1977, the Denison Big Red failed to produce a winning season, in great part to their inability to attract topflight talent from bigger football programs.
After enduring a winless 1977 season, Piper repeated history with another dual threat player named Clay Sampson and resurrected the single wing once more with Sampson at the helm at tailback, going 4-4-1 in ’78 and then achieving first place in the Ohio Athletic Conference with an 8-1 record in ’79. Sampson became the first of two players in Division III history to rush for 3,000 yards and pass for 3,000 in a career when he totaled 6,920 yards for Denison from 1977 to '80, an achievement that only he could claim for 32 years.
Succeeding Hall and Sampson in the single wing tailback role would be Chris Briggs, who in 1985 led Denison to first place in the North Coast Atlantic Conference with a 10-1 record and a spot in the NCAA Division III playoffs. In that season, Denison ran the ball 84 percent of its plays, with Briggs rushing for 1,049 yards and six touchdowns and passed for 541 yards and 11 scores. Briggs followed up a stellar junior season with a 9-1 record in ’86 on his way to becoming the first player in college history to rush for more than 4,000 yards and pass for more than 2,000 yards.
With the success of the 1985 season, Piper’s began to receive national media attention, having been profiled in publications such as Sports Illustrated, The Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post, among others. His allegiance to the single wing earned him a unique place amongst the football community, drawing many older football fans to Denison games who were interested in seeing the standard offense of their youth in action once again.
Piper, though never outright claiming that the single wing was the best formation, believed it had a place in the modern game of his time, saying at one point,
The thing that a lot of people don't understand about the single wing is that it was never caught up with or overrun. It works. But football is like men's fashions. Coaches don't run the single wing because they don't want to be out of style.
Piper, having been profiled in many of these pieces as something of an old soul, clearly never cared about modern style, alluding to an attachment to the past for his reasons of using the single wing. When he discovered the older generation of football fans who came to see the Big Red, Piper said, “I feel I'd be turning my back on people if I ever abandoned the single wing. It's a nostalgic type of thing."
By the end of the 1992 season, Piper had won over 200 games in his career. He became only the 24th head coach in college football history to win 200 games and only the 14th to do it with one school. He retired after the 1992 season with a record of 200-142-19, with his teams having outscored opponents 7,404 points to 5,804 during his tenure.
Piper died in 1997, and his accomplishments at Denison were forever felt by those who played under him, those who coached against him and the fans, both young and old, who cherished Piper’s nostalgic system in a game that is always rapidly advancing. His ties to Granville and his partiality to the single wing made rooted him to a different brand of college football - an ode to the early 20th century years when Rockne, Warner and Kerr coached the game - and allowed him to make a mark for himself in the modern football history.
References
https://www.dispatch.com/story/sports/college/2010/11/06/piper-gave-single-wing-new/23503805007/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/sports/1985/10/24/denison-flies-with-single-wing/13943834-0be8-4024-ade1-9f754b5b2a5f/
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1985-10-26-0340110112-story.html
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1991-11-03-9104090285-story.html
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/1987/03/09/single-wing-really-pays-ohio-piper/62697145007/
https://vault.si.com/vault/1982/09/20/a-very-singular-way-to-play
https://www.newspapers.com/image/517139775/?terms=keith%20w%20piper%20single%20wing&match=1
The History of American Football - Its Great Teams, Players and Coaches - Allison Danzig