Review: New College Football Biography Has Familiar Theme for Oklahoma Fans 

From the second page of Ivan Maisel’s brand new biography on the almost forgotten legacy of Notre Dame’s second coaching icon — “American Coach: The Triumph and Tragedy of Notre Dame Legend Frank Leahy” (Grand Central Publishing, 2025) — generations of Oklahoma football fans might feel a touch of the same silly indignation that Switzer lived every year between his forced resignation in 1989 to his eventual induction into the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame in 2001.

“What I came to learn in my research is that the other coaches didn’t like him,” Maisel said in an interview with 365 Sports in Waco. “So they just wouldn’t vote him in. It had nothing to do with his talent. … One of them said it was because he beat everybody so badly, so they just didn’t like him.”

Maisel effectively points out several times both early and late in his meticulously researched treatise on Leahy’s life that, when he left the game, the coach had a greater winning percentage and more national championships than anyone but Knute Rockne, the original Fighting Irish coaching icon, and that Leahy still today ranks No. 2 all-time in winning percentage.

Leahy coached Notre Dame (his alma mater) for 11 seasons from 1941-53 (he served in the war in 1944 and ’45), won four national championships and posted a winning percentage of .864 (107-13-9).

Switzer coached Oklahoma for 16 seasons from 1973-88, won three national championships and posted a winning percentage of .857 (157-29-4).

From 1946 to 1950, Leahy’s teams put together a 39-game unbeaten streak.

From his first season in 1973 to 1975, Switzer orchestrated 30 consecutive games without a loss.

Yet, the Honors Court of the National Football Foundation — the final committee that renders the ultimate thumbs up or thumbs down to the official Hall of Fame inductees every year — denied entrance 12 times for both Leahy and Switzer.

“More than a thousand guests came to the dinner (at Notre Dame’s Athletic and Convocation Center in 1972) … to honor Leahy, and benefit him,” Maisel writes. “ … And they wanted to remind others, namely the men who for more than a decade had refused to vote Leahy into the College Football Hall of Fame.”

Also, neither Leahy nor Switzer ever received the AFCA’s Amos Alonzo Stagg Award, which goes to an “individual, group or institution whose services have been outstanding in the advancement of the best interests of football.”

In addition to his bootstraps work ethic, Switzer also has a charm and charisma that Leahy did not. People naturally gravitated to Leahy, but Maisel writes that Leahy, driven by failure and a hatred of losing, was instead aloof and occasionally ignorant of those who adored his feats.

I told Switzer recently about Maisel’s new book and my comparison of he and Leahy and why both men were made to wait 12 years for an undeniable honor to ome their way.

Switzer, who turns 88 on Oct. 5, just laughed.

“They were punishing me,” he said. “I was a renegade, they thought.”

“I never lost to Darrell Royal. Never lost to Bobby Bowden. I beat Joe Paterno twice. Bo Schembechler. I beat ‘em all. Tom Osborne, I was 12-5. But, somebody just didn’t want your ass in there.”

When Switzer finally was inducted in 2001 he was in good company alongside Texas giants Grant Teaff of Baylor and Bill Yeoman of Houston (as well as his old tight end and fellow Arkansan, Keith Jackson).

“Yeah, they had to put me in with a couple of good guys,” Switzer joked.

Like Switzer, Leahy beat them all. Maybe he didn’t win many fans outside of South Bend, but he did win — games and championships — a lot. He coached his teams to play exceptionally hard (some opponents resorted to calling it “dirty”). Occasionally, Leahy also elicited cries of poor sportsmanship (he perfected the ancient art of faking injuries to stop the clock — ironically still at the center of new rules implemented for 2025).

Powerful, even bitter rivalries formed with the game’s best, like Michigan’s Fritz Crisler (Stagg recipient, AFCA officer and NCAA Rules Committee Chair) and Army’s Red Blaik. Rivals admitted they didn’t understand Leahy, who was singularly driven by winning. Eventually, he became at odds with then-university president Father Theodore Hesburgh, who wanted Notre Dame to be known for elite academic standards and not just football.

Switzer also agitated opponents by blowing them out — sometimes “hanging half-a-hundred” by halftime. OU’s defenses of the ‘70s and ’80s were some of the hardest-hitting and most vicious in the history of the sport, and the most talented of them often played right up to the edge. Brian Bosworth, for instance, was perhaps the epitome of an OU player forged in Switzer’s image, infamously spitting in Mike Gundy’s face, ripping off helmets in Miami and otherwise comporting himself with a barely controlled rage that eventually spiraled into an embarrassing scrap with the NCAA.

Intense rivalries with good-guy elites like Osborne at Nebraska and Darrell Royal at Texas (both Stagg recipients) didn’t favor Switzer’s image. Switzer eventually got sideways with then-interim OU president David Swank, who grew tired of Sooner football ruling the campus and, after a felony-filled spring of 1989, had the leverage to force his coach out.

While Switzer isn’t mentioned in Maisel’s book — Leahy’s final season was 1953, Switzer’s first year as a college assistant was 1961; they never crossed paths professionally — another former Oklahoma coach  is mentioned prominently.

Bud Wilkinson came to OU in 1946 under Jim Tatum, but a year later, Tatum went to Maryland and Wilkinson set the Sooners on a path to blue blood immortality.

Wilkinson played at Minnesota under Bernie Bierman, where they won three straight national championships from 1934-36. During World War II, Bierman coached the U.S. Navy’s preflight school team at the University of Iowa, known as the Iowa Pre-Flight Seahawks. Wilkinson joined the coaching staff in 1943-44 under Missouri coaching legend Don Faurot. 

In 1943, in a No. 1 vs. No. 2 showdown, Leahy’s Fighting Irish beat Faurot/Wilkinson’s Iowa Pre-Flight squadron 14-13 on their way to the national championship.

In 1951 — the year after Wilkinson led the Sooners to their first national championship — Leahy installed Wilkinson’s famous Split-T offensive formation at Notre Dame.

Then in 1952 and 1953, Leahy’s Irish used that offense to upset the Sooners in a couple of classics — the first of which Maisel retells with painstaking detail, including the stunning efforts of one Billy Vessels, who rushed for a school record (and Notre Dame opponent record) 195 yards and accounted for three touchdowns in a Sooner loss. It was that game, history says and Maisel confirms, that propelled Vessels to win OU’s first Heisman Trophy.

The author credits well over 100 published sources for his material, unearthing a treasure trove of mesmerizing historical facts.

Using quotes from famed writer Red Smith and the New York Herald-Tribune published in 1952, Maisel also retells a chance encounter between Leahy and native Oklahoman Mickey Mantle. Leahy and the Irish were in Philadelphia for a game against Penn, and the Yankees were in town to play the Philadelphia A’s. Leahy dropped in the Yankee locker room, and Mantle lit a fuse by puffing out his chest and telling Smith the Sooners would “flog the ears off Notre Dame this season.” Smith challenged The Mick to go tell Leahy — so he did, and came back somewhat humbled.

Some 30 million viewers watched on NBC as the Irish took down the Sooners 27-21 in South Bend. 

Another instance of Leahy blurring the lines between rules and sportsmanship came late in that win over OU as Notre Dame offensive lineman Manil Mavraides was accused of cheap-shotting OU All-American J.D. Roberts, which provoked Roberts into taking a swing at his opponent — which got him ejected. OU also claimed that a rule-bending offensive shift by Notre Dame's line caused their defensive line to jump offsides in a goal-line situation that helped produce the winning touchdown.

Although Wilkinson later said that '52 squad was his best team, Oklahoma finished ranked No. 2 that year behind Michigan State, while Notre Dame was No. 3. The Irish beat the Sooners again in the rematch in Norman in 1953 (that’s the year the NCAA went back to one-platoon football and unlimited substitutions) — and then Wilkinson’s boys did not lose again until 1957 — a 47-game winning streak that was bookended by another crushing loss to Notre Dame, this time in Norman, and this time without Leahy.

Ivan Maisel, a fixture in American sports journalism at Sports Illustrated, ESPN and other publications for four decades, is a modern-day master of timeless prose whose fastidious research and attention to microscopic yet ultimately revealing details tell a complete story. In this, Maisel’s third book, the reader gets the vibe that Maisel was there alongside Smith and Grantland Rice and other sportswriting immortals covering Leahy and knew him well, even though it all happened before Maisel was born.  

Like many college football fans, I knew who Frank Leahy was — but I was not familiar with his story. In fact, I’d guess that, outside of family, no one living today knew the depth of the man like Maisel has offered.

Maisel combines his virtuosity as a storyteller with unparalleled skills as a dogged fact-finder and researcher, and he tells a story in which Leahy comes off as both hero and antagonist, aggressor and victim, and yet, the hardscrabble Everyman we all want to root for.

Written against the backdrop of today’s college game, where 5-star recruits revel in $5 million contracts (or more) and then hopscotch around schools with all the loyalty of a mackerel in the currents looking for its next meal, Maisel illustrates an entirely different world from a century ago, where the only perk that players really wanted was a scholarship and a summer job. Leahy’s first job as a player was setting up and taking down bleachers in the Notre Dame gymnasium, sweeping the basketball floor and putting lines down on the track for 40 cents an hour. He told his boss he didn’t go to the clubs in downtown South Bend or to the movies because he couldn’t afford it.

Another job, the summer before his senior year, he rode the train into Chicago with teammates covering pipe with asbestos for $75 a week. (Leahy died in 1972 at the age of 64 from leukemia.)

As a 16-year-old in 1924, Leahy delved into the world of prize fighting. Under an assumed name, he won $100 but kept his amateur status. After graduating from high school in Iowa, he moved to Omaha to stay with his big brother — and then tried to enroll as a senior and play football again before his old school found out and wrote a letter to his new school.

The world was indeed different then — and perhaps nowhere is that difference more pronounced than college football. Maisel’s efforts to transport the reader to an era long gone but yet vaguely familiar are flawlessly executed.

• At the end of Leahy’s playing days at Notre Dame (1927-30) came The Great Depression. In those days, Rockne kept a roster of some 250 players. He invited Leahy to South Bend without ever having watched him play. Leahy rode the train from Omaha to South Bend with $19 in his new wallet — and promptly lost both.

• In 1949 — the year of his last national championship — the Irish were still riding the rails to games. Leahy wanted to fly the team to a game at Washington, but the school administration declined. Instead, thousands of Notre Dame fans (and devout Catholics) showed up at whistle stops to cheer the team westward.

• Leahy didn’t play in the famous game, but he was in the locker room for Rockne’s “Win one for The Gipper” halftime speech that fueled a second-half rally over unbeaten Army at Yankee Stadium in 1928, one of the true “Game of the Century” contests.

• Speaking of 1928, the Irish starting interior line that year averaged a whopping 187 pounds per man — the biggest topping the scales at just 200.

• Leahy’s junior year, “The Ramblers” played every game either on the road, at neutral stadiums or in Chicago. Before his senior year, 1930, Notre Dame Stadium was completed with 54,000 seats affixed for the season opener against SMU — on Oct. 4.

• However, Leahy was injured on the final day of the preseason and never played a down his senior year. Rockne died in a plane crash six months later.

• Leahy’s first salary as a college assistant coach at Georgetown paid him $1,200 a year, which meant he worked other jobs, like selling billboard space for an ad agency or working in sales for U.S. Rubber, which eventually led him to a lucrative job traveling the nation as a spokesman selling Keds shoes to basketball teams, canvas with rubber soles — the world’s first athletic shoes.

Maisel deftly dives into the unpleasant details of Leahy’s two years as head coach at Boston College, where Lou Montgomery broke the color barrier and was a vital part of the Eagles’ 20-2 record — but couldn’t play regular-season games against Florida or Auburn because those schools stipulated in contracts they wouldn’t play against black players, and was also left home from the Cotton Bowl loss to Clemson and the Sugar Bowl win over Tennessee, as well as a game at Tulane, for the same reason.

One time, in 1949, comic chaos consumed the entire Leahy family: Leahy’s wife was due any day with one of their eight children, but the coach invited his assistants over for dinner. Thunderstorms knocked out the power just after they left at 9:30 p.m., and she went into labor. Leahy called two doctors, she went upstairs to lay down and almost immediately had the baby. The first doctor to arrive tended to Mrs. Leahy, while the runner-up treated 11-year-old Sue, who tripped in the dark and broke her toe.

“American Coach” is rich with a hundred years of that kind of detail:

• After World War II broke out, Irish QB Angelo Bertelli — second in the Heisman Trophy voting in 1941, sixth in 1942 — enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserves. And six games into the 1943 season, the Marines activated him, and he was shipped out. Bertelli learned while in boot camp at Parris Island, SC, that he had won the Heisman in 1943.

• Eventually, Leahy himself joined the war effort as a lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve — the national champion head coach at Notre Dame! One of his jobs was teaching athletics (especially football) to submarine crews. He and Bertelli and other Irish players were reunited briefly in the Pacific Theater.

• In the 1946 “Game of the Century” rematch with Army at Yankee Stadium, Maisel writes that the teams combined for seven fumbles and that Cadets coach Red Blaik “didn’t believe in field goals; he hadn’t called for an attempt in three seasons,” but it was Leahy, who used only 18 players, that chose to go for it on fourth-and-goal from the 4 instead of kicking a field goal in a game that ended in a 0-0 tie. 

• After that crushing tie, Leahy met with the press for 90 minute (how times have changed!), then kept his coaches in the locker room for hours going over the game. The players went back to the hotel, but by the time the coaches left, there were no cabs available in The Bronx, so they started walking the 120 blocks back to midtown Manhattan. They eventually found a police officer, who got to a phone and called a cab.

• After the ’47 season, the Detroit Lions tried to hire Leahy at $100,000 a year, plus offered 10 percent ownership of the team as well as a car dealership in Detroit. To his family’s chagrin, he turned them down. 

• While Michigan and Notre Dame went back and forth atop the poll in 1948, Maisel writes, “In those days, schools held cocktail parties on Friday night before a home game for the visiting writers and radio men, parties deemed important enough that the head coach would attend.” (As I look back on my 40 years as a sports writer, I can recall only once where that seemed normal: Friday nights before games at Texas Tech, the Red Raider sports information department used to host visiting media at a local steakhouse — a practice that died around 2006 or ’07.)

“All he thought about, day and night, was how to win a football game,” Maisel said, “and that, I think, was a big reason why he burned out in his mid-40s.”

The subtitle ultimately nails it: a tale of “triumph and tragedy” about a common man consumed with the zero sum of success or failure, a perfectionist who at 45 was “too old to coach, too young to retire” (he did come painfully close to coaching again at Texas A&M), a family man from virtually nowhere, a reluctant celebrity whose relentless work ethic and drive to win eventually destroyed his health and diminished his legacy.