Backfield Coach Nelson Was Here Before . . . With Harmon and West fall

Davey Nelson is the only member of the coaching staff who sees the team play. While Art Valpey and Butch Jordan strain from the bench, and Elmer Madur scouts opponents, Nelson sits snugly in the Stadium press box and watches his backs go through their paces.

Not that he relaxes. The sawed-off ex-halfback spends the 60 minutes of play talking into a telephone which runs to the bench, where quarterbacks and coaches can check on the progress of the week's game plan; between halves he talks to the signal callers and gives Valpey a quick recap of the effectiveness of Crimson formations.

"Bill Henry runs the ball game himself," asserts Nelson. "I don't call sequences or plays; but the quarterbacks and defensive centers can check the execution of their plays."

Nelson is familiar with the Stadium. He tried it out in 1940 when he was the wingback on the Michigan team that shut out Harvard 26-0. The three other men in the backfield were named Tom Harmon, Forrest Evashevski, and Bob West fall.

Davey is a little reticent about that Harvard game. "I only played the first half. They were looping their defenses, and I started squawking in the huddle. Mr. Crisler saw it, and I was out of there for the rest of the game."

The single wing was not the same machine that it is now. "We just went out there on Saturday and said, 'Here we come--what are you going to do about it?'" The pre-war edition of the Crisier system featured a minimum of spinners and a maximum of straight power.

It turned out some pretty fair teams, as may be gathered from the three-year record of the squads Nelson played on. Minnesota was the only team which gave real trouble, winning the Little Brown Jug game three straight times. Indiana (in 1941) was the only other team to beat Michigan over the same stretch.

The Navy: A "Dodo"

Nelson graduated in June 1942 and went right into the Navy. As a lieutenant in Air Intelligence he spent three years interpreting reconnaissance photographs. "I feel like I've been looking at movies all my life," says Davey, who spends a good many hours a week watching one game over and over again.

Eighteen months on the carrier "Yorktown" and a year and a half in the Aleutians filled the time until the fall of 1945, when Nelson returned to Ann Arbor to work on a Master's degree in Physical Education.

Graduate Work

Under Benny Oosterbaan, Valpey, and other members of the staff, Davey set about a task which, to the layman at least, is about as simple as taking apart an airplane engine.

All he did was to examine the 1945 Navy-Michigan game--won 33-7 by the Middies--to discover why the Michigan offenses failed. "It was a study in offensive execution and defensive anticipation," Nelson says. "Then I broke the game down into individual failures, both in execution and in physical stamina."

With this tome under his arm, Nelson found a coaching job at Hillsdale College before the start of the '46 season. As athletic director and head football coach of the 800-man school, he lost only one game in his two-year stay--the second game of his opening season. From then until November of '47 two ties were the only marks on an otherwise perfect record.

"We had some pretty good boys," Nelson admits. "A lot of men were coming out of the service and wanted to go to small colleges."

The First Year: Installation

Putting the single wing into Harvard football has been comparatively easy, at least as far as Nelson's department is concerned. "The system's been evolving since 1940, and a lot of boys out west grew up with it; here we had to teach the backs the feeling of the thing more than the actual execution, which came quickly enough."

On the field, Davey is rarely still. Through the first weeks of pre-season workouts, following the maxim, "You can't play without practice," he maintained a killing pace for himself as well as for the backfield squad. There's been less actual field work since then--"it never seemed to get dark so early out in Michigan."

Not Superstitious

The Crimson's backfield coach certainly doesn't fall into the superstitious class. Like all of the new football family, he counts the final score as the big thing. "There's no such thing as a moral victory" was his remark before the Columbia game, and it apparently keynoted that week.

But at home it must be different. Nelson's two cocker spaniels, Flash and Gooky, will block and tackle for dog biscuits. "And when you ask them what they do on Saturdays," Davey admits craftily, "They stand on their hind legs and pray."

(This is the fourth in a series of articles profiling the now members of the Harvard football coaching staff.)