| | The name was coined in 1960, but the Cradle rocked long before
then.
Bob Kurz, then working in the sports information office at Miami
University, was looking for a way to quickly explain how this little
school nestled in the Miami Valley churned out one great head coach
after another.
Paul Brown cut his teeth as a player in tiny Oxford. So did Weeb
Ewbank. Sid Gillman came to the school to coach in 1944. His 1947 team
went 9-0-1 and won the Sun Bowl in 1947. While at Miami, he recruited
Ara Parseghian, John Pont, Carmen Cozza and Paul Dietzel.
In 1960, Gillman was coaching the Los Angeles Rams, Brown with the Cleveland Browns, Ewbank with the Baltimore Colts. Parseghian was
making a name for himself at Northwestern University, Dietzel at
Louisiana State. Pont was the head coach at Miami -- Cozza one of his
top assistants. Another Miami grad, Glenn "Bo" Schembechler, was a
rising young assistant on the staff of Woody Hayes at Ohio State,
who'd coached at Miami himself from 1949-50.
The roots of all these coaching minds all tied to Oxford. Among
coaching circles, Miami's family tree was the mother oak.
Kurz need something that summed up the phenomenon. Something
punchy. Something that would stick. "The Cradle of Coaches" name was
born.
Despite not luring the A-list prep talent of a Notre Dame, Alabama
or Ohio State, Miami became a force in college football -- the little
school a lot of big powers were afraid to play. The Redskins (later
RedHawks) won eight Mid-American Conference titles between 1948-68.
"Competing against the Big Ten and the other major universities,
we often got the second pick of the lot," said Parseghian, a Miami
player from 1946-47 and head coach from 1951-55. "A lot of times,
though, the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft doesn't necessarily turn out
to be the best player."
But the school kept turning out A-list coaches. Pont took Indiana
University to its only Rose Bowl in 1967; Parseghian returned Notre
Dame to its national championship stature; Cozza became an institution
at Yale, where he coached from 1965-96; Schembechler returned to
Oxford as head coach (1963-68) and left for the University of Michigan
in 1969. He took the Wolverines to the Rose Bowl in his first season.
Dick Shrider was Miami's athletic director when Schembechler left,
charged with making a hire that would keep the Cradle rocking.
Shrider, AD at Miami from 1964-89, settled on Bill Mallory, then an
assistant at Ohio State. Dick Crum took over in 1974 and coached the
Redskins to three more MAC championships and two bowl games -- the 1974
and '75 Tangerine (later Citrus) bowls.
Randy Walker was a fullback for Mallory and Crum from 1973-75. He served as an assistant under Crum for 11 seasons at Miami and North
Carolina, spent two years at Northwestern and replaced Tim Rose as
head coach after the 1989 season.
"Part of the reason I went to Miami was I bought into all the
stuff about the Cradle of Coaches," said Walker, who left Oxford last
winter to take the head coaching job at Northwestern as Miami's
all-time leader in wins (59). "The Cradle rocks again."
By the mid-1990s, more than 100 Miami graduates were still active
in the pro or college ranks. In football, other future head coaches
who have played or worked at Miami include: Bill Arnsparger (later
head coach with the New York Giants); George Blackburn (University of
Cincinnati, Virginia); John Mackovic (Wake Forest, Kansas City Chiefs,
Illinois, Texas); Dave McClain (Ball State, Wisconsin); Larry Smith
(Tulane, Southern California, Missouri); and Dick Tomey (Hawaii,
Arizona).
(Sean Keeler writes for The Cincinnati Post.)
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