Sid Gillman. Josh Katzowitz

      Schmidt liked his stand-in son so much that the 26-year-old Gillman was the only assistant coach Schmidt ever hired at Ohio State (athletic director Lynn St. John usually did the deed). Schmidt wasn’t concerned that Gillman was Jewish, although this already was becoming a problem for Gillman, considering he couldn’t land another job in the Big Ten because of his religious background. Instead, Schmidt gave him $2,500 a year to coach the team’s ends.

      It was not the nirvana Gillman might have envisioned.

      Schmidt was always seen as bizarre. He was confident and sarcastic. He forgot players’ names, and if he happened to remember, he frequently mispronounced them. He was also mean. Once, a player named Johnny Vaught—who went on to great success as Ole Miss’s coach—made a mistake at practice and asked, “Coach, where do you want me to go on this play?” Replied Schmidt, then the Texas Christian coach: “You can go straight to hell as far as I’m concerned—you’re not doing me a bit of good.” In that day and age, it was rare for a coach to say something like that to one of his players, and it didn’t help Schmidt’s relationship with them.

      When Gillman joined the coaching staff before the 1938 season, Schmidt’s paranoia was impinging on his team’s growth. Most of his assistant coaches were rendered irrelevant, because Schmidt ran every part of practice himself. He trusted hardly anybody else, so the assistants chased errant footballs and ran errands for the head coach. Schmidt did everything else. Making matters worse, most of them didn’t have full access to Schmidt’s playbook. He kept those encyclopedia-thick treasures locked away—literally. Gillman was close enough to Schmidt to have earned access to the entire Schmidt catalog, but he was forbidden from parceling out the knowledge that came with it.

      In fact, Schmidt began handing out assignments to his players that featured only the job that particular player was supposed to accomplish on that certain play. In other words, instead of giving an actor the full script of the movie, Schmidt, the director, produced only the lines that actor was supposed to recite. The actor would have no idea of the plot or what else his character was supposed to experience. In effect, he couldn’t do his job effectively, because his lines had no context. It was the same thing with an offensive tackle. If he didn’t know what the assignment was for the guard next to him—or for that matter, the quarterback and running back—how could he understand the totality of the play itself? Schmidt’s paranoia forced him to this measure because he was scared of the consequences if his playbooks fell into the wrong hands. But clearly, it wasn’t an efficient way to run a football team.

      Schmidt’s offensive innovations were beginning to lose their effectiveness, the losses began to pile up, and though the Ohio State students enjoyed his zaniness, his act was wearing thin. A couple of three-loss seasons were followed by 1940’s 4-4 debacle, and players began to grumble about him, saying they were poorly conditioned and that they spent too much time on offense and not enough time hitting on defense. They began holding players-only meetings on a weekly basis, and some started skipping practice. Then, Michigan dominated Ohio State 40–0, the Buckeyes worst loss in 35 years, and it was clear that Schmidt was on his way out the door—of his job and, maybe, of his sanity.

      At the team banquet, Jim Langhurst, a departing captain, presented Schmidt with a gold trophy, and Schmidt, touched, broke down in tears, saying, “This gets my goat. It sure means a lot to me.” The gold trophy, however, simply added to the weight already on his shoulders.

      After the banquet, Schmidt, with his job almost surely at an end, traveled to Los Angeles to scout the December 7 contest between Notre Dame and Southern California—which was to meet Ohio State in the second game of the 1941 season. When Schmidt returned, he was told that his five assistant coaches, including Gillman, had turned in their resignation letters. Nine days after the USC-Notre Dame game, Buckeyes athletic director Lynn St. John met with Schmidt to discuss the state of the program, and later that day, Schmidt, who finished his term with a 39-16-1 record, was forced to resign. He held out hope that the athletic board would reject his letter of resignation. But that night, during a secret 2-hour, 40-minute meeting at the Faculty Club, the athletic board unanimously accepted it. Ohio State was moving on.

      Schmidt would coach one more season, going 3-7 in 1942 at the University of Idaho, and after the school ended the program, he died September 19, 1944, as an insurance salesman.

      “When he came to Ohio State, Big Ten coaches were on a fairly well-established pattern,” Gillman said after learning of Schmidt’s death. “Francis turned things upside down, gambled with a wide-open, lateral-passing game, and began winning games for Ohio State. Rival coaches couldn’t keep up with him. Some of his own players couldn’t keep up with him either. That was his one fault. He tried to teach too much offense. There were always a few players who couldn’t get it all. Those few always kept him from reaching perfection.

      “If Francis had any real fault it was his neglect of fundamentals in favor of developing his offensive tactics. His players spent so much of their time learning their assignments on the dozens of different plays he gave them that they had little chance to practice other phases of the game.”

      Gillman surely is correct, but he fails to mention what might have been Schmidt’s biggest lesson to Gillman. His inability to stay organized eventually doomed Schmidt, and it was never more clearly on display than when Joe Williams, the sports editor of the Syracuse Herald-Journal, stopped off to visit Schmidt while on his way home from the World Series in Cincinnati. Williams entered the Buckeyes’ locker room, and he was struck dumb by the hundreds upon hundreds of Schmidt’s plays (highlighted in yellows, reds, and purples) hanging on the wall. These obviously weren’t important enough for Schmidt to keep locked away out of sight. Wrote Williams: “The effect, if baffling to the mind, is soothing to the eyes. You find yourself thinking of a sunset in the Swiss Alps.” Williams asked local reporter Lew Byrer about it, saying it was a little strange that anybody could walk into the locker room and study Schmidt’s playbook. Said Byrer: “Nobody knows what they mean anyway, and I doubt if even Schmidt does.”

      Gillman realized that in order to surpass Schmidt’s level of success, he needed a system that was impeccable in its organization. Any other way would distract him from the task at hand. Any other way could possibly kill his coaching career.