Lou Little

Bio

He was a man who cared more for the personal growth and well-being of his players than he did for his won-lost record. Lou Little was a gifted teacher of football but, more importantly, a coach who seemed more interested in being a humanitarian. Little was a star tackle at Penn (1916-1919). From 1920 until 1923, he was a captain and coach of the Frankford Yellow Jackets, a leading pro team of the period. Serving as head coach at Georgetown University from 1924 through 1929, Little's teams compiled a 41-12-3 record. Several weeks before he began his tenure as head coach at Columbia in 1930, he told a group of alumni, "I did not come to Columbia to fail." Over the next 27 years, Little's Lions were seldom out-thought, never out-fought. From 1936, until his retirement in 1956, he had only six winning campaigns, yet he developed many of the game's leading players, including Sid Luckman, Gene Rossides, Lou Kusserow, Ventan Yablonsky and Al Barabas. Little's pet single-wing play was the double-spin run or pass and his teams used it with immense success. A past president of the American Football Coaches Association and chairman of it's Rules Committee, Little retired in 1956 and became a member of the National Football Foundation's Executive Committee.