Lorin F. Deland

Lorin Fuller Deland (1855-1917) was head coach of the Harvard Crimson football team for three games in 1895, after having been a football "adviser" to the team beginning in 1892. He invented the “flying wedge” formation, which was unveiled in a 6-0 loss to Yale in the championship game of 1892. Later, Deland collaborated with former Yale Bulldogs football coach Walter Camp on the seminal book titled Football, published in 1896.

Deland was an independently wealthy Bostonian who dabbled in a number of interests. At various times in his life, he was a publisher, owned an advertising agency, was a military historian, author, reporter, actor, and chess master. He even wrote the words to a popular 1900 song entitled “Dinah”. Deland appeared in many local theatre productions, and the income from his advertising agency was used to support several local charities. On May 12, 1880, he married Margaret Deland, who later gained fame as a novelist, short story writer, and poet. Deland had inherited his father's publishing company, which he sold in 1886 to go into advertising, as well as opening a greeting card business. Margaret’s writing career began by authoring verses for her husband's greeting cards.

Deland never played football or even attended a football game until 1890, when he was in his mid-thirties. Within two years he was helping to coach Harvard and was recognized as a football genius. Deland analyzed the American sport as if it were a battlefield and devised plays based on his study of Napoleon Bonaparte and military tactics. Deland’s biggest innovation was the latest and greatest of the mass-momentum plays, the fabled “flying wedge.” Deland theorized that the key to the sport was to catapult all one's strength at the enemy's weakest point. Deland worked with the Harvard team on a voluntary basis to perfect the flying wedge, a violent assault by several men on a single opponent.

Walter Camp’s confidante Theodore S. Woolsey reported to Camp in July 1892 that Lorin Deland was adapting “military strategy to football” and “testing the practicability of these new plays.” Yet, Woolsey questioned whether Harvard players could carry them out. He noted: “To work them out at all would require a standard of team play which Harvard is not usually up to.”

Harvard’s 1892 team had an undefeated 10-0 record heading into its end-of-year showdown with the Yale Bulldogs, coached by football pioneer Walter Camp. Though the team had been working on the flying wedge formation since the pre-season, Deland was saving its unveiling for the Yale game. Against Yale in 1892, Harvard opened the second half with a kickoff, but in those days it was legal to tap the ball and then put it in play by running with it or handing or pitching to a teammate. Using this strategy, Harvard implemented their devastating new play. According to football historian Parke H. Davis:

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