Wow Boys

The 1940 Stanford Indians football team, nicknamed the "Wow Boys", represented Stanford University in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) intercollegiate competition during the 1940 season. First-year head coach Clark Shaughnessy inherited a team that finished with a 1–7–1 record the previous season. He installed his own version of the T formation, a system that had largely fallen into disuse since the 1890s and was viewed as obsolete. The Indians shocked observers when they won all ten of their games including the Rose Bowl, which prompted several selectors to declare them the 1940 national champions. Stanford's dramatic reversal of fortunes prompted football programs across the nation to abandon the single-wing formation in favor of the new T formation.

Clark Shaughnessy had served as the head coach at the University of Chicago since 1930. While there, he developed a new version of the T formation based upon the "pro T" that was concurrently in use by the Chicago Bears of the National Football League. The T formation, in which three backs lined up abreast and behind the quarterback who was himself behind the center, was an obsolescent system that had been disused since the 1890s in favor of the single-wing and double-wing formations. Shaugnessy, however, incorporated several new features in his own version of the T. It utilized flankers and the man-in-motion concept, and it emphasized deception and quickness over the brute force necessitated by the wing formations. Shaughnessy was not very successful at Chicago and his teams never finished a season with more wins than losses. In 1939, the Chicago Maroons compiled a 2–6 record and failed to defeat any of their conference opponents. All six losses were defensive shutouts, the worst being an 85–0 rout by Michigan. After the season, the University of Chicago disbanded its football program. Instead of remaining at Chicago, where he also held a position as a professor and earned a comfortable salary of $10,000 per year, Shaughnessy elected to continue coaching football, which he described as his hobby and passion. For 1940, he was hired by Stanford University whose Indians had finished the previous season with a 1–7–1 record.