Call Me Coach: A Life in College Football [Hardcover]

When LSU head football coach Paul Dietzel saw Billy Cannon field an Ole Miss punt on LSU's own eleven yard line on a stifling Halloween night in 1959, his shouts of No, no, no! turned to Go, go, go! as Cannon eluded tackler after tackler, sending fans in Tiger Stadium into a frenzy and earning himself that year's Heisman Trophy. Dietzel is probably best known for leading LSU to its first national championship the year before Cannon's legendary run, but his career in athletics also carried him to numerous posts across the country and put him in the company of some of the best coaching minds of all time. In Call Me Coach, Dietzel affectionately recalls his rich and varied life in college football.

In 1948, Dietzel decided to forgo medical school at Columbia University to become the plebe football coach at West Point. As an assistant over the next few years, he worked with Bear Bryant at the University of Kentucky, Colonel Red Blaik and Vince Lombardi at West Point, and Sid Gillman at the University of Cincinnati. Taking the job of head coach at LSU in 1955, he reversed the Tigers' losing skid and--using the wing-T formation and a revolutionary three-team substitution system incorporating the White Team, the Go Team, and the renowned Chinese Bandits--crafted 1958's unbeaten championship season. The thirty-three-year-old Dietzel was voted National Coach of the Year by the widest margin ever.

Back at West Point from 1961 to 1965, Dietzel rallied the Cadets to finally beat Navy and, as South Carolina's football coach and athletics director from 1966 to 1974, he took the Gamecocks to their first bowl game in twenty-five years and mandated the recruitment of black athletes in all sports programs. After twenty years as a head coach, with 109 wins and 95 losses at three schools and a postseason record of 11 victories and 3 defeats, Dietzel retired from coaching in 1974, later serving as athletics director at Indiana and LSU.

Through Dietzel's eyes, realÛ