The Jut-Jawed Thin Man from Mountain Grove

In 1995 Don Faurot's heart gave out, but for parts of eight decades, it belonged to Mizzou. Faurot wasn't the University of Missouri's first football coach. He doesn't have the most wins or the greatest winning percentage in team history. But his legacy transcends that of any coach who came before or after.

The pride of Mountain Grove, Missouri, Faurot built Missouri football into a championship program in the 1930s and '40s, but a win-loss record could never solely capture his contributions to the state's flagship school — and the game of football. Not that Faurot's was too shabby at 101–79–10 over 19 seasons.

Faurot was one of the sport's great innovators, a visionary who gave life to an offensive philosophy that later won countless games for other coaches for generations. He was a longtime administrator with a keen business sense and acquired knack for hiring coaches. He was, if nothing else, a Mizzou lifer, a man tethered to his football program, his athletics department, and his school that he helped nurture for decades. And by all accounts, Faurot led with unmatched grace and class.

Upon Faurot's retirement from coaching after the 1956 season, the New York Times suggested that the name of the split T be changed to the Faurot T as an homage to its "originator and strategist." But despite the Gray Lady's hopes, the nickname for Faurot's offensive creation never stuck. Others adopted the option-based system and took it to greater heights on the national scale, but those who knew Faurot best could fully appreciate his mark on college football at large, not just at Mizzou.

"To this day, if someone was capable of doing this, if they gave me 22 players, no assistant coaches, no telephone, just 22 players and to play another coach with 22 players of equal ability, the one coach I would fear the most was Don Faurot," Hall of Fame Mizzou coach Dan Devine told the Columbia Daily Tribune when Faurot died in 1995. "He could coach every position."

Faurot's family moved around to different parts of Missouri during his childhood and for a while lived in Columbia. Faurot, who lost parts of two fingers on his right hand during a farming accident as a young man, would find his way to Rollins Field to watch the Tigers practice during his time in Columbia. The Faurots later moved back to Mountain Grove, which didn't have a high school football team, but Don wound up back at Mizzou for college, where he played baseball and basketball, ran track, and eventually joined the football team, lettering in 1923–24.

After college, Faurot got into coaching and spent nine years at Kirksville Teachers College, a school later known as Northeast Missouri State and then Truman State. Faurot won 63 games in nine years there, including a 26–6 takedown of Missouri in 1933 in Columbia.

Faurot had turned down an offer to join Missouri's staff as an assistant after the 1931 season, but in 1935, he returned to his alma mater to revive a program that had collapsed under the failed Frank Carideo regime. Three weeks and three wins into his first season, Faurot had eclipsed Carideo's victory total from the previous three seasons. The Tigers improved immediately on Faurot's watch but didn't really take off until quarterback Paul Christman's arrival in 1938. The centerpiece to Faurot's offense, Christman was Missouri's first national star, leading the Tigers to the 1939 Big Six Conference title. Christman finished among the Heisman Trophy's top five vote-getters in both 1939 and 1940. Faurot always credited Christman for turning around a program that hadn't won a conference championship since 1927.

But Faurot figured out how to sustain the Tigers' success after Christman, who would remain the school's most prolific passer for nearly 30 years after his departure. Without a capable passer on the roster and loads of running backs, Faurot figured his best chance to attack defenses was on the ground. For years he'd used the single-wing offense popularized by Pop...