The Coachless Era

Michigan played its first intercollegiate football game in 1879 and spent its first twelve seasons without a head coach at all. Team captains ran practices, set the lineups and called the games. The Wolverines went 23-10-1 across that stretch.

It is a genuinely strange thing to look at now — a program that would later employ Fielding Yost and Bo Schembechler spent over a decade being organised by undergraduates, and won two-thirds of its games doing it.