Davey Nelson is the only member of the coaching staff who sees the team play. While Art Valpey and Butch Jordan strain from the bench, and Elmer Madur scouts opponents, Nelson sits snugly in the Stadium press box and watches his backs go through their paces.

Not that he relaxes. The sawed-off ex-halfback spends the 60 minutes of play talking into a telephone which runs to the bench, where quarterbacks and coaches can check on the progress of the week's game plan; between halves he talks to the signal callers and gives Valpey a quick recap of the effectiveness of Crimson formations.

"Bill Henry runs the ball game himself," asserts Nelson. "I don't call sequences or plays; but the quarterbacks and defensive centers can check the execution of their plays."

Nelson is familiar with the Stadium. He tried it out in 1940 when he was the wingback on the Michigan team that shut out Harvard 26-0. The three other men in the backfield were named Tom Harmon, Forrest Evashevski, and Bob West fall.

Davey is a little reticent about that Harvard game. "I only played the first half. They were looping their defenses, and I started squawking in the huddle. Mr. Crisler saw it, and I was out of there for the rest of the game."

The single wing was not the same machine that it is now. "We just went out there on Saturday and said, 'Here we come--what are you going to do about it?'" The pre-war edition of the Crisier system featured a minimum of spinners and a maximum of straight power.

It turned out some pretty fair teams, as may be gathered from the three-year record of the squads Nelson played on. Minnesota was the only team which gave real trouble, winning the Little Brown Jug game three straight times. Indiana (in 1941) was the only other team to beat Michigan over the same stretch.

The Navy: A "Dodo"

Nelson graduated in June 1942 and went right into the Navy. As a lieutenant in Air Intelligence he spent three years interpreting reconnaissance photographs. "I feel like I've been looking at movies all my life," says Davey, who spends a good many hours a week watching one game over and over again.

Eighteen months on the carrier "Yorktown" and a year and a half in the Aleutians filled the time until the fall of 1945, when Nelson returned to Ann Arbor to work on a Master's degree in Physical Education.

Graduate Work

Under Benny Oosterbaan, Valpey, and other members of the staff, Davey set about a task which, to the layman at least, is about as simple as taking apart an airplane engine.

All he did was to examine the 1945 Navy-Michigan game--won 33-7 by the Middies--to discover why the Michigan offenses failed. "It was a study in offensive execution and defensive anticipation," Nelson says. "Then I broke the game down into individual failures, both in execution and in physical stamina."

With this tome under his arm, Nelson found a coaching job at Hillsdale College before the start of the '46 season. As athletic director and head football coach of the 800-man school, he lost only one game in his two-year stay--the second game of his opening season. From then until November of '47 two ties were the only marks on an otherwise perfect record.

"We had some pretty good boys," Nelson admits. "A lot of men were coming out of the service and wanted to go to small colleges."