Emory Bellard was a head football coach at Texas A&M and Mississippi State, but he's remembered most for the revolutionary offense he created while he was an assistant at the University of Texas. Bellard the father of the Wishbone died early Thursday in Georgetown.
Bellard, 83, had been battling Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as ALS. Funeral services are pending. A celebration of Bellard's life will be held Feb. 19 in Georgetown at a time and place to be determined.
Former Texas A&M coach R.C. Slocum, who was a defensive assistant for Bellard at A&M in the 1970s, said he visited with Bellard on Tuesday, and that Bellard told him, "I've had a great life. I got to do exactly what I wanted to do, which was coach football. I got to do it at some great places with some great young men."
Bellard's wishbone powered Texas to two national championships, but its true beauty was that it could be used successfully by everyone from athletic powerhouses such as Oklahoma and Alabama to the undersized but disciplined service academy teams.
Slocum, however, said Thursday that Bellard's greatest contribution at A&M was not his offense, but his openness to recruiting black athletes in a Southwest Conference that had been reluctant to do so.
"That's a huge thing he did for A&M, and it opened the door for a lot of other people to do that," Slocum said.
Bellard began his college coaching career on Darrell Royal's Texas staff in 1967 after winning three state high school championships, back-to-back Class 3A titles with Breckenridge in 1958 and 1959 and a Class 4A title with San Angelo Central in 1966.
After Texas' 1967 season had ended the same way as the two previous years, with four Longhorns losses, Royal reshuffled his staff . Bellard, who was a backup halfback for Texas in 1945, was moved from coaching linebackers to the offensive backfield.
Royal, looking ahead to the 1968 season, was faced with the dilemma of what to do at the fullback position with both Ted Koy and highly touted sophomore Steve Worster vying for the same starting spot.
In the spring of 1968 — in what Koy called the most gosh-awful practices — he and Worster took turns slamming into linebackers and defensive ends during blocking drills. Koy recalls that one collision was so fierce that Worster's face mask was broken along with his nose; a trainer promptly wiped off Worster's nose and handed him a new helmet.
"Steve didn't miss a rotation," recalled Koy, now a local veterinarian.
Luckily for both of them, Bellard had been tinkering with a new offense, drawing diagrams and practicing in his yard with one of his sons. The strange new formation — a full-house backfield in the shape of a Y — borrowed a bit from the split back veer offense used by Bill Yeoman's University of Houston team and by West Texas State. But Bellard's triple option offense was decidedly different. And it let Worster, at fullback, and Koy, at halfback, be on the field at the same time along with star halfback Chris Gilbert.
The offense didn't really click in a 20-20 tie against Houston or a 31-22 loss to Texas Tech. But after the Tech game, the fullback was moved a little bit farther back from the quarterback — and that quarterback became James Street, who replaced "Super Bill" Bradley.
With the new alignment, Texas beat Oklahoma State.
"After that third game, we thought, 'Hey, this thing is going to be a lot of fun,'" Koy said.
The Longhorns didn't lose again until the 1971 Cotton Bowl against Notre Dame, a 30-game run that included two United Press International championships and one Associated Press crown.
"To say he was an important member of our staff at that time is an understatement," Royal said in a statement Thursday. "He was a true friend, and that didn't change whether he was in Austin, College Station or Starkville."
Bellard's wishbone soon was adopted by teams around the country. It remained, however, a particularly good fit with Bellard, who was meticulous about detail.
"The wishbone is a very disciplined offense," said Grant Teaff, the former Baylor coach who is currently the executive director of the American Football Coaches Association. "If you don't have a disciplined defense, it will eat you alive."
Bellard took over at Texas A&M in 1972, at a time when the Southwest Conference was grudgingly starting to change.
"I think we had one (black) scholarship player and one walk-on," said Slocum, who recalled that Bellard's first signing class included nine black players.
"It was a very significant event for A&M and this part of the country," Slocum said. "He and those players won over the fan base."
One of those players, star running back Bubba Bean, said, "If you were faster, bigger and stronger, you played. It was as simple as that."
Bellard had 10-win seasons in 1975 and 1976 at A&M, and was 48-27 when he resigned during the 1978 season. He coached at Mississippi State from 1979-85, going 37-42 and tweaking the wishbone into a wing bone by moving a halfback to a wing. The wing bone is an offense similar to what Georgia Tech and Air Force successfully run today.
In 1988, Bellard returned to the high school ranks, finishing his coaching career with a six-year stint at Spring Westfield.
Bellard was inducted to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 1995.
"There have been 320 individuals inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame since its inception in 1951, and I don't believe there's a one of them who exercised more character and class during their lifetime than Emory Bellard," said Steve Fallon, the executive director of the Hall.
"He meant the world to me," said Bean, who visited with Bellard on Tuesday, the same day as Slocum. "I lost my dad six years ago, and he kind of filled that void for me. He was the same guy I met almost 40 years ago: soft-spoken, just the ultimate in class."
jmaher@statesman.com; 445-3956
