"When a boy comes to college with the idea that all that is necessary is for him to be told, constantly told how to do this and that, and he will deliver in the last ditch, I cannot help thinking that something is wrong.
"I have in mind right now a player in the line, who came to college after four years of school football. Ever since his entry he has complained that no one has told him anything. Now this particular player spends ten months of each year loafing, and expects in his two months of football to do a man's job in a big game.
"No amount of blackboard and other talk is going to make a player do a man's job and whip his opponent. No man can play a tackle job properly if he does not realize the kind of a proposition he is up against twelve months in the year and act accordingly. He has got to do his own thinking, and see to it himself that he has the necessary strength and toughness, to play the game, as one must to win."
Sanford the Unique
George Foster Sanford is unique in football. He made splendid teams when he coached at Columbia, while his subsequent record with the Rutgers Eleven attracted wide attention.
In the Columbia Alumni News of October, 1915, Albert W. Putnam, a former player, reviews seven years of Morningside football, and pays the following tribute to Foster Sanford:
"Sanford coached the teams of 1899, 1900 and 1901. He coached them ably, conscientiously and thoroughly, and in my opinion was the best football coach in the country."
"During my three years' experience as coach at Columbia," says Sanford, "we beat all the big teams except Harvard. I was fortunate enough to develop such men as Weekes, Morley, Wright, and Berrien, players whose records will always stand high in the Hall of Football Fame at Columbia. I was particularly well satisfied with the work I got out of Slocovitch, a former Yale player, whom the Yale coaches had never seemed to handle properly. I did not allow him to play over one day a week. This was because I had discovered that he was very heavily muscled; that if he played continuously he would become muscle bound. My treatment proved to fit the case exactly and Slocovitch became a star end for Columbia. We defeated Yale the first year; the next year at New Haven the contest was a strenuous one, and the game attracted unusual attention. It was in my own home town, and I had to stand for a lot of good natured kidding, but those who were there will remember how scared the Yale coaches got during the last part of the game, when Columbia made terrific advances. How Columbia's team fought Gordon Brown's Eleven almost to a standstill that day is something that the Yale coaches of that time will long remember."
An old Yale player, Bob Loree, whose father is a Trustee of Rutgers, induced Sanford to lend the college his assistance. Apparently this connection was an unmixed blessing. "Mr. L. F. Loree, Bob's father," says Sandy, "has frankly admitted that in his opinion Sanford's gift to the college (for he works without remuneration) has brought a spirit and a betterment of conditions which is worth fully as much as donations of thousands of dollars.
"From the first day I went there," continues Sandy, "I started to build up football for Rutgers and to rely on Rutgers men for my assistants. It was there that I met the best football man I ever coached, John T. Toohey. This remarkable tackle weighed 220 pounds. The life he led and the example he set will always have a lasting influence upon Rutgers men. For sad to relate, Toohey was killed in the railroad yards at Oneonta, where he was yard master. Toohey was a great leader, possessing a wonderful personality, and winning the immediate respect of every one who knew him."