Emory Bellard, Creator of Wishbone Offense, Dies at 83

His wife, Susan, said the cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Bellard (pronounced bell-ARD) spent 14 seasons as a head coach, first at Texas A&M; and then at Mississippi State, but his signature contribution to football came in 1968 as an assistant at the University of Texas.

The Texas team had suffered through three subpar seasons, and the coach, Darrell Royal, seeking a change, asked Bellard to devise an offensive backfield scheme that would include a lead blocker and maximize the effectiveness of the team’s three strong running backs. Bellard came up with a variant of a two-back formation called the veer: the quarterback and the three runners lined up in the shape of a Y, or a wishbone, the fullback right behind the quarterback and two tailbacks split behind them.

From this formation, the quarterback had three options: he could hand the ball to the fullback charging up the middle, or he could fake to the fullback and sprint out to one side or the other, then turn upfield with the ball himself or, if the defense closed in on him, pitch the ball wide to a tailback. The other tailback would cut inside as a blocker.

The various options gave the offense the potential advantage of faking out would-be tacklers without having to block them, and it could help smaller, faster teams overcome bigger, stronger opponents.

Texas tied its first game using the wishbone and lost its second, but it then won 30 games in a row, capturing the national championship in 1969 and sharing it with Nebraska in 1970.

Soon, other teams, including powerhouses like Alabama and Oklahoma, began using the wishbone offense, also known as the triple-option. Many colleges began to tailor their high school recruiting to find shifty, shrewd quarterbacks who could run the triple-option offense and speedy runners who could thrive in it.

It was many years before defenses caught up with the wishbone. From 1969 through 1979, seven national championships were won or shared by wishbone teams.

Bellard was hired away from Texas by Texas A&M;, and between 1972 and 1978 he led the Aggies to two 10-win seasons and three bowl games. He then coached seven years at Mississippi State, twice finishing in the top 20 in the polls. His overall record as a head coach was 85-69.

Emory Dilworth Bellard was born on Dec. 17, 1927, in Luling, Tex., east of San Antonio, where his father worked in the oilfields and was killed in an accident when Emory was 12.

He was a freshman running back at Texas at the end of World War II. But after he was hurt and players returned to school from the war, he transferred to Southwest Texas State (now Texas State), where he earned a degree. He started coaching high school in 1949, and his teams won three state titles before he was hired by Royal after the 1966 season.

Bellard’s first wife died of cancer. In addition to his wife, Susan, whom he married in 1994, he is survived by a son, Bob, a high school coach in Bryan, Tex., and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Bellard may have invented the wishbone, but he didn’t name it. According to Royal, it was a newspaper writer, Mickey Herskowitz, who gets credit for that. In the 2005 book “Coach Royal: Conversations With a Texas Football Legend,” he recalled that after a game or two, he was asked at a news conference what the new formation was called. It didn’t have a name, he replied.

“I said: ‘Well, they’re kind of in the shape of a Y back there. Call it the Y.’ I mean, I didn’t care what they called it, you know. Mickey Herskowitz said: ‘That’s not very original. Why don’t you call it a wishbone? It’s in the shape of a wishbone.’ I said: ‘You got it, Mickey. It’s a wishbone.’”