A royal welcome: Nobody in the wishbone era coached football any better than a man named Darrell K. Royal

Coach and Athletic Director, Jan, 2002 by Ben Weber

What was it like growing up in Hollis, OK during the Great Depression?

ROYAL: People were all the same. Nobody had anything. A few families, like the doctors, dressed a little better, but mostly everyone had it tough. Those were the Dust Bowl days and it was pretty hard to scratch out a living.

I remember the highway near my house. All of the cars on it were headed west. Some of them had trailers and some of them were just stuffed with everything the people owned, but they were all headed west, looking for work.

COACH: Who introduced you to football and what are your first memories of the game?

ROYAL: I used to walk across town to watch my brother work out. I loved football and the coaches always impressed me. I learned as much about the game as I could. I always knew that I wanted to be a coach.

COACH: What sports did you play and what high school did you go to?

ROYAL: I played football, baseball, and basketball. There wasn't anything else. There was no volleyball at Hollis H.S.

COACH: You joined the army just as World War II was ending. How did you end up at Oklahoma U. in 1946?

ROYAL: I was a tailgunner on a B-29. My crew trained on bom bardment, photo reconnaissance, and weather reconnaissance. But, none of this mattered for the tailgunner. All I needed to know was how to fire that .250 caliber gun.

We were shipped to Guam, but before we left I came down with an appendicitis. I had the surgery and my flight crew got another tailgunner.

After that, I played on the 3rd Air Force's football team. Being just out of high school, I got some positive attention. The people from Oklahoma saw me play and recruited me. That was fine with me because that's where I wanted to go.

COACH: You had a great career at OU, making All-American as both a QB and DB in your senior year. You played for Jim Tatum in your first year and Bud Wilkinson in your last two. How did these coaches influence you?

ROYAL: Bud Wilkinson was my coach in all my four years at Oklahoma. He was the backfield coach before becoming the head coach, and I used the things he taught me until the very last day I worked as a head coach.

Having known since junior high school that I was going to be a coach, I studied everything all of my coaches did. I studied football just the way I studied everything else in the classroom.

I learned a tremendous amount from Bud Wilkinson. But I never made the fatal error of trying to be Bud Wilkinson. I have seen too many coaches trying to imitate their former coaches. They talk like them and they walk like them, but when it's crunch time, their old coach isn't there to bail them out.

The funny thing about Coach Wilkinson is that we weren't alike at all. Wilkinson wanted to be an English professor. I wasn't even a good English student.

COACH: How did you wind up as freshman coach at N.C. State in 1950?

ROYAL: I took a job at El Reno (OK) H.S. as a football coach with the understanding that I could leave if I got a college offer by June.

Two factors led me to N.C. State. I'm pretty sure Bud Wilkinson called there to recommend me. The other reason was because Beattie Feathers, the N.C. State coach, was interested in the Split T and I had been the quarterback on a team running that kind of offense.

COACH: Over the next two years ('51 and '52), you were an assistant coach at Tulsa and Miss. St. In 1953, you got your first head coaching job with the Edmonton Eskimos of the CFL. A year later, you returned to Miss. State as head coach. Two years later, it was off to Washington, and finally, in 1957 you found a home in Texas. That's seven moves in eight years! Was all of that by design?

ROYAL: None of it was by design. I was just working and hustling to find the right job. I knew that Texas would be my last coaching job. I knew that if I could keep the people at Texas happy, I'd never think of going anywhere else.

COACH: You were only 32 years old when you arrived at Texas to become one of the immortal coaching names in college football. From 1957-76, you amassed a record of 167-47-5, winning three national titles (1963, 1969, 1970), three coach-of-the-year designations, and a 30-game win streak. What kind of offense did you bring with you to Texas?

ROYAL: I ran the Split T. Later on, in 1961, we went to the flip-flop. It was a variation of the Wing T, but we flipped the linemen. We had a strong side and a weak side. In other words, if we wanted to run the pitch-back off-tackle power-play to the right, we'd call right formation and the entire line would take an odd sort of departure from the huddle. Kind of like a line of ants. Then they'd go line up on the left side and the left side would go line up on the right side.

That way, we only had to teach assignments for about four plays from each side. It sure cut down on busted assignments. Of course, we didn't run too many plays in our offense anyway.

This way, we had the same people working on the double teams and we had the same guards pulling. It meant we only had to teach things one time for right and left.