eliminate football at the school, as had happened at both Loyola and Chicago the year prior. The Bay Area media mocked the Shaughnessy hiring as comically inept. They believed that a prestigious academic school had foolishly hired an inveterate loser as its head coach. Prescott Sulivan of the San Francisco Examiner and Jack McDonald of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin coined the nickname "Soup" for Shaughnessy, which they sarcastically explained was a diminutive for the word "super". Sullivan wrote, "We have heard it said that Shaughnessy has developed the knack of losing to the point where, with him, it is an exact science. In light of his record, we aren't at all surprised at this." The Stanford players were also skeptical of Shaughnessy's abilities. Center Milt Vucinich said, "We'd been reading about all those beatings Shaughnessy's men had taken, so we were joking among ourselves that wasn't it just like Stanford to hire somebody like this to coach us." Although Stanford had fared poorly during the previous seasons, Thornhill had left behind a team with a talented roster, which included 24 returning lettermen. Shaughnessy believed the players were good, but unsuited to the single-wing offense that his predecessor had employed. Perhaps most importantly, Shaughnessy inherited back Frankie Albert, whom he considered a prototypical T formation quarterback. In 1943, Shaughnessy wrote that he considered the 1940 Stanford backfield—quarterback Frankie Albert, fullback Norm Standlee, right halfback Hugh Gallarneau, and left halfback Pete Kmetovic—as the greatest in history. While he believed the Indians backfield was better than any such combination in the single-wing, double-wing, short punt, or box formations, he added the caveat that this held true only in the Stanford players' employment in the T-formation. Shaughnessy assembled a competent coaching staff in line coach Phil Bengston and backfield coach Marchmont Schwartz. He also hired former Chicago Bears quarterback Bernie Masterson to mentor Frankie Albert. Shaughnessy's version of the T formation relied on motion and deception, and therefore differed from its earlier 19th-century incarnations, such as that used by Amos Alonzo Stagg at the University of Chicago, which emphasized power. In contrast to the single-wing, the new T did not use massed blocking formations for the ball-carrier. Instead, it utilized "brush blocking", where the linemen would only need to block a defender for one or two seconds. This scheme greatly reduced the disadvantage of an undersized line. Also different from the single-wing, the direct