With the passing of Ken Keuffel, we have lost a major link to our football heritage. Coach Keuffel, for more than 20 years the head football coach at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and for another 6 years the head coach at Wabash College, died last Sunday in Princeton, N.J. at the age of 82.
As coach, clinician and author, Coach Keuffel was a leading bearer of the single wing torch long after the offense had all but disappeared from the game, writing two books on the offense, “Simplified Single Wing Football,” published in 1964, and “Winning Single Wing Football“, published in 2004, that are must-reading for anyone interested in running the offense or just learning more about its inner workings.
Although the single wing has disappeared from the colleges, it did hang on at widely -scattered high schools, and thanks largely to the Internet, it has made something of a comeback in high school and youth football. (Evidences of it can also be seen in today’s “modern” shotgun offenses.
A native of Montclair, N.J., he started his college career in 1943 as a Princeton fullback, then left for service in the Army Air Corps. Returning to Princeton after the war, he was a single-wing quarterback (blocking back) and place-kicker.
Following graduaton with a degree in English, he coached the Penn freshmen under another legendary Single-Wing coach, George Munger, while earning a doctorate in English literature from Pennsylvania.
In 1954 he became a teacher and an assistant coach at Lawrenceville, and became the head coach at Lawrenceville in 1956. Following the 1960 season, he left to become head coach at Wabash, but in 1967 he returned to Lawrenceville, where he coached until his first retirement in 1982.
Coach Keuffel was coaxed back into coaching a few years later, and stayed on through 2000, when he finally retired at age 76. And always, although he made many alterations along the way, he coached the unbalanced single wing of Princeton and Penn.
Coach Keuffel was generous with his help and advice. He was a highly refined, a gentleman of the old school who saw himself as a teacher first and a coach second.
His ability to write served him well when it came time to publish his books. I once kidded him about devoting an entire chapter in his first book to the subject of stopping the single wing. “Why?” I asked him.
“I wanted to sell more books!” he told me, laughing.
He was very proud of the fact that in most years at Lawrenceville, a prestigious all-boys prep school, roughly half of its enrollment of 600 were playing either varsity, junior varsity or club football.