Arnett "Ace" Mumford

Sport: Football

Induction Year: 1984

University: Southern

Induction Year: 1984

The most significant victory in Eddie Robinson’s half century at Grambling State University wasn’t his 300th win at Florida A&M in 1982, or the 1985 wins that tied and then broke Paul “Bear” Bryant’s career record of 323 victories.

It was a 21-7 victory over Arnett William “Ace” Mumford’s Southern University Jaguars in 1947 – Robinson’s only win in head-to-head competition with Mumford.

Long before the Grambling-Southern rivalry was named the “Bayou Classic,” and received national television coverage in the Louisiana Superdome, Mumford was the undisputed king of black collegiate football in the Deep South.

Roy Givens ran 65 yards for one touchdown in the 1947 upset, and Paul “Tank” Younger scored another. The Tigers also scored on a pass from Boots Moore to Gussie Williams, while Snow Taylor scored the Jaguars’ only touchdown.

Southern was in the middle of a run of five consecutive Southwestern Athletic Conference Championships, and an 11-year run in which the Jaguars never lose more than one SWAC game. The loss to Grambling, which wasn’t in the conference at that time, was so embarrassing that Southern dropped the Tigers from their schedule after avenging the setback in 1948. Their rivalry wasn’t renewed until Grambling joined the SWAC in 1959.

A native of Buckhannon, West Va., Mumford received his bachelor’s degree from Southern California and coached at three Texas schools before arriving on the Southern campus in Baton Rouge.

The Jaguars were unbeaten in 1938, Mumford’s third season. But the best was yet to come. In a span of three seasons, from 1948 through 1950, Southern won 31 games, lost none and had two ties.

In 26 years and 25 football seasons (there was no team in 1943 because of World War II), Mumford’s teams won of shared 11 Southwestern Athletic Conference Championships, including two in his last three seasons.

Grambling lost only three games in Mumford’s last two seasons. Two of them were to Southern.

“He had one of the finest minds in football,” recalled Robinson. “I learned a lot from him. He was a coach’s coach. He was on top of everything. He was very innovative. He worked for perfection.”

Along with Clark Shaughnessy, Mumford was a pioneer of the man-in-motion offense. But he got little recognition, because black colleges were generally ignored by the media in the Jim Crow society that existed throughout his coaching career.

White schools received plenty of publicity, but the blacks were riding in the back of the bus – literally and figuratively. Only after the National Football League threw its gates open and accepted hundreds of their athletes did newspapers and the electronic media acknowledge their existence.

One of 35 All-Americans Mumford produced at Southern was Leonard C. Barnes, who later became chancellor of Southern University-Shreveport.

“I’ve never met a man that I thought as much of,” recalled Barnes. “This man was a football genius, a person who was committed to excellence on and off the field. You didn’t play for the old man unless you took care of your studies. He was a stern academician.”

Barnes said the Jaguars were operating out of a single wing offense when he went there as a freshman in 1940, but had switched to the T-formation when he returned in 1946 following World War II.

“You didn’t take anything for granted with him,” Barnes recalled. “Although I was an All-American for three years, I had to fight for my position every year.”

“Coach Mumford was probably the finest offensive coach I’ve ever been around.”

Gerald Kimble, who coached Southern teams three years before he was fired in December of 1991, quarterbacked the 1960 Jaguars to the national black championship – the fourth national title for Mumford’s Southern teams.

“He was ahead of his time,” recalled Kimble. “We are doing things then that a lot of coaches and teams are doing now – multiple offenses and wide open attacks. He was a very strong person who wasn’t afraid to try new things.

“When I first went to Southern, I was on a basketball-baseball scholarship. In my sophomore year, he talked me into coming out to play football. That was the best thing I ever did. I think most of us who played for him try to imitate what he did.”

The bottom line for Mumford’s Southern teams was 174 victories, 60 losses and 14 ties – a winning percentage of .730. He had a 36-year career total of 235 victories.

Like Bryant, Mumford died the year after his coaching career ended.

He took over the coaching reins at Southern one year after Bernie Moore became head coach at LSU, and stepped down the same year that Paul Dietzel left LSU. Between Moore and Dietzel, Gaynell Tinsley coached the Tigers for seven years.

Over the same span, Lowell Dawson, Claude “Little Monk” Simons, Jr., Henry Frnka, Raymond Wolf and Andy Pilney coached at Tulane.

The media excused itself for ignoring Mumford’s accomplishments during his lifetime by noting that he didn’t win 235 games against Southeastern Conference competition, but that raises such questions as whether Red Grange would have been as effective against integrated teams.

Coaching is relative. Mumford coached all-black teams that played other all-black teams, just as his contemporaries at LSU and Tulane coached all-white teams that played other all-white teams. None of them was dodging anybody. They were simply laying the cards they were dealt, as society allowed them to play at that time.

Whatever the circumstances, the cream rises to the top and a winner finds a way to win.