How the War in France Changed Football Forever - This article is available in NWOSU Libraries physical journal holdings.  Please contact library staff for a copy of the full piece.

"By long tradition and persistent metaphore, football as been associated with war."

A 1986 Smithsonian piece reveals how Coach Shaughnsessy of the 1933 Bears developed the now familiar T-formation using a German general's battle tactics. 

The military tactical ideas of German General Heinz Guderian were applied by U.S. football coach Clark Shaughnessy from a European battlefield to American football. Shaughnessy came up as a tackle-turned-fullback at the University of Minnesota, Minnesota, in 1911-1913, and went back on to coach at Tulane and Loyola of New Orleans, Louisiana. By 1933 he was at the University of Chicago, Illinois. But he was in some sense an anomaly in U.S. sports--an athlete with a creative, inquiring mind. As it happened, another interest of Shaughnessy's was military tactics. By long tradition and persistent metaphor, football has been associated with war. In the years between the wars, Shaughnessy kept looking for ideas useful to football in the writings of then known military strategists. Thus he was reading Heinz Guderian when Guderian had no status or celebrity. The German strategy of the spring of 1940 was based on the tank theories that Shaughnessy had studied in Chicago, Illinois. He had been experimenting with Guderian's tactical ideas for the Bears in 1939. But now he began translating the darts and arrows of the actual German battle to the x's and o's of football plays.