Arnie Herber: Faith, football and formation

Continued from last week

According to Green Bay Packers Historian Cliff Christl, Herber received a lot of harassment from his teammates in his early days with the team.

“They tagged him with the nickname ‘Dummy’ and called him that to his face,” Christl wrote in The Greatest Story in Sports. “Lambeau later took credit for putting a stop to it all by telling his team. ‘Lay off the Dummy. We’re going to play football, and this kid is going to win with us.”

Once Herber returned to the Packers, Head Coach Curly Lambeau showed his belief in the young athlete.

“Lambeau’s faith in Herber proved prophetic, but first he needed to tinker with his Notre Dame Box offense and find the right fit for him,” Christl stated. “That mission was accomplished in 1932 after veteran quarterback Red Dunn retired.”

Lambeau’s partial year at Notre Dame provided him with an “education” that would prove important to the early success of the Green Bay Packers.

Though there for just a short time, it was long enough for him to grasp the offensive system style of Notre Dame Coach Knute Rockne, commonly referred to as the “Notre Dame Box,” one of the three primary offenses of the 1920s, along with the single-wing and short-punt formations.

In the Box, players lined up in a straight T formation and then shifted to a box formation, which resembled a parallelogram.

The formation differed from the typical single-wing formation in that there was no featured tailback or any featured back.

In Lambeau’s early years, the ball could be snapped to any of four backs.

Later, any of the three backs would receive the snap.

That was why Lambeau placed a high priority on finding versatile backs.

“Convinced that Herber couldn’t operate as effectively as Dunn close to the line of scrimmage or call signals as astutely, Lambeau moved him from quarterback to halfback,” Christl said. “Thereafter, Herber started mostly at right halfback in 1932 and 1933.

“Unlike the popular single wing of the day, there was no featured tailback in Lambeau’s offense. The four backs shifted in unison just before the snap, usually to the right, although they could shift either way, and any one of them might have been a threat to receive the snap and throw, run, catch or punt the ball, depending on their specific talents.”

To be continued