1940

The modern T-Formation is popularized by Clark Shaughnessy at Stanford and with the Chicago Bears

If you want to get technical about it, the T was really the original formation (they called it the “regular formation” in the 1890s). But as head coach at a variety of schools in the 1930s and 1940s, Shaughnessy adds wrinkles — motion, mainly — to this standard.

From Doug Farrar’s “The Genius of Desperation, The Schematic Innovations that Made the Modern NFL”:

Shaughnessy was the University of Chicago’s head coach and he told Halas that he had watched several Bears games that season and that he had some ideas regarding the use of the T formation that might open things up for Halas’ team. Named this because there are three running backs behind the quarterback in the shape of a T, the formation allowed the quarterback to drop back to pass, gave different rushing options, and offered new sleights of hand. But knowing it needed to be tweaked, Halas rearranged the place cards at his table so he and Shaughnessy could sit together, and heard him out. Halas had been working with the T formation since his freshman year at the University of Illinois in 1914, but it was time for new ideas. As happens with any static offensive scheme, defenses had figured out the T. Shaughnessy told Halas that he had some additional elements — “hidden-ball stuff, but with power” — to try out.

Shaughnessy uses his version (with the passing offense more easily deployed from it) to upset Nebraska in the 1941 Rose Bowl. Combine that with Halas’ explosive success — his Bears beat Washington, 73-0, in the 1940 NFL Championship — and the Single Wing is virtually extinct by the late 1950s, also in part because of innovation elsewhere in the Midwest.