Shock Troops: The Craziest Coaching Strategy You’ve Never Heard Of

In the 1920s, the legendary Knute Rockne at Notre Dame shocked the football world by doing the unthinkable — benching his stars on purpose. His strategy, borrowed from the battlefields of World War I, changed the way coaches thought about fatigue, depth, and the meaning of teamwork.

This is the forgotten story of Rockne’s “Shock Troops,” a revolutionary approach that turned the idea of starting lineups upside down. Long before “platoon football” became the norm, Rockne’s second-stringers opened games with one job: hit hard, wear down the opponent, and hand a weakened enemy over to the starters. It was military strategy applied to the gridiron — total exhaustion as a weapon.

By the time Rockne’s famed Four Horsemen galloped onto the field in 1924, opponents were already battered and breathless. That Notre Dame team went 10-0 and became national champions, but few realize their dominance was built on the backs of unsung reserves who never expected to score. Their mission was sacrifice, not glory — a tactical “first wave” that made football look more like trench warfare than sport.

Rockne’s innovation spread like wildfire. Coaches such as Pop Warner at Stanford, Howard Jones at USC, Harry Mehre at Georgia, and Bernie Bierman at Minnesota all adapted versions of the system. Each found ways to use fresh legs and psychological warfare to tilt the odds in their favor. For a brief window in college football history, starting the game on the bench was a badge of honor.

But the era of shock troops couldn’t last forever. When the NCAA introduced free substitution rules in the 1940s — paving the way for platoon football and specialized offense-defense units — Rockne’s battlefield logic became obsolete. Yet his core insight remains timeless: depth wins championships, and fatigue can be a weapon as powerful as any playbook.

In this episode of Hardcore College Football History, we dig into how Knute Rockne’s militarized mindset reshaped the sport, inspired generations of coaches, and laid the groundwork for the modern game we know today.

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What if the secret to winning wasn’t starting your 
best players? What if it was starting your worst? In the 1920s, the smartest coaches in college 
football, including the legendary Knute Rockne, began doing something that sounds insane today. 
They benched their stars for the first quarter. They sent their second string out to get punched 
in the mouth on purpose. This wasn’t a punishment. It was a brutal, radical new strategy borrowed 
directly from the trenches of World War I. It was a strategy known as shock troops, and 
it was designed to exhaust the enemy into submission before the real game even began. 
Rockne had played football at Notre Dame, and like many Americans shaped by World War 
I, adopted military terminology and ideas of organization and discipline into his coaching. 
He understood both the physical demands of the game and the brutal efficiency of military 
tactics. When he became head coach in 1918, he began to experiment with something radical. 
What if you didn’t start your best players? The logic was simple, but it went against every 
coaching instinct we would have now. Football in the 1920s was a grueling war of attrition. 
Substitution rules were limited. Players went both ways, playing offense and defense. By the fourth 
quarter, everyone was exhausted. To understand why shock troops made sense, you have to understand 
the substitution rules of the era. In the early 1920s, once a player left the game in a quarter, 
he couldn’t return until the next quarter. This meant coaches had to be strategic about when to 
pull players for rest. The rules were designed to present constant shoveling of players and reward 
durability and toughness. By 1922, the rules had evolved slightly. A player could be substituted 
once per half, but only once. If you took someone out in the first quarter, they could come back 
in the second quarter, but that was it for that half. This created a strategic puzzle. When do you 
use your one substitution? How do you keep players fresh in a game where exhaustion was inevitable? 
Rockne’s insight was as follows. What if one team wasn’t exhausted? His shock troop system worked 
like this. The second string unit would start the game and play the entire first quarter, sometimes 
even into the second. Their orders were clear. Play with maximum intensity. Hit hard and wear 
the opponent down. They weren’t expected to score. They were expected to tire out the other 
team’s starters. Then in the second quarter, Rockne would send in his regulars. His first team 
players. Fresh legs against exhausted opponents. And because his starters hadn’t played the first 
quarter, they were eligible to play the rest of the game without needing to be substituted out. 
The strategy reached its peak in 1924. That was the year of Notre Dame’s legendary four horsemen 
backfield. Harry Stuhldreher, Jim Crowley, Don Miller, and Elmer Layden. Sports writer 
Grantland Rice had immortalized them with perhaps the most famous lead in sports journalism history. 
But here’s what most people don’t know. The four horsemen rarely played in the first quarter. They 
watched from the sideline while the shock troops did their work. Notre Dame went undefeated that 
season. Ten wins, no losses. National champions. There were more advantages to the shock troops. 
From Harry Stuhldreher book Knute Rockne published in 1931. A psychological advantage was that when 
the shock troops would hold the opponents even, with the coming on the field of an entire new 
team, the opponents would wonder, if we couldn’t do anything with the second team, how are we going 
to buck up against the first? If the opponents started the game with their shock troops, Rockne 
had been known to open with his third team, followed by his second and then his first. Or 
again, he has put his regulars as his starting team when the opponents started their second. 
Success breeds imitation, and by the mid-1920s, shock troops weren’t just a Notre Dame innovation. 
They were becoming a coaching philosophy. The idea spread across the country, adopted by the 
sharpest minds in the game. In the deep south, Harry Mehre installed the system at the University 
of Georgia, using his second unit as a battering ram against rivals like Georgia Tech and Auburn. 
Out on the west coast, legendary innovators got creative. At Stanford, Pop Warner developed 
his own variation, sending in what he called waves of fresh players to overwhelm opponents. 
Nearby, Howard Jones turned the University of Southern California into a dynasty, using his 
deep roster to weaponize the California Heat on his way to four national championships. And in the 
frozen north, Minnesota’s Bernie Bierman turned the strategy into a science, discovering 
that starters kept warm under blankets, had a massive advantage when they entered a 
frigid game against a worn-down frozen opponent, a brutal insight that helped his Gophers win five 
national titles. Even Rockne’s own assistants, like Frank Thomas at Alabama, took the system with 
them, seeding the idea across the entire landscape of college football. For a brief window in college 
football history, starting the game on the bench was a badge of honor. It meant you were good 
enough that the coach wanted to save you. Starting your second string was the mark of an elite 
forward-thinking program, But then, almost as quickly as it appeared, the shock troop strategy 
vanished. Two key changes, one on the field and one in the rulebook, made this brilliant tactic 
obsolete. Players could be substituted freely at any time and unlimited numbers. In 1941, college 
football adopted free substitution rules. This fundamentally changed the strategic calculus. If 
you could rotate players in and out constantly, the shock troops concept lost its advantage. 
There was no longer a penalty for taking someone out and bringing them back in. The free 
substitution rule was briefly rescinded in 1953, returning to limited substitution in an attempt to 
emphasize two-way players again. But by 1965, free substitution was back for good, leading to the 
modern era of specialized offensive and defensive units. But there was something more fundamental at 
play even before the rules changes. Coaches began to realize having your best players on the field 
from the opening kickoff might actually matter more than you think. Games could be decided in 
the first quarter. Momentum could shift early. And if your shock troops fell behind by two or three 
touchdowns while trying to tire out the opponent, your starters might never catch up. The math that 
seemed so elegant in theory didn’t always work in practice. Some opponents simply refused to be 
worn down. And some shock troop units, despite being second string players, would actually build 
leads that the starters then struggled to add to, creating awkward dynamics within the team. 
There was also a psychological element that coaches hadn’t fully anticipated. Star players 
didn’t always appreciate watching the game start without them. The four horsemen may have 
accepted it, but not every first string player was so understanding. Team chemistry could suffer 
when starters felt like they were being held back. By the end of the 1930s, shock troops had largely 
disappeared from the game. The term itself faded from the football lexicon. Today, the idea 
of shock troops seems almost quaint. In an era of limited scholarship rosters, specialized 
coordinators, and analytics departments, the notion of deliberately benching your stars 
to start a game feels like something from another sport entirely. And yet the core insight remains. 
Depth matters. Depth matters. Fresh players have an advantage. The team that can rotate talent 
and keep legs fresh in the fourth quarter often wins. You see echoes of the shock troops’ 
philosophy of modern running back rotations, in defensive line rotations, and in the way 
coaches manage snap counts to keep players fresh for crucial moments. The substitution rules 
that made shock troops necessary are long gone, but the understanding that fatigue is a weapon, 
and that strategic use of your roster can provide an edge, that depth is an asset, those lessons are 
as relevant now as they were in 1924. Knute Rockne and his shock troops didn’t just borrow a tactic 
from the battlefield. They proved that football, like war, is ultimately about resources, strategy, 
and finding creative ways to gain an advantage. The name, shock troops, has been forgotten, but 
the lesson endures. If you enjoyed this deep dive into one of college football’s forgotten 
strategies, be sure to subscribe to Hardcore College Football History. We unearth stories 
like this every week. Thanks for watching.