Who Was Notre Dame's First Head Football Coach?

The official records say it was James Morrison. But there's another possible answer, and it's a name you might recognize.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED OCTOBER 8, 2026

According to the University of Notre Dame's official records, the program's first head coach was a fellow named James Morrison. According to the school's official records, he coached the team in 1894. According to Wikipedia, he went 3-1-1 that season.

Respectfully, I disagree.

I disagree with the school. I definitely disagree with Wikipedia.

Not that I really blame anyone. It was 1894. Football was new. There were no precedents to follow. No one agreed about what counted and what didn't. This was a squad that played against high schools and neighborhood teams, after all. No one imagined that we would still care so much about the early years of a college football team more than a century later, and if they learned that Notre Dame football would practically turn into a religion unto itself, they'd probably call it blasphemy.

But here we are, and blasphemous or not, the truth matters.

So if Morrison wasn't the first coach in Notre Dame's long and storied history, then who was?

It was a kid that maybe you've never heard of before, but I bet you know his parents.

His name was John Mohler Studebaker Jr.

John Studebaker Jr. went to college at Purdue, and he was one of the best athletes on campus. He might have been one of the best athletes in the nation. According to one story, he won the standing high jump at an intramural track meet, which doesn't sound impressive until you learn that one of the men he beat went on to win Olympic gold in the same event twice.

John Jr. also played football at Purdue, where he starred at fullback for a team that went undefeated in 1891 and 1892. Purdue called themselves the champions of the west, and there was no one with much of a case to dispute it. The team's other star player was another South Bend kid, Walter Muessel of the Muessel brewing family.

Studebaker and Muessel graduated in the spring of 1893 and returned to life in South Bend. They each had a family business to step into, but neither of them were quite ready to step away from football.

So in late summer 1893, the two wandered over toward the campus of the University of Notre Dame and watched players from the small Catholic school drill on the football field. They offered their experience. They offered their expertise. They offered to teach them how to win.

The men of Notre Dame were ready to listen.

He also played in the games, and that seemed to help too.

John Studebaker Jr. was his team's best player, its playcaller, and the guy who ran the practices and set the lineups. And in case you're thinking that playing in the games disqualifies the claim that he was the team's coach, then you should know that the team would go on to have at least two more official head coaches who also played in the games.

In 1893, John Studebaker was for all intents and purposes Notre Dame's head coach and its best player. What he was not was a student.

John Studebaker never attended classes, never enrolled in classes, and never intended to. Today we'd call a player like that ineligible. In 1893, they might have called him a ringer. No one would have called it illegal. Most teams played with whoever they could find: students, alums, local firefighters, and anyone else who didn't mind losing a few teeth in the pile.

Notre Dame went 4-1 in 1893, the year that might be considered John Studebaker Jr.'s first campaign as head coach.

In 1894, Notre Dame decided it wanted an official coach. That's how they got James Morrison, a former tackle from the University of Michigan. They signed him to a two-week contract.

Then Morrison's two weeks were up. He left the team and took another job coaching the same Hillsdale team that he'd beaten a week earlier. He was at Hillsdale for one week. He lost the only game he coached for them, then went looking for greener pastures. His Wikipedia page is wild — crediting him with all five games at Notre Dame and all six at Hillsdale. According to Wikipedia and some versions of official records, he is both the winning and losing coach of that Notre Dame — Hillsdale matchup on October 13, 1894.

After Morrison's departure, Notre Dame went 2-1 the rest of the way. The man in charge of things for those games was the same guy who'd been in charge since before Morrison ever arrived. Take away the two games that Morrison actually coached, and John Studebaker's record across two season stands at 4-2.

Studebaker didn't stay. If the University ever tried to bring him on in an official capacity, there's no record of it. Anyway, there was more money to be made in the family business than there was in football.

A lot more money.

John Studebaker Jr. never made a dime for his work with the Notre Dame football team, which appears to be the most important reason the record books don't mention him. They count their head coaches as the guys they officially paid to do it. That's their prerogative, they're the ones who own the records, and they make the rules.

But they weren't the ones who wrote John Studebaker Jr.'s obituary:

While in Purdue, where he was a member of the class of 1894, he played on the university's famous teams of 1892 and 1893 and climaxed his football career by winning general recognition as the best fullback in the United States. He added to this reputation by coaching and producing a championship team for the University of Notre Dame in 1894.