Adam Walsh

Adam Walsh (football coach)
Date of birth	December 4, 1901
Place of birth	Churchville, Iowa
Date of death	January 13, 1985 (aged 83)
Place of death	Westwood, California
Position(s)	Center
College	Notre Dame
Awards	1945 NFL Coach of the Year
Career record	34-15-6 (College) 16-5-1 (NFL)
Coaching stats	DatabaseFootball
Team(s) as a player
1922-1924	Notre Dame
Team(s) as a coach/administrator
1935-1942 1945 1946	Bowdoin College Cleveland Rams Los Angeles Rams
College Football Hall of Fame

Adam Walsh Born in Churchville, Iowa, on December 4, 1901, Adam Walsh was an outstanding athlete at Hollywood High School in California, and earned varsity letters in basketball, track, and football at the University of Notre Dame. Adam was an All-American center and captain of the 1924 Notre Dame football team under Coach Knute Rockne – ‘the Four Horsemen’ of the backfield and ‘the Seven Mules’ of the offensive line – that captured the imagination of the nation by completing a undefeated season with a win against Stanford in the Rose Bowl.

Captain Walsh played every minute of the Army game in 1924 with two broken hands (for 58 minutes of the game) and never missed a single snap of the ball, was involved in 75 percent of the tackles on defense, and intercepted a pass in the final minutes of the game to preserve a Notre Dame victory. He remains the offensive center on the All Time Notre Dame Team.

Adam served as head coach and athletic director at Santa Clara University, line coach at Yale, and then as a member of the coaching staff at Harvard for a year. In 1935 he accepted the head coaching position at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Though Bowdoin had been winless the prior year, Coach Walsh began his twenty-year coaching career at the College with a state championship. Adam’s teams won or tied for the Maine championship in seven of his first eight years at Bowdoin.

Bowdoin suspended the football program for the 1943, 1944, and 1945 seasons and Adam returned to Notre Dame as a line coach. In 1945 he led the Cleveland Rams then in Cleveland, to the championship of the National Football League and was named NFL Coach of the Year. He returned to Bowdoin after two years with the Rams and a 16-5-1 NFL coaching record. Between 1947 and 1958 Adam’s teams would win outright or share the state championship four more times.

In the years that followed, Adam served two terms in the Maine House of Representatives and was appointed the U.S. Marshal for Maine under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, building on his long-standing record of public service. Many honors would follow: induction into the National Football Hall of Fame, the Helms Hall of Fame and the Maine Sports Hall of Fame; being named All-Time Southern California High School Team, the Notre Dame All-Time Team, and the All-Time Rose Bowl Team.

Head Coaching Record

References and notes

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