Moore passes former boss Hayden Fry on all-time win list
Jerry Moore moved past his former boss Hayden Fry on the all-time victory list for NCAA Division I coaches last Saturday.
Moore won for the 233rd time, which ranks 18th on the all-time list.
Fry won 232 games as head coach at SMU, North Texas and Iowa.
Moore played at Baylor when Fry was a position coach there. And Moore’s first job as an assistant coach at the collegiate level was under Fry from 1965 through 1972 at SMU.
Fry, 82, retired in 1998 after 20 years as coach at Iowa. Moore said that he still calls periodically.
“In fact, I’ll probably get a call from him tonight,” Moore said Saturday, after passing Fry on the victory list.
“He’s always been an inspiration to me,” Moore said. “He’s a high-energy, highly-motivated kind of guy. I wish I had half his energy, and his optimism.”
Moore said that he learned a lot from Fry.
“I learned you don’t go by the book,” he said.
He recalled SMU’s victory over Oklahoma in the 1968 Bluebonnet Bowl, and how Fry’s out-of-the-box thinking helped secure that victory.
“Sometimes Hayden would do things that were not orthodox,” Moore said. “He’d take tight ends – and we didn’t have tight ends that look like Ben Jorden – so he’d take wide outs and stand them up in tight end positions. Everybody thought it was ridiculous. So he goes to Iowa and does that and they (go to) the Rose Bowl.
“We line up in what we call the Spread offense, but he called it the Flying Wishbone. The media guys there in Dallas wore him out about it because we went up to Oklahoma and just got beat bad with it. Then, two years later, everybody’s trying to do that Flying Wishbone deal.
“He was just very innovative. I had great experiences, and he was a great guy to work for. I’ve always been appreciative of him. I’ve been one of the most blessed coaches to work for him, Tom Osborne and Ken Hatfield. It doesn’t get any better than that.”