Francis Joseph "Shag" Shaughnessy was born on April 8, 1884, in South Amboy, N.J. He received a baseball scholarship at the University of Notre Dame from 1901 to 1904 and captained the varsity football team in his last year with the Fighting Irish.
After graduating with degrees in law and pharmaceutical science, he played major league baseball with Washington (1905) and Philadelphia (1908). He introduced the "option play" to American football while coaching at Yale and Cornell.
In an era when university teams were guided by honourary coaches, Shaughnessy was the first professional coach hired in Canadian university football and his full-time appointment was not well received by the other teams in the league.
In 1912, his first year at McGill, he led an under-dog football team to an unexpected Yates Cup championship. His team repeated as champs in 1913 and 1919. Overall, he coached the program to a 32-52-4 record over 17 seasons. The 32 victories stood for decades as the most by a McGill football coach until 1979 when he was finally surpassed by Charlie Baillie.
Shaughnessy enlisted in the Canadian armed forces during World War 1 and when the war ended, he returned to his love of sports. During the summers, he served as a baseball manager of Syracuse of the International League, the coached football in the fall at McGill.
An innovator, he persuaded the football rules committee to reduce the number of men on a team from 14 to 12, to adopt the direct pass from centre, to extend the blocking zone and eventually the forward pass, which he first introduced during a Syracuse-McGill game in 1921. He lobbied for 10 years before the Canadian Rugby Football Union revised the rules and adopted the forward pass in 1931. He was the first football coach in Canada to introduce the huddle, "X" and "Y" strategic formations and "secondary defence" with the implementation of linebackers.
He also coached the McGill men's and women's hockey teams. From 1919 to 1927, he guided the men's hockey program to a 61-56-2 record. The 61 victories established a school record that stood for five decades. Shaughnessy was inducted as a builder into Canada's Football Hall of Fame (1963), the Loyola University Sports Hall of Fame (1967) and Canada's Baseball Hall of Fame (1983).
He died in Montreal on May 15, 1969, and that fall, the Shaughnessy Cup was first presented for local football supremacy between McGill and Loyola. Since 1975, the Cup has been fought for in an annual challenge match between McGill and Concordia.
