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Terry Brennan, a Notre Dame Football Coach at 25, Dies at 93

One of Frank Leahy’s Lads as a player on national championship teams, he succeeded his mentor but was fired at 30.

Terry Brennan in 1954 during his first season as coach of Notre Dame’s football team. He coached four winning teams in five seasons but was fired all the same, a move that was roundly condemned in the football world.Credit...John Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

Terry Brennan was one of Leahy’s Lads, the elusive runners, strong-armed passers and muscular linemen who propelled Notre Dame to four national football championships under Coach Frank Leahy in the 1940s.

Brennan played halfback on two of those teams, and he starred in the annual rivalry with Army. But he was remembered most for succeeding Leahy as coach at age 25, a move that startled the college football world.

Brennan, who had been living at a senior facility in Northbrook, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Highland Park, according to Donnellan Family Funeral Services of Skokie. He was 93.

Brennan took over a football program that had transformed Notre Dame from a small, largely unknown Roman Catholic institution in South Bend, Ind., to a storied name in popular culture. But his coaching résumé was limited to three high school championship teams in Chicago and one year as Leahy’s freshman coach.

When Leahy retired and Brennan replaced him in February 1954, the sports columnist Red Smith saw turbulence looming.

“He’s only 25,” Smith wrote. “By the time he’s 30, he’ll be a good deal more than five years older. Coaching Notre Dame is the most coveted job in football, and probably the most nerve-racking.”

At the age of 30, Brennan was fired.

He had coached four winning teams in five seasons. His 1957 team pulled off one of college football’s greatest upsets, a 7-0 road victory over Oklahoma, snapping Oklahoma’s record-setting 47-game winning streak. But he had been faced with a reduction in athletic scholarships ordered by Notre Dame’s president, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, who was determined to have Notre Dame viewed as a renowned academic institution and only secondarily as a football powerhouse. Father Hesburgh had, in fact, taught Brennan at Notre Dame and had admired his intellect.

Brennan was probably doomed by his failure to win a national championship, something that Notre Dame’s alumni had come to expect virtually every year. And Leahy, in retirement, feuded with him, questioning the team’s fighting spirit.

Brennan’s firing, four days before Christmas in 1958, was widely condemned in the football world.

“Notre Dame won’t look very good in the eyes of the country,” said Paul Dietzel of Louisiana State, who was named the 1958 college coach of the year by the American Football Coaches Association and the Football Writers Association of America.

The Indiana Catholic and Record, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, said that the real losers in Brennan’s firing were “the priests and laymen at Notre Dame who were trying, successfully we believe, to remake the public image of Notre Dame from football factory to first-class university.”

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Brennan’s predecessor as Notre Dame’s head coach, Frank Leahy, with six of his so-called Leahy’s Lads in 1946. From left: George Strohmeyer, center; Johnny Lujack, quarterback; Leahy; Bob McBridge, guard; Zigmont Czarobski, right tackle; Floyd Simmons, halfback; and Brennan, halfback.Credit...John Lindsay/Associated Press

Terence Patrick Brennan was born on June 11, 1928, in Milwaukee, the sixth of seven children of Martin and Katherine Brennan. His father, a lawyer, had played football for Creighton, Notre Dame and Marquette. Terry was a high school football star, then made the Notre Dame lineup as a freshman in 1945, when most of the regulars were serving in World War II.

In the postwar years, Notre Dame, led by quarterback Johnny Lujack, vied with Army for college football supremacy. Brennan, playing on both offense and defense, made a key play in the 1946 Notre Dame-Army game at Yankee Stadium, a matchup of unbeaten squads, intercepting a halfback option pass by Army’s Glenn Davis on the Irish 8-yard line late in the first period. The teams played to a 0-0 tie, but Notre Dame was voted national champion.

In the 1947 Army game, Brennan ran the opening kickoff back 97 yards for a touchdown and scored again on a 3-yard run in the first period, sending Notre Dame to a 27-7 victory and another national title.

He led the Irish in receiving and scoring in 1946 and 1947, and he rushed for 1,269 career yards, but knee problems kept him from a pro football career.

Brennan coached Mount Carmel High School of Chicago to three consecutive Catholic league championships while obtaining a law degree from DePaul University in Chicago. He became Leahy’s freshman coach in 1953. Leahy developed health problems that season, leading to his retirement.

Brennan had trouble getting into Notre Dame’s stadium for his first home game as head coach, against Texas, when he encountered roadblocks funneling traffic. “The police wouldn’t let me down Notre Dame Avenue, nor would they believe I was the head coach,” he once recalled. “I guess I looked too young.”

Notre Dame went 9-1 and 8-2 in Brennan’s first two seasons as coach with players recruited by Leahy. But with the talent drying up in the face of scholarship restrictions and enhanced admission requirements for athletes, the Irish could no longer dominate. Notre Dame plunged to 2-8 in 1956, though the team’s quarterback, Paul Hornung, won the Heisman Trophy.

On the eve of the 1956 season finale, at Southern California, Leahy said: “It’s not the losses that upset me. It’s the attitude. What has happened to the old Notre Dame spirit?”

Brennan’s teams went 7-3 and 6-4 the next two seasons, but with Notre Dame’s glory days clearly at an end, he was asked to resign. He was fired after refusing to do so, telling Sports Illustrated soon afterward that he didn’t want to be seen as “quitting and running out.”

He was replaced by Joe Kuharich, a Notre Dame guard of the 1930s who had been coaching Washington of the N.F.L. Kuharich never had a winning team in four seasons at Notre Dame.

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Brennan in 2010 outside his home at the time in Glenview, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. He was 30 when his coaching career ended and later became an investment banker.Credit...Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press

Brennan became an investment banker in Chicago. He never coached football again.

He is survived by four sons, Terry, Chris, Joe and Matt; two daughters, Denise Dwyer and Jane Lipton; two sisters, Eileen McCullough and Virginia Brennan; 25 grandchildren; and 32 great-grandchildren. His wife, Mary Louise (Kelley) Brennan, died in 2001.

Looking back at his firing, Brennan said he felt that Leahy’s criticism had turned Notre Dame alumni against him. “Psychologically in his mind, if the person who followed him succeeded, somehow that took away from what he did,” Brennan told The South Bend Tribune in 1999. “I had absolutely no use for him.”

Paul Hornung said of Brennan: “It’s a real shame, kind of sad. He could have been one of the great coaches in Notre Dame history.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Terry Brennan, 93, Star Notre Dame Halfback Who Became the Team’s Coach at 25. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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