Clarence Spears
American football player and coach, college athletics administrator (1894-1964)
Clarence Wiley "Doc" Spears (July 24, 1894 – February 1, 1964) was an American college football player, coach, and doctor. He was an All-American guard at Dartmouth College (1914–1915) and served as the head football coach at Dartmouth (1917–1920), West Virginia University (1921–1924), the University of Minnesota (1925–1929), the University of Oregon (1930–1931), the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1932–1935), the University of Toledo (1936–1942), and University of Maryland, College Park (1943–1944), compiling a career college football record of 148–83–14. Spears was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a player in 1955.
Early life and playing career
Spears was born in DeWitt, Arkansas and attended high school in Kewanee, Illinois. He began his college career at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he competed in football and track and field during the 1912–13 academic year. He transferred to Dartmouth College in 1913. At Dartmouth, he played guard in football and was selected to the College Football All-America Team in 1914 and 1915.
Coaching career
Spears was the head coach for the Dartmouth Indians football team from 1917 to 1920. From 1921 to 1924, he coached the West Virginia Mountaineers football team, winning 79.5% of the games he coached during his tenure there. Following that, Spears coached the Minnesota Golden Gophers from 1925 to 1929, leading the team to a 6–0–2 record and a share of the Big Ten Conference title in 1927 He had a 28–9–3 record at Minnesota.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Clarence Spears” as american football player and coach, college athletics administrator (1894-1964). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american football player and coach, college athletics administrator (1894-1964). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5126752. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1894, 1964, 1914 and 1915.
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This entry incorporates text from “Clarence Spears” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.