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Frankie Albert

American football player and coach

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 23, 2026
Entity authorityQ5490903 ↗
Source-derived summary

Frank Cullen Albert (January 27, 1920 – September 4, 2002) was an American professional football player and coach. He played as a quarterback and punter with the San Francisco 49ers in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and later in National Football League (NFL). He played college football for the Stanford Indians (now Cardinal), where he led the 1940 football team to an undefeated season and the 1941 Rose Bowl.

Many who saw Albert in action credit him as being the greatest left-handed quarterback ever to play the game. Albert was the first left-handed quarterback to play in the NFL.

Biography

Early life

Frankie Albert was born in Chicago and attended Glendale High School in Glendale, California.

College career

He went to Stanford University, where he was coached by T formation innovator Clark Shaughnessy. Albert played as Stanford's quarterback and in 1940–41 became an all-American. He was the first college T-formation quarterback in modern football history. He led the team of 1940 to a 9–0 regular season, 21–13 victory over Nebraska in the Rose Bowl and a No. 2 national ranking, behind Minnesota.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Frankie Albert” is american football player and coach. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Frankie, Albert and American, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1920, 2002, 1940, 1941—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1920-01-27. For this dossier, Frankie, Albert and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american football player and coach” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5490903. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920, 2002, 1940 and 1941.

Critical limits

A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Frankie Albert”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Frankie Albert primary sources, Frankie Albert archive and Frankie research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Frankie Albert”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Frankie Albert” 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.