Jauron tapped for Hall of Fame

Until today, Yale had 24 players in the College Football Hall of Fame, enough to put the Bulldogs in seventh place among colleges. Granted, the most recent of those was Alex Kroll ’59, who played but a year at Yale before transferring to Rutgers; the others all played before 1938. But today, the Hall of Fame announced that Dick Jauron ’73, a three-time All American running back for the Bulldogs, will be inducted into the Hall in December along with 14 other players and two coaches.

Jauron is best known now as an NFL coach: he was head coach of the Chicago Bears from 1999 to 2003, winning Coach of the Year honors in 2001, and he later was head coach of the Buffalo Bills (2006–2009). But before that, he played eight seasons in the NFL for the Detroit Lions and the Cincinnati Bengals. At Yale, he ran for 2,947 yards in three seasons and scored 28 touchdowns. “I used to tell people that Dick was so good, you could be in a phone booth with him for 20 minutes and never touch him,” his coach Carm Cozza once told a reporter. (And if you needed another reason to like him, he turned down Harvard.)

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The Yale Alumni Magazine is published by Yale Alumni Publications Inc., an alumni-based nonprofit that is not run by Yale University. Its content does not necessarily reflect the views of the university administration.