Jim Tatum
James M. "Big Jim" Tatum (July 22, 1913 – July 23, 1959) was an American football and baseball player and coach. Tatum served as the head football coach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1942, 1956–1958), the University of Oklahoma (1946), and the University of Maryland, College Park (1947–1955), compiling a career college football record of 100–35–7. His 1953 Maryland team won a national title. As a head coach, he employed the split-T formation with great success, a system he had learned as an assistant under Don Faurot at the Iowa Pre-Flight School during World War II. Tatum was also the head baseball coach at Cornell University from 1937 to 1939, tallying a mark of 20–40–1. Tatum's career was cut short by his untimely death in 1959. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 1984.
1951 Maryland Terrapins football team
The Associated Press later called Maryland's preseason favorite title a "dubious distinction", to which few teams in the Mid-Atlantic had been able to live up. Tatum expressed confidence and said it was "the best team I've ever coached," but acknowledged the team could lose as many as seven games in a worst-case scenario. Another Associated Press article said most people expected a big season from Maryland as the culmination of five years of Tatum's high-caliber recruiting. A United Press article had high confidence in Maryland, because of its experienced team and what it assessed as an easier schedule than previous seasons. It predicted Georgia, LSU, Navy, and North Carolina as the "only rough spots" on the schedule.