page_title: Everett Strupper
section_title: Georgia Tech
hierarchical_section_title: Everett Strupper / Georgia Tech
caption_attribution_description: Everett "Strup" Strupper, Georgia Tech football player
context_page_description: George Everett Strupper Jr., known variously as "Ev" or "Strup" or "Stroop" was an American football player. He played halfback for Georgia Tech from 1915 to 1917. Strupper overcame deafness resulting from a childhood illness and was selected as an All-American in 1917.
  During Strupper's three years playing for Georgia Tech, the team compiled a record of 24–0–2 and outscored its opponents by a combined score of 1,135 to 61. In Georgia Tech's record-setting 222–0 win over Cumberland College in 1916, Strupper scored eight touchdowns. For many years, 1917 Georgia Tech was considered the greatest football team the South ever produced. Strupper starred as part of a renowned backfield including also Joe Guyon, Judy Harlan, and Al Hill. Strupper and teammate Walker Carpenter were the first players from the Deep South selected for an All-America first team.
  Sportswriter Morgan Blake called Strupper "probably the greatest running half-back the South has known." Bernie McCarty writes "Strupper ranks among the greatest broken-field gallopers in Southern football history. And he caught and threw passes, returned kicks, blocked well, punted and played a bang-up defensive game."
context_section_description: Strupper enrolled at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta in 1914. During his freshman year, Strupper became a member of the Georgia Phi chapter of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.  He was a multi-sport athlete competing for Georgia Tech in basketball, football, and track and field.
  In 1914, Strupper played for the freshman football team at Georgia Tech. He then played halfback for Georgia Tech's varsity football teams under head coach John Heisman from 1915 to 1917. Strupper was deaf, and because of his deafness, he called the signals instead of the team's quarterback.  Strupper was a small man, with his height being stated in varying accounts to be between five-feet seven inches and five-feet, ten inches.  His coach John Heisman later wrote that Strupper was "but 5 feet 7 inches in height, weighed only 148 pounds stripped."  He was sometimes known as "little Everett Strupper."
  Georgia Tech never lost a game in which Strupper played, compiling three consecutive undefeated seasons from 1915 to 1917.  During Strupper's three years playing for Georgia Tech, the team compiled a record of 24–0–2.  Only two teams managed a tie – the University of Georgia in 1915 and Washington & Lee in 1916. In those 26 games, Georgia Tech outscored its opponents by a combined score of 1,135 to 61.
  
  Georgia Tech coach John Heisman later described Strupper as follows:
  "Everett Strupper was a small package of condensed lightning when you turned him loose in an open field with a ball you wanted delivered somewhere in the neighborhood of the enemy's goal line. He was small, but he was put together like a high-powered motor. His arms and legs did just what his mind told them to do, and, believe me, his mind worked faster than Ty Cobb's when he's running the bases. Dodging and twisting, stiff-arming and hipping, he'd run the gauntlet of men big enough, you'd think, to pick him up and spank him, and most of the time, too, he'd get away from them, try as hard as they would."
  Heisman also said of Strupper "Were I compelled to risk my head on what one absolutely unaided gridster might accomplish, football under arm and facing eleven ferocious opponents, I would rather choose and chance this man on how he might come through the gauntlet than any ball carrier I have ever seen in action."
  Heisman recalled that, when Strupper first arrived from Riverside Military Academy, Heisman could not imagine Strupper playing on the football team: "Too light for the line, I didn't see how he could play in the backfield, because he wouldn't be able to get the signals. He could have played quarterback fine, but his enunciation wasn't clear enough for him to call the plays."  Heisman recalled how Strupper overcame the obstacle posed by his deafness: "He couldn't hear anything but a regular shout. But he could read your lips like a flash. No lad that ever stepped on a football field had keener eyes than Everett had. The enemy found this out the minute he began looking for openings through which to run the ball." He was nominated though not selected for an Associated Press All-Time Southeast 1869–1919 era team.
caption: Strupper from Georgia Tech archives
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