North Texas Athletics Hall of Fame
Odus Mitchell didn’t grow up a football fan. In fact, he never even saw the game that would become his livelihood until he attended West Texas State.
“I watched them play, and the next year I went out for football,” said Mitchell in an interview in 1982. In West Texas State’s first game of the season, Mitchell was told to go in. He quickly donned a helmet – which at the time was little more than a leather cap - and approached his coach for final instructions.
“He took my helmet off and turned it around because I had it on backwards,” Mitchell said. “So he turned this thing around and put it on there, and he was giving me some instructions on how to play out there. I was scared to death, boy. I didn’t know what the heck was going on.
“I just never did know anything but to just get at them.”
That condition quickly changed. Mitchell proved an ardent student, learning the game so well that he went directly from college to a 41-year coaching career, winning 287 games in high school and college football, posting a .672 winning percentage, and earning a place in the Texas Sports Hall of Fame.
Mitchell grew up in the very small central-Texas town of Antelope, where he participated in track, basketball and baseball. He got his early education in a one-room schoolhouse and completed high school in his first year at West Texas State. After college, Mitchell turned his affinity for sports into a coaching career, beginning as a high school coach in Post, Texas, the first of several high school jobs. His last high-school job was in Marshall, where he coached a young quarterback named Y.A. Tittle, who went on to a sterling 16-year NFL career before being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
In 1946, Mitchell was hired by North Texas, not only to coach the football team but to revive the program. North Texas football, like many athletic programs around the country, was shut down during World War II. North Texas hired a coach but he changed his mind at the last minute, leaving the administration scrambling for a replacement.
“It was nearly time for the season to start,” Mitchell recalled. “I hadn’t doing any recruiting or anything, and I hadn’t had an experience with recruiting. I got initiated like heck the first game.
“It wasn’t but about ten days after I got here until we played A&M. I didn’t know the boys. Well, they swarmed in here, the kids, you know, that had been in the service. I had over a hundred boys out for football.”
Mitchell absorbed a 47-0 drubbing in his first game against Texas A&M, but won six of the next eight games to set up a final-game showdown for the Lone Star Conference title against one of NT’s biggest rivals, East Texas State.
“Boy, we had the best game that day you ever saw,” Mitchell said. “Nobody could have stopped us.”
North Texas rolled to a 47-7 win, earning the rookie coach the Lone Star championship and the school’s first bid to a bowl game. The Mitchellmen defeated Pacific, coached by the legendary Amos Alonzo Stagg, 14-13 in the Optimist Bowl in Houston, then won another league crown the next year and posted the first 10-win season in program history. In Mitchell’s first seven seasons, North Texas had a winning record and captured five conference titles.
In 1956, Mitchell’s North Texas program became the first in Texas to integrate African-American student-athletes when Abner Haynes and Leon King joined the team. Though there was resistance from some opponents (including Mississippi State, which cancelled its contract to play North Texas), under Mitchell’s guidance, the transition went well more African-Americans followed in Haynes’s and King’s footsteps.
After winning two Lone Star titles and five championships in the Gulf Coast Conference, North Texas moved to the Missouri Valley Conference in 1958, and, just as he had a decade earlier, Mitchell won the conference title in his first two seasons in the new league. With wins over Louisville and Tulsa in 1959, North Texas earned a top-20 national ranking at No. 16.
During the 1966 season, Mitchell announced he would retire at season’s end. That year, he garnered his 10th conference championship and was named Coach of the Year by the Missouri Valley Conference and by the American Football Coaches Association for District 7. The day of his final game at North Texas was declared “Odus Mitchell Day” by the mayor of Denton.
But the benefits of the Mitchell era didn’t end in 1966. He left behind a wealth of talent that would provide the foundation for some of the most powerful teams in North Texas history, teams that would win another Missouri Valley title and send 13 players to the NFL, including two first-round draft picks. Among the freshman in 1966 who would gain such national notoriety in the next three years were quarterback Steve Ramsey, wide receiver Ron Shanklin, offensive lineman Glen Holloway, defensive back Charles Beatty, and defensive lineman Cedrick Hardman, as well as a sophomore just beginning to establish his legend: defensive lineman Joe Greene.
Mitchell remains the winningest coach in North Texas history with 122 career victories and 14 winning seasons (including seven consecutive). In 1981, Mitchell was a member of the first class of inductees into the North Texas Athletic Hall of Fame, and, in 1986, Mitchell was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame. Odus Mitchell passed away in 1989.
In 2013, Odus Mitchell was named the North Texas All-Century football team's coach.