A Cut Above: The Barbershop Collection of James Carpenter, Part I

featuring a full wrap of transfer images of fourteen football players and coach Amos Alonzo Stagg against a maroon background.
identified players include Paul "Shorty" Des Jardiens, Marion L. Skinner, and John Bennett Canning, all of whom played for the University of Chicago Maroons during the 1912 season.
center features a C with a football in it encircling the date 1912.
underside marked VESEY with impressed Austria.
Height 3 5/8 inches.

Amos Alonzo Stagg (1862-1965) was perhaps the most influential figure in the history of collegiate athletics. Having coached and contributed to the development of multiple sports, his legacy remains primarily with football and basketball. The legendary Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne once said that "all football comes from Stagg." He is enshrined in two Halls of Fame, and the NCAA Division III football championship is known as the Stagg Bowl.

Stagg's football career began at Yale University, where he was selected to the first Football All-American team as a player in 1889. The following year, he began his football coaching career at Springfield College (1890-1891), where James Naismith, later famous as the inventor of basketball, played under him.

Stagg's most significant contributions to football occurred during his forty-one-year tenure as head coach of the University of Chicago (1892-1932). Under his guidance, Chicago became known as a football powerhouse during the first quarter of the twentieth century, winning seven Big Ten championships (1899, 1905, 1907, 1908, 1913, 1922, and 1924). In addition to his football duties, he also coached track, baseball, and basketball and is credited with helping to organize the Big Ten Conference. In 1912, the year identified on this mug, the Maroons finished second in the Western Conference with a 6-1 record and outscored all their opponents.