Charley Trippi, who became one of college football’s most celebrated players at the University of Georgia and then propelled the long-downtrodden Chicago Cardinals to the 1947 N.F.L. championship on his way to a Hall of Fame career, died on Wednesday at home in Athens, Ga.
The death was confirmed by his grandson Clint Watson. Trippi, who had been the Hall of Fame’s oldest surviving player, was 100.
Although he was a football star at a time when many players appeared on both offense and defense, Trippi was especially renowned for doing just about everything but kicking field goals and extra points and snapping the ball.
In his nine years with the Cardinals, he ran for 3,506 yards, threw for 2,547 yards and amassed 1,321 yards in pass receptions — and is the only player in the Hall of Fame to have exceeded 1,000 yards in each category. He played at left halfback and quarterback, punted and returned punts and kickoffs, and finished out his career at defensive back.
Trippi took Georgia to an unbeaten 1946 season when he was runner-up for the Heisman Trophy behind Army’s Glenn Davis. He received the Maxwell Award, which also honors college football’s leading player.
Chosen by the Cardinals as the No. 1 pick in the N.F.L.’s 1945 draft, when he had two years of college eligibility left, Trippi signed a four-year, $100,000 contract with the Cards in January 1947 — a stunning payout for its time — after they outbid the New York Yankees of the fledgling All-America Football Conference.
The Cardinals had mostly been losers since they captured the 1925 N.F.L. championship, an accomplishment that came under a cloud. At a time before there was a championship game, the Cardinals finished with the league’s best record. But the Pottsville Maroons of Pennsylvania, who were vying with them for the title, had their franchise suspended by the league late in the season for infringing on another team’s territorial rights in a scheduling matter.
Twenty-two years later, in Trippi’s rookie season, the Cardinals emerged from the shadow of the crosstown Chicago Bears, renowned as the Monsters of the Midway.
Listed at six feet and 180 pounds or so, Trippi played at halfback in the championship game against the Philadelphia Eagles. He wore tennis shoes on the icy field at Comiskey Park in Chicago, scoring a touchdown on a 44-yard run from the line of scrimmage and running a punt back 75 yards for another as the Cardinals won, 28-21.
But there was no victory parade. The players celebrated at a South Side bar and then management threw a banquet for them.
The Cardinals met the Eagles again in the 1948 championship game, but were defeated, 7-0, in a snowstorm at Shibe Park in Philadelphia.
“It was a disgrace,” Trippi told The Augusta Chronicle in 2012. “The commissioner should have postponed the game. You couldn’t see the lines on the field. You couldn’t see the safety. It wasn’t football. It was just a bunch of pushing.”
Trippi teamed with Paul Christman at quarterback, and at the other halfback spot was Elmer Angsman, who had two 70-yard touchdown runs in the ’47 championship game. Together with Pat Harder at fullback, they became known as the Dream Backfield.
He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1959 and to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1968 and was named to the N.F.L.’s all-decade team for the 1940s.
Charles Louis Trippi was born on Dec. 14, 1921, in Pittston, Pa., the son of a coal miner, and became a football star in high school. Harold Ketron, a star center for the Bulldogs in the early 1900s, owned a Wilkes-Barre, Pa., bottling franchise for Atlanta-based Coca-Cola. He gave Trippi a summer job driving his trucks and arranged for him to get a tryout at Georgia that led to an athletic scholarship.
“I wanted to get out of the area,” Trippi told The Athens Banner-Herald long afterward. “I couldn’t visualize mining coal eight hours a day for the rest of my life.”
As a sophomore with the Bulldogs, playing at tailback in a single wing offense, Trippi starred in the 1943 Rose Bowl game. He ran for more than 100 yards in a 9-0 victory over U.C.L.A. His backfield teammate, Frank Sinkwich, the winner of the 1942 Heisman Trophy, saw only spot action because of ankle injuries, though he scored the game’s only touchdown.
In an oral history interview with the University of Georgia in 2006, Trippi recalled that he played 58 of the 60 minutes that day because Wally Butts, the head coach, “had a philosophy: If you can’t play defense, you can’t play offense.” He called that game “probably the greatest thrill I ever got out of football.”
Trippi played football for a stateside Army Air Forces team during World War II. He returned to Georgia midway through the 1945 season and, playing in a T formation, set a school record by gaining 239 yards against Florida. The mark is now held by Herschel Walker, who gained 283 yards against Vanderbilt in 1980.
Trippi led the Bulldogs to an 11-0 season in 1946, then threw a long touchdown pass in their 20-10 Sugar Bowl victory over North Carolina, outplaying its all-American tailback Charlie Justice, known as Choo Choo.
At Georgia, he ran for 24 touchdowns and caught four touchdown passes and was a two-time all-American.
Trippi was also an outstanding baseball player at Georgia and played the outfield for the Atlanta Crackers of the Southern Association in 1947. He was considered a major league prospect but quit baseball to pursue football full time.
He retired after the 1955 N.F.L. season, having played at halfback, quarterback and then mostly at defensive back late in his career. He ran for 23 career touchdowns, passed for 16, caught 11 touchdown passes and scored twice on punt returns and once on an interception.
Trippi was later an assistant coach with Georgia and the Cardinals, in Chicago and in St. Louis, their first stop before moving to Arizona. He had lucrative investments in commercial real estate in Athens after leaving full-time football.
His first wife, Virginia (Davis) Trippi, died in 1971. Trippi is survived by his second wife, Peggy (McNiven) Trippi; his son, Charles Jr., and his daughter Brenda Fleeman, both from his first marriage; three stepchildren, Rob Bell, Kim Gunnin and Terry Bell; 15 grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren. Another daughter from his first marriage, Joann Trippi Johns, died in 2019.
Long after Trippi’s exploits at Georgia, the football program held an annual Charley Trippi Day before the intrasquad spring game, and the Bulldogs present an annual Trippi Award to their most versatile player.
Jim Thorpe, considered one of America’s greatest all-around athletes, called Trippi “the greatest football player I’ve ever seen.”
“Trippi is an excellent runner, punter and passer,” Thorpe told The Associated Press in 1949. “He blocks well and is a sure tackler. Guess that covers the field.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.