Max Bumgardner

Max Andrew Bumgardner (May 13, 1923 – April 12, 2005) was an American football player and coach. After playing college football as an end at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physical education in 1948, he was selected in the first round, 10th overall, of the 1948 NFL draft by the Chicago Bears, but was sent to the Detroit Lions. He played for just one season in the National Football League (NFL), with the Lions.

Bumgardner grew up in the town of Chicken Ridge, Texas just outside of Wichita Falls.

Bumgardner started playing at Texas in 1942 under coach Dana X. Bible and helped the team win the Conference Championship and then the 1943 Cotton Bowl Classic. That year he also won the light-heavyweight boxing championship and was a golden gloves boxer. He left school to fight in World War II, where he was a staff sergeant in the Combat Engineering Corps and served in France and Germany before returning to school in 1946.

At Texas, he was captain of the 1947 Football team that won the 1948 Sugar Bowl and a favorite target of Bobby Layne. He, Layne and fellow end R.E. "Peppy" Blount were all drafted by the Bears in 1948. Bumgardner began his coaching career in 1949 at Denison High School in Denison, Texas, where he worked as an assistant under head football coach Les Cranfill. In 1950, he was hired as the head football coach and athletic director at San Angelo College—now known as Angelo State University—in San Angelo, Texas. He was named Texas Junior College Coach of the Year in 1951 and 1955. Bumgardner remained in that post as the school became a four-year college, renamed as Angelo State College ND playing in the NAIA, and then moved up to Division II of the NCAA in 1968. He resigned as head coach in 1968, but stayed on as athletic director until 1972.

In 1972 Emory Bellard, a UT assistant and inventor of the wishbone offense, became head football coach at Texas A&M, and he recruited Bumgardner to join his staff as an academic counselor, a job he maintained until 1979 when he retired from coaching and teaching.

He became marketing manager of a real estate firm in Bryan and in 1987, he retired to Pecan Plantation near Granbury, Texas. He moved to Greenville, Texas in 2001 to be near his daughter. He died of congestive heart failure on April 12, 2005, in Greenville and was buried in the family cemetery there.