Neil Snow - Honors and Accolades

Honors and Accolades

In the popular 1916 book Football Days: Memories of the Game and of the Men Behind the Ball, William Hanford Edwards wrote the following about Snow:

"The University of Michigan never graduated a man who was more universally loved than Neil Snow. What he did and the way he did it has become a tradition at Michigan. He was idolized by every one who knew him. As a player and captain he set a wonderful example for his men to pattern after. He was a powerful player, possessing such determination and fortitude that he would go through a stone wall if he had to. He was their great all-around athlete; good in football, baseball and track. ...hen I grew to know him, I soon realized how his great, quiet, modest, though wonderful personality, made everybody idolize him. Modesty was his most noticeable characteristic. He was always the last to talk of his own athletic achievements."

The noted football expert Walter Camp said of Snow: "No college ever developed a better all-around athlete."

He has been called "the greatest all-round athlete ever graduated from the University of Michigan" and was named a member of Fielding H. Yost's "all-time" Michigan team at the right end position.

In 1907, The Washington Post named Snow one of the three greatest football players to have played in the West, along with Walter Eckersall and Willie Heston. The Post opined that Snow was an end quite worthy to rank with the great ends of the East and that he "was just the kind of man who would have been suited to the advanced requirements of the new game and its additional demand for alertness, in an end."

In 1916, the Oakland Tribune published an article ranking Snow as one of North America's greatest all-around athletes, naming Snow, Elmer Oliphant and Christy Mathewson as the runners-up to Jim Thorpe. The Tribune wrote of Snow:

"Undoubtedly one of the greatest was the late Neil Snow of Michigan. Snow stood as one of the great football players of the game. He was an all-American end and a great plunging full back. As a ball player he batted over .390 for Michigan his last two years and received at least three good offers from big league clubs. He was one of the best college first basemen that ever lived. On the track Snow could high jump around six feet; he could put the shot 45 feet; he was a fine hurdler. Taking both quality and quantity, we should say that Snow was the equal at least of any man that has been mentioned."

Sports writer Grantland Rice often wrote about Snow, ranking him as one of the three greatest all-around athletes ever turned out in college sport along with Jim Thorpe and Elmer Oliphant. Rice called Snow "a football marvel, hurdler, jumper and shot putter and one of the best ball players Michigan ever knew."

In 1960, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.