Many Stanford alumni were upset with the decision to hire Shaughnessy. The most popular candidates for the vacant position were two Stanford alumni themselves: San Jose State coach Dudley DeGroot, and Santa Clara coach Buck Shaw. Some believed the Shaughnessy hiring was a ploy to eventually eliminate football at the school, as had happened at both Loyola and Chicago the year prior. The Bay Area media mocked the Shaughnessy hiring as comically inept. They believed that a prestigious academic school had foolishly hired an inveterate loser as its head coach. Prescott Sulivan of the "San Francisco Examiner" and Jack McDonald of the "San Francisco Call-Bulletin" coined the nickname "Soup" for Shaughnessy, which they sarcastically explained was a diminutive for the word "super". Sullivan wrote, "We have heard it said that Shaughnessy has developed the knack of losing to the point where, with him, it is an exact science. In light of his record, we aren't at all surprised at this." The Stanford players were also skeptical of Shaughnessy's abilities. Center Milt Vucinich said, "We'd been reading about all those beatings Shaughnessy's men had taken, so we were joking among ourselves that wasn't it just like Stanford to hire somebody like this to coach us."