The Forgotten Mastery of Thorpe, Deacon, and Their Signature Gridiron Maneuvers

You're just in time for a couple great short stories about American football history that I think you're really going to enjoy.

Maybe you remember these stories and maybe it's something new that's going into your football brain and that's why we're here today.

I'm Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

And we do this a lot.

We try to talk about the great players, events and teams in football history and bring a little bit of light and shed that remembrance on these great players and teams.

Well, and we have some great stories for you today that we're going to just take a little bit of your time and fill some of that noggin with some great gridiron information from yesteryear.

Our first story starts with a play that worked so well that the National Football League had to slap a ban on it.

There was just a tackle behind the line.

Then came David Jones, a 14th round long shot out of South Carolina State, who renamed himself Deacon because, as he put it, nobody remembers a David.

Now, he didn't just change the name of the game, he changed the physics of it.

And his primary tool, a move so violent the National Football League eventually had to rewrite the rule book to stop it.

Deacon Jones called it the head slap.

He studied Muhammad Ali's hand speed and realized that if you strike an offensive lineman across the ear hole with a cupped hand, two things will happen.

First, the sound will be like a gunshot inside the helmet.

Second, and more importantly, human biology takes over.

Deacon once said, anytime you go upside a man's head, they have a tendency to blink.

That split second of darkness was all that he needed.

By the time the tackle's eyes reopened, the Deacon had already three steps past him, closing in on the quarterback who's about to be put in a burlap sack, as he would say.

For 14 seasons, the head slap was the most feared maneuver in football.

While the NFL didn't track sacks officially back then, modern researchers have gone back and checked the tapes and credited Deacon with the numbers that would make today's pass rushers weep, including three seasons of 20 plus sacks.

It wasn't just a move, it was a psychological warfare.

Tackles would flinch before the ball was even snapped, terrified of the ringing in their ears that would last well into Tuesday morning.

They called it the the Deacon Jones rule.

Deacon, ever the provocateur, took it as the ultimate compliment.

He joked that the league outlawed it because they didn't want little sissies getting their necks broken.

To him, the ban was proof that he had broken the game's balance.

Today, a defensive end can't even graze a helmet without a flag hitting the turf.

But the next time you see a speed rusher dip his shoulder and disappear around the edge, remember the man who did it first with a cup, palm and a thunderous crack.

The Deacon is gone, but the sack remains his eternal gospel.

Yeah, that was such an impactful maneuver by Deacon Jones.

You know when you have to have the rules change and we've seen that happen before in some things.

But yeah, that was really quite the blow, both in player safety but very clever than you're studying the boxing techniques of, you know, Mr. Muhammad Ali the time was really kind of brilliant when you think about it.

And it was legal when he did it.

So can't say he did something dirty because he was playing by the rules.

They just changed the rules midstream and he really took it as a compliment, as we said earlier.

So.

So a great story there.

So.

And a great play of Deacon Jones and if you like great play.

Well, you might be interested in some things we got cooking.

Over at pigskindispatch.com we have an entire game section now.

We told you about the pigskin trivia Dr. Drive a few weeks ago and that's going strong.

I think that's great to take your football knowledge and apply it in there.

And an interactive game to play football.

But we also have some other games that maybe just you don't have enough time to go through the whole trivia.

Maybe trivia is not your thing.

Well, how about the game of paper football?

We have a digital game of paper football that only pigskin dispatch can bring you.

Is really quite an interesting thing.

I think you're really going to like that.

So play our paper football.

It's on pigskindispatch.com up at the upper menu.

It has games and you'll see pigskin trivia drive, the pigskin blitz, card game, memory game and some more.

And we have more games we're adding here all the time and great events.

So we want to be your source for not only the portal of football history but anything football themed in games.

So check us out there.

So now we have a double feature here with our stories tonight and this one we're going to go a little bit further back.

We with a very interesting game that had some quite the impact from some great innovative coaches.

And that story's up next.

The eyes of the sporting world were fixed on a patch of grass in Massachusetts.

On one side the Harvard Crimson, led by the legendary Percy Haughton.

And they were the elite, the high flying giants of the gridiron at the time.

But Haughton made a mistake.

Looking back at a grueling loss to Princeton, he decided to rest his starters a week later as he figured his reserves could handle his visitors for this coming week.

He forgot who he was playing though.

Across the line stood the Carlisle Indian School, coached by the innovator Pop Warner.

They didn't have the pedigree, but they had the legend of the single wing.

And they had a young man named Jim Thorpe on their side.

The game began as a tactical chess match.

Thorpe struck first with a 15 yard field goal, but Harvard's Hollister answered right back.

It was a 3:3 stalemate until the second quarter when Thorpe, playing through a leg injury, blasted a monster 47 yard drop kick right directly through the uprights, but then spelled disaster for Carlisle.

Harvard's Reynolds recovered a fumble at midfield.

The Carlisle defense swarmed him and thought the play was dead.

But Reynolds popped back up and sprinted, setting up another Harvard score at halftime.

The reserves of Harvard led 9 to 6, but Harvard was confident and Carlisle was simmering.

In a third.

The ragtag bunch turned into a machine.

Possum Powell and Alex Arcossa hammered the Crimson line until Arcosa finally punched in for the game's only offensive touchdown.

Thorpe tacked on the extra point and another field goal.

Panic set in on the Harvard sideline.

Coach Hotten realized the game was slipping away and to start the fourth quarter he threw away the gentleman's agreement right out the window.

And he sent in nine fresh regulars, his first teamers to crush the uprising.

The Harvard starters stood tall in a red zone, but they still couldn't stop the foot of Jim Thorpe.

Under immense pressure, Thorpe knocked his fourth field goal the day over the crossbar.

Harvard managed one last depth score on a blocked punt, but it wasn't enough.

When the dust settled, the scoreboard read Carlisle 18, Harvard 15.

It remains one of the greatest upsets in the history of football.

A team of innovators and outcasts didn't just play the elite, they danced around them.

And on that November day, Jim Thorpe didn't just kick a ball, he kicked down a door of college football history.

Thanks for joining us today.

You can find more football history at your portal to The Gridiron History pigskindispatch.com.