The Legacy of Larry Kelley: A Controversial Play That Changed Football

Hello my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome.

Once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history and I have some great stories of football history for you today.

I've picked up, I've been on doing some vacationing, doing a little bit of reading, getting some great material to share with you.

Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland.

Yale took on an undefeated Navy Midshipman squad.

That's when Yale's end Kelly pursued the play as the ball trickled toward the Navy goal line.

Realizing he could not scoop it up before the football rolled out of bounds, Kelly used his foot to boot the ball further downfield toward the end zone.

Yale recovered the kicked fumble at the Navy 2 yard line, setting up the game winning touchdown in a tight 127 victory.

Now this controversial play ignited a massive national debate regarding the legality of kicking a loose ball.

Navy coaches and players protested fiercely, arguing that Kelly intentionally kicked the ball to advance it, a move that should have resulted in a penalty for an illegal kick.

However, the officials in the game ruled that the contact was accidental and allowing the play to stand.

The outcry from this specific instance forced the NCAA Football Rules Committee to alter the rule book the following season, officially banning any INT intentional kicking of a loose ball, a regulation that was known for years as the Larry Kelly Rule.

Instead of damaging his reputation, the high profile debate showcased Kelly's uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time.

The media sensation surrounding his genius on field awareness captivated voters.

Just weeks after the Navy incident, Kelly became the first line player and the first player under the official Heisman name to win the coveted trophy.

Larry Kelly proved that sometimes a little controversy is a perfect final touch on a Hall of Fame resume and a Heisman Trophy.

For more deep dives into the rules of Change the Gridiron forever, head over to pigskind dispatch.com Heisman Trophy winning of.

Larry Kelly on our timeline on pigskindispatch.com upper menu there's a spot that says timeline.

You can click on it.

Two different timelines, one by every day of the year, which we've made famous here over the last five or six years.

But now we have an annual yearly one that we're building out.

You can go on pigskind dispatch.com timeline go to yearly and find some great events that happened in the chronicles of football history.

Yeah, I love those stories about old Yale football.

Got to visit the Yale bowl probably about 10, 15 years ago and what a great nostalgic place to celebrate football.

You know, being a fan of Walter Camp and everything that he did for the game.

Just love walking those hallways, walking the grounds where legends played football and lived and went to school there on a campus of Yale University.

Yale Bulldogs.

But you know, this is Fridays and we're trying to reserve Fridays for some Pittsburgh Steelers related stories.

And we have a good one, a couple good ones here really.

The second one is going to be a little bit more.

It's about Johnny Blood McNally who ended up playing for the Steelers.

We don't have too much Steeler stuff in it, but this next one is about the founder of of the Steelers.

So I told you not too long ago, as I do every year I went up to the Western New York Pfra Mini Conference, get to see a bunch of old friends here, some great speakers up there.

But one of the great things they have up there is they have a book exchange for gray iron books, you know, things that you can read about.

And I picked up one that in this little trade off, the Fireside Book of Pro Football.

It's edited by Richard Whittingham and it is a group of multiple sports articles on the game of professional football.

And they had some real dandies in there that a couple of moment of reference here in this episode and one of them is about Art Rooney Senior, you know, the, the chief, the glorified owner, original owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, which turned into the Pittsburgh Steelers.

A lot of stories that we've talked a lot about Art Rooney on past episodes.

And I don't think that I had these numbers in hand when I talked about this before.

We knew it was substantial enough to put the franchise that was sort of struggling, not winning a whole lot of games.

Rooney wasn't a very wealthy man, but he was a gambler and he loved the horses and he was friends with Tim Mara.

Well, anyway, he's up in New York State for a weekend and.

And he didn't like to talk about it much, but this particular gentleman that's writing this article wrote this article long ago.

Roy Blount Jr. Got to spend quite a bit of time with the Chief and take a long car ride with him and a weekend of doing some gambling on some horses, too.

Now, he went to a local watering hole, sports bar at the time, and him and his cronies, and all of a sudden three of them left there and went to Saratoga Racetrack and he ended up taking that $21,000.

He took 2,000 of it, bet an 8 to 1 on a horse that was named Quell Jeu.

I'm not sure what the language that is or what it means, but it must mean you're going to win a lot of money because this horse, it was 8 to 1, won the race and so did several more during the day.

And at the end of this day, he wins $21,000.

That's probably got a couple million by today's standards.

So just amazing story, but it goes to show you a little bit of luck can go a long way.

And Art Rooney definitely had it there.

His horse racing helped his football team.

Here's a great story about Johnny Blood.

Had another Very memorable story that I got out of that.

The Fireside book of pro football that I got up at the PFRA book swap back in April.

And this one was on Johnny Blood McNally.

You can remember, we've talked about Johnny Blood in a lot of instances.

You know, he's known as the vagabond halfback.

And one of the stories I got out of this little tale that came out of this fireside pro football chat was from an article that was wrote.

It was actually an interview back with Johnny Blood back in the day.

And, you know, a lot of it was penned by himself.

I believe the way this article was written.

And one reason is that he's called a vagabond halfback is that reporters were trying to find come up with a name for him because as a kid, he grew up in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area and he used to hop a lot of trains sometimes to save a couple bucks when he was playing pro football.

He would hop some trains to save a couple dollars to get to and fro and not have to pay his own, you know, fees for the train.

So he would hop into boxcars and ride the rail.

So a reporter found out about this and decided he was going to call him the Hobo halfback.

And Johnny McDowelley said, hey, don't call me that.

That sounds kind of, you know, disparaging.

You know, I don't want to.

Disparaging.

I don't want to have that be my name.

So he said, how about the vagabond halfback?

And that's the name they came up with.

That's how Johnny McNally got that name.

Now, as for Johnny Blood, we talked about it before.

Kind of interesting.

Yeah, that's right.

The Notre Dame team that had the Four Horsemen, coached by Knute Rockne, freshmen were not eligible in their first year of playing.

Kind of a funny thing there.

Anyway, the way he got the name Johnny Blood, he told us, and we've said this story before, I think Warren Rogan told it one time, is that they were playing for Notre Dame.

They did not want to lose their eligibility, but they wanted to put a little bit of cash in their pocket.

So he and another player went and were playing some semi pro ball.

On their way there, they saw that there was a movie marquee that was called Blood and Sand was the name of the movie.

I believe Valentino was the actor in it.

And that's what they said.

Okay, that's a.

To be our names.

I'll be Blood, said Johnny and you be Sand.

And that's the way they signed up their names to play in that semi pro game and make some money under a pseudonym name so they wouldn't be recognized.

But you know, Johnny Blood had some really cool things.

You know, he played not only on a Four Horsemen team under Newt Rockne, he practiced with them.

Anyway, he ended up going and playing some, some minor teams up around the Minneapolis area.

Played with the Milwaukee Badgers, who we've talked about in our book Marooned before.

We know their story.

He also played on a Duluth Eskimos with Ernie Nevers for a year or two.

Loved Ernie Nevers, great player there.

When the Eskimos folded up, he ended up playing for the Pottsville Maroons after the lost championship era.

But he played with Pete Henry there, the famous Canton Bulldog and Pottsville Maroon, and then ended up going up and playing for Curly Lambeau with the Green Bay packers and Cal Hubbard and a bunch of other great players.

Arnie Erber and I think Don Hudson was coming on right about that, the end of his career at that time.

But it's kind of funny that Curly Lambeau, I guess, didn't really care for Johnny Blood.

McNally.

McNally by his own admission, was quite a.

Quite the partier.

He loved to go and have, you know, a few suds after the game, have some fun, live it up a little bit, chase the ladies around a little bit.

Karel Lambeau, a lot more refined and conservative than that.

Never was very fond of that.

And a couple times they got into it where McNally thought he was off the team and Lambeau would end up calling him up because he's just too talented of a player not to have on your team.

He was, you know, a great, very versatile running back that could catch a few passes in an era where the pass was just coming on with Arnie Erber and Hudson.

It's very interesting that he fit Curly Lambo's offense so well.

But Lambo personally didn't really like what Johnny Blood did, according to Johnny Blood McNally.

So just a great little insight from Johnny Blood McNally himself on his own story.

Well, we really want to thank you for joining us today with our great stories on football history.

You can find more here just about three or four times a week on our podcast.

We have multiple days where we're going on YouTube channel, a bunch of YouTube shorts.

We have our visits with our friend Timothy P. Brown of footballarchaeology.com and some other guests.

And always multiple articles pigskindispatch.com including our timeline and our games, Pigskin trivia drive, Paper football and more great things to do.

Football oriented and your portal to positive football history pigskindispatch.com thanks for joining us and have a great gridiron day.