Transcript of the Forward Pass History with Timothy Brown
Darin Hayes
Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes at Pigskin Dispatch. Welcome once again to the Pigpen. We have an exciting topic to talk about today. We will go back to the roots of football and, you know, one of the most compelling elements of the game, the passing game. And we're going to go back and look at where it came from, what it's all about, and how it derived to what it is today. And we've got an expert who wrote a very good book called How Football Became Football, the First 150 Years of the Games Evolution. And his name is Timothy P. Brown, and we'll bring him in now. Timothy Brown, welcome to the Pigpen.
Timothy Brown
Hey, Darin. Thank you. Appreciate you having me on.
Looking forward to it.
Learning More About Timothy Brown
Darin Hayes
Like we were talking before we hit record here, I read your book. It is extremely fascinating. And I love how you grab all the different elements of football history, not just looking at it from the mirror image of a rulesmaker or of a player. You're going even on the officiating side. How officiating evolved with the game really caught my interest.
Timothy Brown
I don't know if I've ever seen anybody do that before, but you caught the interest of all the elements of football. Well done job on that. Yeah, I appreciate it. And I guess, you know, just to me, and a lot of the book is about college football because a lot of the history is about college football. But for me, it goes beyond the game. You know, there are the elements of the fans and the money and, you know, just kind of the, where it fits in society, and how it reflects societal change. I think those are some of the most interesting aspects of football, but it's not just a game on the field that goes beyond that. But of course, the core of it is the game on the field. Now, where did you get the interest to get to the point of writing books on football? I grew up in an athletic family. I played college football. I had a couple played or coached for a couple of years as a graduate assistant or as an assistant while I was going to grad school. And so I've just always had that, you know, kind of football element. And for me, it ended up that I was, you know, I wasn't working in business and collecting Rose Bowl memorabilia. So that's kind of my more my main collecting hobby. And I came across a story that just kind of fascinated me, which is what led to the first book, which covers the military Rose Bowl teams of World War One and World War Two, or I'm sorry, of World War One, not World War Two, but 1918 and 1919 Rose Bowls. And then, you know, in doing the research for that book, I had to really understand football back then rather than the present day. So, that required me to do a bunch of research. And eventually, I realized that the research itself and understanding football back then was a lot of fun. And so I just kind of expanded that. And so the second book that you mentioned, How Football Became Football, reflects really the first 150 years of the game, just how it evolved in multiple dimensions.
Breaking Down Football into Eras
Darin Hayes
I mean, the other element that I thought you did a really good job on is sort of breaking football into three different segments, time segments of those 150 years. Maybe you could just share with the listeners a little bit about how you broke those up and what differentiates the three.
Timothy Brown
So the reason I broke it into three eras was just that, you know, I just felt like I couldn't just go chronological order, and just, you know, it would just be this recitation of facts, which would be kind of boring. So, I wanted to have some themes about what was happening in football during different time periods. And so the first era, which I just called the early era, was from the game's beginning. So, more or less, in 1869, with Rutgers and Princeton, and then going until 1905, when there were a series of rule changes due to the dangers of the game, etc. And so that's the first period. The second one started in 1906 and continued until 1959. Somebody could argue with me whether it should be 1955 or 1965. But, you know, I have my reasons for choosing 1960. But it's at that point where from 60 on, you know, we have dramatically increased influence of television, and therefore money in the game, we have dramatically increased influence of African American players. Then, there are a couple of other changes, particularly the permanent use of two-platoon football at the college level. Those three things just had a tremendous impact on the game as we know it today. And so, you know, I chose 1960 again; you could argue a slightly different time period, but that's what I worked with. I thought you were spot on. I would totally agree with you that 1960 was a big breaking point. And, of course, 1906, which is sort of what's going to lead us into our discussion today; I guess, though, before we get to 1906, we're going to have to try to figure out what football was the first 30-some years before 1906 that brought us to that point.
Darin Hayes
So maybe if you could describe us, what was football like in the early 1900s? Yeah, so I just want to step back a little bit further first to just say people say all the time football evolved from rugby.
Early 20th Century American Football
Timothy Brown
And yes, that's true. But I just want to emphasize football was rugby. So, in the early days of what we now think of as gridiron, North American football, US and Canada, it was rugby. And you know, when they started the game, they made some minor tweaks, but it was right. So the game remained very much rugby-esque until, say, 1890. They made some rule changes, including allowing tackling below the waist and things like that, which made it harder to do the outside wide-open and running of rugby. And so the game started steering towards this, which ultimately became mass and momentum football. So mass meaning, you know, it was basically like playing goal line football, you know, the goal line offensive goal against goal line defense, all 110 yards of the field at the time. The mass refers to the idea of multiple blockers leading the runner through the hole and/or grabbing him by the handles that he had sewn on his pants to pull him through the hole. And the momentum, referring to, you know, back then, they didn't have rules on how many players had to be on the line of scrimmage. So, teams would have guards back or tackle back formations and different things. And there was no limit on the number of men who could be moving forward at the snap, you know, similar to what Canada has in their football. So, you know, they'd have these guys running all at the same time and collapsing into a particular hole, just basically slamming into to basically overrun one or two players on the defense. And so it became a very dangerous game. And as a result, there were lots of injuries and, ultimately, deaths, you know, resulting from the nature of the play at the time. Okay, so that sort of takes us to when we always hear about, you know, President Theodore Roosevelt became involved because of the high death count and injury count. And you know, many schools were, you know, canceling their football programs. I guess that sort of takes us up to the 1905 season. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think the whole thing with Roosevelt is a little bit overblown. But, you know, it was more, I think it was a high-profile act on his part. I mean, he really, there's nothing he could do to ban football, right? Right. But, you know, he was a football sport. He was a fan, you know, he, he was at the 1905 Army-Navy game at the end of the season. His son played for Harvard, at least the freshman team at the time. Oh, and he was a big believer in, you know, kind of that whole mass masculinity thing that was behind, you know, football at the time. So, he was a fan. So he wanted to make sure the game continued. At the end of the day, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton controlled the game. They were still even in 1904 and 1905; they were the three schools. Penn, maybe a little bit, but they were the three; they were the schools that controlled the game. And they had, they, they had core responsibility for the rulemaking bodies. It wasn't until 1904 that a non-Easterner, Amos Alonzo Stagg, who had played at Yale but was coaching at Chicago, was the first non-Easterner on the rules committee. So, you know, anything that was wrong with football was due to the guys out east. Okay. The good things about football were due to the guys out east, too. Right. So, there was sort of a reluctance on their part to want to change the game, that I take it. They liked having that game. I guess the flying wedge was gone by that point, but just like you said, the massive collision goal line play, every play, they sort of liked that, and they didn't want to see that change. I take it. Yeah. So, you know, one of their big arguments and, and, and with, with a fair amount of truth to it, but, you know, the, the, the whole death count thing came from a series of newspapers, you know, they, they would track what was happening around the country. And so the death count really was not; it wasn't a bunch of college players from your top-notch college teams. They counted anything from, you know, a lot of the deaths were just kids playing sandlot football or backyard football. A lot of them, you know, weren't; they had no coaching. They were just playing. They didn't know how to tackle the death count. Also included kids who maybe got cut or spiked on the field and got an infection while they couldn't treat infections like we can today. And so some of those guys died from an infection they sustained on the football field. So, on the one hand, the death numbers are exaggerated, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it was a dangerous game. And here and there, there were some college athletes who were killed playing the game. And some of what brought it to a head at the end of the 1905 season was an NYU player, a New York University player, who was killed, and their college president, you know, basically took up the banner and really pushed for change and started organizing change in what ultimately became the organized group that ultimately became the NCAA.
Darin Hayes
So I take it, though, even though Roosevelt's threat was a little bit idle, it was sort of a pivotal point in getting these groups to talk about the revisions and reform that was needed in football. Is that a fair statement?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, yeah, I think that that's true. I mean, it put pressure on the big schools to make changes. And then what ended up happening was like with NYU and some others, they just basically got to a point where they just said, you know, we're not paying attention to you anymore. You're not gonna make the rules anymore. We're gonna make the rules. Eventually, those two groups agreed to get together, you know, compromise on some of the rule changes that ended up taking place.
Darin Hayes
So, if I'm looking at this correctly, we have, you know, the Yale camp, Harvard, and Penn, and we would say Columbia was the other one? Princeton. So we have the Walter camps of the world on that side. And then, on the other side, who wants to have the reform?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, it could be; it was mostly schools that would now be considered V3 schools or V2. You know, they're just, but it was a mishmash. You know, by and large, the folks at the Army and Navy kind of supported the old world, too. You know, the old-school game. So it is more or less that the teams that were at the top of the heap at the time really had no reason to change. And the truth is that in those schools where they had effective coaching, the guys were conditioned before practice. They had the best of the equipment and training. They really had, you know, a limited number of serious injuries and deaths. So they kind of felt like, look, the problem isn't us. The problem is everybody else who doesn't know what they're doing. You know, I think that was really kind of the crux of the argument, but at the end of the day, even those folks realized that they needed to make some changes. And so it was really gonna be a matter of how do we compromise? How do we find ways to allow change without overturning the game that they had grown to love? You know, back then, people, you know, you go back and read newspaper articles from 1903, 1904, and they'll just go on and on about the virtues of some great punter. Now, we think of a punter as the guy of last resort; nobody wants to punt, right? They'll punt it on first down, third, second down all the time. And it was just such an integral part of the game that if you were a good punter, you were a star, you know? Now, typically, you were also the fullback or halfback on the team, but punting was a very highly regarded activity. That explains why I know we talked about a game where they had, I think, no second downs. They punted on first down every plague in Clement weather. I forget what it was, but we've talked about that in one of the podcasts recently. Okay, so we're at this meeting now. I take it after the end of the 1905 season before 1906 starts. And we have these two groups getting together. So, I'm taking it that the forward pass was one of the suggestions that were brought to the table to help open up the game and make it a little bit safer. Is that true? Yeah, so, you know, there were a lot of different suggestions, right? So, and really kind of coming despite the fact that the Easterners controlled things, there was input coming in from across the country. You know, I mean, anything ranged from the forward pass, which ultimately got implemented in 1906, though heavily restricted 1906, they also approved the onsite kick from scrimmage. So it was essentially a punt. in which any member of the offensive team could recover the punt and advance it. So, just like we think about an onside kick today, the kicking team can recover it. Well, they had opened up the game by allowing the kicking team to recover punts as well. And there had been a forerunner to that that was a little bit more restrictive, but that kind of what they call the quarterback kick, that carried on until 1922. So, it remained a part of the game for a while. Well, there are some good things that people would want to be punting on first down, then have to advance the ball a long way because you don't have the pass at that point in time. So maybe that's a good way to get a good chunk of yardage if you're in a stalemate. So interesting. Yeah, and if you think about it, punting was a natural part of the rugby-ish game. So, every team had skilled punters. And so what you wanted, in this case, was a punter who could kind of kick it off to the side in one of your ends, or somebody else could run down and get it. The forward pass was either something that didn't really change the game much or entirely brand new, depending on how you define the forward pass, which I think is one of, which is another big misconception in terms of people's understanding of how that changed the game. Before 1905 or before 1906, the game was not filled with forward passes, but the forward pass was common. It was just illegal. And the reason I say that is because what we now think of as laterals, a term that entered football all about 1914, or pitches, what we think of laterals and pitches, they call passes, right? So the quarterback got the snap from the center, and he tossed it to a half-back or a full-back. That was a pass. And so a forward pass was just those instances where they were running around the field, and they pitched it inadvertently or deliberately tossed it forward. And so it was a penalty, and they'd call the penalty, and they'd lose possession of the ball and that kind of thing. And if you look at old newspaper reports, it's all over the place. Forward passes almost every game; somebody's being penalized for a forward pass. So the game or the game had a forward pass. It was illegal. And so when they were thinking about the new forward pass in 1906, they were pretty much thinking of that. They were thinking of forwarding laterals. So they weren't viewing it as this thing that was gonna revolutionize the game. It was, and a number of committee members thought, yeah, we need it for a couple of years, and we can get rid of it. So, there was no notion of what was going to come down the road and how it would dramatically change the game.
The Passing Game
Darin Hayes
It was more of a, well, yeah, you can pitch the ball forward and whatever. So it wasn't what you think of it today. They weren't thinking of Aaron Rodgers dropping back and dropping a 45-yard pass on a dime to a receiver who was streaking down the field.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, well, that's right. And so some of it is even. There are some great illustrations of the period that show and discuss the most effective way to throw the forward pass, right? And so, really, I mean, in 1906, there was only one team I'm aware of who threw the ball in the overhand spiral motion that we think of as the forward pass today. Everybody else was trying to figure out, like, okay, well, I'm only gonna toss it a couple of yards or whatever. And so they were. Some thought the best way to throw it was tossing it like a great grenade with a stiff arm or some basketball set shot. There were a variety of different techniques like that, but it was all within a 10-yard kind of radius, maybe flipping it 15 yards downfield to somebody, and just conceptually, nobody had. The skies did not open up, and a stone tablet did not come down, giving the football world a passing tree, right? I mean, nobody had any idea what any of that would have looked like. That was Sid Gillman and 40 or 50 yards in the future before that happened. Okay, 1906, you said the forward pass came in with some restrictions on it.
Darin Hayes
Maybe you could describe some of those restrictions. When the forward pass first came in, at that point, that was during the era of the checkerboard field. And so, probably a fair number of your listeners have seen a checkerboard field at one point or another.
Timothy Brown
But so beyond the normal stripes every five yards, there were lines running perpendicular to those. There were also five yards. So the reason those were there is in 1903, they instituted a rule that said that the first person to receive the ball from the center could not run forward or could not cross the line of scrimmage with the ball unless they were five yards right or left at the center. This was to try to eliminate some fakery that was going on in the center area and to keep them from running up the gut all the time. But so when the forward pass was adopted, they basically followed that same rule and said that in order to throw a forward pass, the passer has to be five yards right or left of the center before they can throw the ball. There were other restrictions, and some of these changed a little bit over time, but there were restrictions. Prior to 1912, it was a more restricted game. So, you know, they had things like you couldn't throw the ball more than 20 yards downfield. You couldn't; if the ball crossed the goal line on the fly or on a bounce, it was a turnover. If you threw a pass and it was not touched by an offensive or defensive player before it touched the ground, it was a turnover. So, you know, if you think about the implications of that, you've got guys who don't really know how to throw a forward pass very well, trying to throw it to people who don't know how to run passing routes. And if they throw it too far, it's a turnover. If they miss, if they have an incompletion, it's a turnover. So it's really not surprising that for the first half dozen or so years of football, the forward pass didn't get used very much other than by a couple of select teams. And some of those did very well. And they were playing with a watermelon ball, too, I imagine, right? More of a rugby, okay. Yeah, I guess that would make it very difficult to try to figure out how to throw that ball, wouldn't it? It'd be tough for us today, I think, to try to figure out how to throw that. Yeah, well, I mean, it really was one of the things. Early on, the ball was so thick that they basically kind of felt like unless the passer had big hands, they couldn't be, in effect, the passer just because they couldn't get a grip on the ball. You know, and the lacing, you know, the laces were just, you know, relatively thin pieces of leather that laced the ball together. They weren't like, you know, we've got polyvinyl chloride laces now that are stiff as, you know, stiff as a brick.
Darin Hayes
So it's very easy to get, you know, to spin on the ball and do those kinds of things. That wasn't the case back then. It reminds me of we had a gentleman who, one of my PFRA friends, Simon Herrera, has a vintage football game. They replicate the games played in the early 1920s in the pro game. And he wanted to try to get it so they wouldn't throw passes. So he had a ball developed for these games that he has every year. That's even a wider girth than the balls that you're talking about in the, you know, 1906. So they can't pass the ball. I forget what it was, like 24-inch girth or something. It's ridiculous, like a medicine ball. So, it was effective. They can't throw a pass with it. So, it sounds like this is a similar situation here for these folks who were trying to throw a pass.
Timothy Brown
Well, the flip side of it is that, you know, as long as you had that rounded ball, you could still continue to dropkick. But once you got to the, you know, there were successive changes to the dimensions of the ball. Once the ball got too pointy, drop-kicking went away because you couldn't predict where the ball was going to bounce anymore. Unless you're Doug Flutie, right? Well, he's playing on Astroturf, not on some muddy field that guys played on back in the day. Right. So, who did throw the first pass successfully? And how did that come about? It seems like everything's against them, wanting to throw a pass. Well, so, you know, one of the things, an interesting thing that happened as the committee was kind of as people are tossing out ideas on the changes that should occur in 1906, there were two teams out in Kansas that decided to play a game, a test game to experiment and institute some of the potential rule changes. So Fairmont, which now is Wichita State, and Washburn played one another. The coach of Washburn was a guy named John Outland; the Outland Trophies were named after them. And so they played a test game on Christmas Day, 1905. You know, it's unclear, exactly, you know, so they threw forward passes, but it's unclear what that means. You know, it's hard to believe that they would have really restructured their offense in a significant way. It probably meant that they just tossed the ball forward on a couple of occasions. I think only one forward pass was completed, and the game ended up in a 0 -0 tie or 6 -6 tie, you know, whatever it was. So, it's not a very good test of the process, but it points out the fact that you really have time to let things sink in and conceptualize the changes that you had as a coach. The last names were Eddie Coach and Coaches. He had played at Wisconsin and, I think, was an all-American or, you know, whatever. He was a star there, but he ended up with a guy named Bradbury Robinson, who transferred from Wisconsin down at St. Louis U. Bradbury Robinson was a big, pretty big guy who had big hands, and he had learned to throw the overhand spiral. I guess he'd learned it by throwing the ball back when he was retrieving punks. But so he all said, you know, here's this guy who has this capability that nobody else had. And so St. Louis U basically and Coaches, you know, built this offense around, you know, it's not like they just went to a passing offense, but, you know, they threw the ball far more than anybody else. They were undefeated in 1906, and before the season, I used to live in St. Louis. I grew up in Wisconsin, but I used to live there. So, I know the weather in both places, and St. Louis is ungodly in the summer in terms of heat and humidity. So he took his boys up to Wisconsin for training camp back in the days when training camp meant he really did camp. And then, as they were getting ready to go back to St. Louis, they played a local school named Carroll College, which is my alma mater. Now it's Carroll University, but they played a game, and Bradbury Robinson threw the first forward pass in a legal, you know, authorized game. So I always claimed that Carroll invented pass defense, which you would want to guess. Yeah, I guess it would be. Yeah. Although St. Louis U won. So, but so that was, that game was played in early September 1906. And, you know, various teams tried the forward pass. Carlisle was, you know, an early innovator in its use. They always liked anything kind of tricky. Otherwise, it really did not get used much over the next couple of years; just because it was, it was heavily restricted. And, frankly, you know, the Eastern teams didn't really like it that much to begin with. Where it really saw some use was out West, and probably the, you know, one of the seminal moments in the forward pass didn't come until 1913 when, you know, Knute Rockne and Gus Dorius at Notre Dame visited Army for a game, and they were throwing the ball all over the place and the New York sports writers and certainly the West Point football team were surprised at what they could do. And Notre Dame beat Army's butt, and, you know, it brought a lot of attention to what you could do with the forward pass if you think about it differently than most teams thought about it to that point.
Darin Hayes
Now, it was sort of a slow progression, though, from 1906 to, let's say, 1912 to get the passing game to be that way, for Rockne and the rest of Notre Dame to throw the ball like that. Can you describe it? I think 1912 you described as being another pivotal year for the forward pass.
Timothy Brown
Yeah. So, you know, for me, there are three things going on. One is, like I said, you know, that, so when they first approved the forward pass, there's just an inability to conceptualize what it could be. I mean, nobody thought it would be what Don Coryell or somebody else would produce, you know, down the road. There was also just an inability to figure out the techniques to use, which we've talked about a little bit. And then there were restrictions. So, you know, the, we had things like, you know, the, you had to be five yards right or left. And, you know, this will play out again, but in a different form, like in the 40s. But, you know, what we think of is any kind of quick passing, you know, so a quick slant. Right. I mean, that's like. They couldn't even think of a quick slant at the time. But because the passer had to be five yards right or left, he could never have thrown a quick slant. He could never have thrown a bubble screen. He could, you know, there are things that we take it, take for granted as part of football today in the passing game, just they couldn't even think about that as an opportunity because it was, it was, it wasn't legal, you know?
Darin Hayes
So, you know, you basically were forcing the pass to occur only on rollouts. Okay, so 1912 sort of eliminated that rule so that they could throw more of a traditional setting that we know passing as?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, so yeah, by 1912, they dropped that 20-yard downfield rule. They, I believe, also dropped the rule that, so I believe by then, you could throw the ball into the end zone. So, until 1912, there was no end zone, right? So there was this undefined area behind the goal line, but because it was illegal to throw the ball over the goal line, they didn't need an end zone per se. It had to be carried over the goal line. And so, in 1912, they changed that. It was just one of those things where there were just these incredible little tiny steps to make the game more open, but 1912 was a big one. So you can throw the ball as far downfield as you want. You can throw it into the end zone. They later had restrictions where you can only throw one forward pass in a set of downs and things like that. But I think things opened up enough in 1912 that people could see how the forward pass could change the game. They still didn't use that much, but it was getting there. But I guess in a way, I know you described this in the book, the passing restrictions being lifted, and especially that having those end zones defined as being 10 yards, it ended up changing the field from what the Canadians, you know, have the 110-yard field goal line to goal line, still to this day.
Stadium Evolution
Darin Hayes
But our stadiums in this, like you described, I know Harvard and Yale and of a couple others had the cement stadiums where they were restricted with that only so much room to put a stadium, and they had to change100-yard100 yard field with the two end zones, is that correct?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, a little bit; I added a little bit just to say that Harvard is an example. Harvard built what is still their stadium in 1903, and it was the first, or the largest, reinforced concrete building in the world at the time, blah, blah, blah. But the point was it was there, and it was gonna stay there, right? They had built that stadium so that it could accommodate a regulation football field, a fairly small track, and some sideline area. Well, one of the discussions they had in 1905 was whether we should widen the field like the Canadians had to open up the game. And, you know, with Harvard being one of the dominant forces in the game at the time, they were like, no, we're not changing our stadium, so we need to keep it as is. So, they didn't widen the field in 1905. When it came to 1912, you ran into an issue with the length of the field, not its width. And so there were stadiums like the Polo Grounds in New York City where a lot of college games were played. Back then, a lot of college games were played in baseball parks because that's where the stadium was for, right? Right. And so, depending on the configuration of the ballpark, you might not be able to fit the 110-yard field with 10-yard end zones on the end of it, so 130-yard field. You might only be able to fit a 120-yard field. So what they ended up doing is they eliminated the 55-yard line and, you know, before, you know, kickoffs had been from the midline instead of the 40, and they switched it to the 40 and things like that. So, you know, fairly innocuous kind of change, but, you know, that's one of the, you know, Americans changed to the 50-yard line. It wasn't the Canadians who bastardized our game; we bastardized the game that we had kind of collectively agreed on. And the same thing with three downs. That's sort of the way that Walter's camp designed it, with three downs. And, uh, we also changed that out here. So that occurred in 1912 as well. So we switched to four downs to gain 10 yards at that point. So, actually, probably 1912 is almost as impactful as, uh, 1906. And maybe, maybe not as much as like the early 18 eighties, but, uh, uh, truly some big changes there. And I can see why you have that incorporated as your next era, the second phase of football. Cause there's a lot of going on there. Yeah. Tremendous changes. And then, and then from then on, you know, I mean, there's more tweaking, some of which, you know, some tweaks are bigger than others, but, uh, 1906 to 1912 was a, you know, a period of turmoil, but they, they kind of game came out of it and, and started moving forward, a combination of thinking about the game differently, new techniques, and then rule chains listened up the passing game.
Darin Hayes
Now, Tim, what do you think would have happened, you know, now that we know the whole story arc of the passing game and all the changes that came because of between 1906 and 1912, uh, in your opinion, would the game of football survived without those revisions?
Timothy Brown
You know, it's one of those where, okay, without revisions, I think the answer is no, you know, I, I just, I think there was enough push for the game too, you know, enough recognition, the game was a dangerous game that, uh, without changes, I think it would have died, um, but I'm not sure that would have happened, you know, I think just like today, you know, yeah, I think football still has a lot of dangers in front of it in terms of CTE and all of that, but I think the game's going to change, you know, it's, it will address it. It's, you know, there are enough people who want the game to survive, and there's enough money behind. You know, people who want the game to survive will adjust as it needs to. Um, it may be slower than some folks would like, but it will adjust. And so I think the same thing there. I think if, if the game, um, if it had not changed in 1906, okay, it probably would have been 1908 or 10 or something, but had it not changed, then, then I think it would have, you know, what we saw with, you know, as you mentioned, teams drop the drop football or schools drop football, you know, Columbia dropped football, Northwestern dropped football, USC dropped football, Cal dropped football, Stanford dropped football, but those out in California, they, they switched immediately to rugby. And so, you know, one of the more interesting questions, I think, is whether America switched from American or gridiron football to rugby. How would that have affected the game of rugby? You know, you know, how would the, you know, would, would rugby be the same game it is today if America had been involved? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't, but I guarantee you just based on the, just the sheer population of the country and, and the, you know, I mean, the big game, the California Stanford game in the years that they were playing rugby, that got all the attention that the football game had in the past, big crowds, big press coverage, all of that.
Darin Hayes
Yeah, I believe even to this day, Australia is playing two or three different versions of rugby, just in that much smaller country than ours. So yeah, I guess that would have had a big impact on rugby if the United States had been playing that.
Timothy Brown
So very interesting, very interesting. Canada had a, you know, Canada kind of went off in a different, in its own direction; they played what was called Canadian rugby, which had some elements of American football. It had bounds and a scrimmage, but it was still much more of a wide-open game, no blocking, you know, at that time, whereas American football picked up blocking in the 1880s. So, and then they eventually merged back towards an American-like football, you know, so Canadian football is now very close to American football, but Canadian rugby, until the twenties or so, probably was as similar to rugby as American football. And then that's sort of where the Gray Cup came out. It was the Canadian rugby originally before the CFL.
Darin Hayes
So very interesting. Now, as you said earlier, I, as you said earlier, have a book on the military. Maybe you could tell us what the name of that book is. And I guess we're both your books and where folks could buy them at.
Timothy Brown
So, one book is Fields of Friendly Strife. So, it comes from General MacArthur's quote about the playing fields at West Point. But that's basically a book that follows the teams that played in the 1918 and 1919 Rose Bowls. So it was World War I. And so rather than, for various reasons, rather than having college teams play in the Rose Bowls, they had military teams play. So there was the Marine training camp on the West Coast. It was Mare Island. There was an army training camp up near Tacoma called Camp Lewis. They played in the 1918 game. And then Mirror Island met Great Lakes from near Chicago in the 1919 game. That game included guys like George Halas, who became a fairly famous name in football. But he was on the Great Lakes team, as were a number of others, some pretty talented athletes. So basically, the book kind of follows those teams as they play in their season. Of the guys who had played in 1918, about half of them ended up shipping out and ending up in France during World War I. So it kind of traces them all through that period and then their lives afterward. Wasn't that the game where Patty Driscoll touched on a pass to Halas? That's the game? Okay, okay, okay. All right, great, great.
Darin Hayes
Okay, so you have a website that's named after that original book. Maybe if you could tell us what that is so listeners could go and check that out. Yeah, so Fields of Friendly Strength, it started off really to support my first book.
Timothy Brown
And then, as I kind of turned the corner, a lot of my early information covers World War I and the teams and games. And then I pretty much go right into just various history of football topics. So I would say the last 50 articles or posts that I have are pretty much straight football, but football history. Mostly pre-1960 and a lot of older stuff. I post articles, two or three articles a month. It's available at fieldsoffriendliestrife.com. I've got a Twitter account and Facebook. So, if you either search my name, Timothy P. Brown, or Fields of Friendly Strength, you'll come across it. It's, you know, if you search Fields of Friendly Strength and you're looking for me, you're gonna find it, so.
Darin Hayes
Okay, well, we'll also be listeners. We will have a link to Tim's site on our show notes of the podcast you're listening to, or you can go to pigskindispatch .com. We'll also have some backlinks there to get you there. So we'll make sure we get you in the direction if you need that help. So a great, great site. I highly recommend the site. I highly recommend the book. Just a tremendous job that you did. And coming from an official to an old coach, that's hard to give compliments, I guess, going both ways, but I really enjoyed it.
Timothy Brown
You know, we're natural enemies, you know, as my friend, Josie Ziemba says, you know, so. You know, it's a funny thing. I think for me, some of the stuff I enjoyed most of all in doing the research was the role of officiating. You know, it's just the, so, you know, like things that the book covers, it covers, you know, when did referees start? What did referees wear along the way? What were their uniforms? When did penalty flags come into play? When did whistles or the horns that they used come into play? When did the gun come into play? You know, the referee signals, you know, signal penalties. Well, that had to start, too. So all of those kinds of things, you know, they weren't there when football started. They had to develop. And so we just try to identify as best as I could when those things started and who we can credit with those kinds of changes. Yeah, those evolutions still happen recently because I don't know if you probably remember, but probably about 15 years ago, the NFL went from white knickers to wearing black pants, which in the officiating world was humongous.
Darin Hayes
I had some arguments probably 25 years ago with some people I officiated with that were traditional. I said, no, white knickers are the traditional pants of officials. I said, well, here, let me show you this photograph from 1903, and what's this guy wearing? He's wearing a black suit coat with black pants and dark-colored pants. And I hated the knickers because, especially before, everybody had turf fields, you had grass stains, mud, and you know how washing white is. It's tough, especially if you do a Friday night game; you gotta go do JV games the next day. And you have only so many pairs of white knickers. So it's- Well, one of the things I've got in the book, but one of my favorite aspects of officiating was, you know, until the 20s, maybe the 30s, there was really no training for officials.
Timothy Brown
You were just a former player who knew most of the rules. And so, and you had to be somebody people trusted, kind of thought you were a citizen, right? Most football officials wore their letter sweaters when they were officiating. And it was, and if you look at box scores, really through 19, really through World War II, the box scores of most games would list the officials, and they tell you the school that they attended. And it was because, you know, if you were an Ohio State guy, you did not officiate Ohio State games. You might do Michigan and Indiana and Pitt or whatever. But so you're wearing your letter sweater of a different team was kind of a number one said, I know what I'm talking about because I want a football letter.
Darin Hayes
But secondly, I'm impartial. You know, I'm not rooting for the two teams that are on the field today. Yeah, I know I've read some things where, like, Walter Camp, as he was coaching Yale, would go to New York City to officiate the, you know, the Harvard Princeton game, for instance; I know a couple of instances.
Timothy Brown
So yeah, and, you know, there's, you know, some of the earlier Rose Bowls, you know, USC was a lesser team back then, but you know, they were their head coach, you know, was officiating the Rose Bowl, you know, he was local, didn't have to pay a whole lot more than the bus fare, you know, and so.
Darin Hayes
Yeah, it's just unbelievable. You know, besides the uniform changing, when I started officiating in the early 80s, or I'm sorry, later 80s, you know, we, as a wing official, you know, the head linesman and the line judge, they had you go probably within two yards of the widest offensive player, you know, so if you had a wideout, you'd be tears. Well, that changed probably in the nineties when the offense changed. There are kids getting faster. They said, okay, plant your butts on the sideline. You know, you don't have to be close to officiating. So, that was a big to do in the officiating world. And I can't even imagine, you know, incorporating things like the forward pass and doing it with the two or three officials on the field when you're so used to that, you know, grind it out the game in the middle, so.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, well, I've got one of the articles on the website about the history of down boxes and chains, you know, generally. And so, you know, back in the day, so, you know, what we now call the down box, back in the day, it really was a box. You know, it was a stick with a box on it that had four sides and one, two, three, four. And they spun it around, depending on what down it was. But then, the linesman carried that around with them on the field, you know? And they'd be, you know, he'd be running downfield with the sharp stick with a box on it. And so it just, you know, certain things like that that just seem crazy now. But it's just the way the game evolved, you know? And so, so that kind of stuff, I just think that you know, it's fascinating to figure out, you know, kind of how it happened and why it changed, you know, from one period to another. Well, it definitely is.
Darin Hayes
You do an excellent job of illustrating the changes and how they affected all aspects of the game; as I said, you do a wonderful job and wonderful job of explaining the history of the forward pass today, and I really appreciate you coming on here and, uh, uh, you know, sharing that with us and, uh, we'd love to have you on again sometime if we can to talk about a different subject because you're very interesting and you're very knowledgeable.
Timothy Brown
So I thank you. You name the topic and I'll be there. Okay. It's fun, you know, fun to, fun to share, share information. Cause there's somebody else out there who's got some insight on something that neither of us have.
Darin Hayes
And so let's learn from them, too. Absolutely. So preserve that football history, and we thank you for that. And that's what we're all about. And, uh, thanks for helping us. Let's do that tonight. So thank you very much.
Timothy Brown
Darin, my pleasure.
