1905: The Year That Changed Football – What If the Forward Pass Was Never Legalized?

It's a real common sight to see a quarterback step back, take a three step, five step drop, launch a ball downfield, watch a receiver catch it and see what happens after that.

But what if the forward pass never existed?

We're going to take a look at that and some of the history of the rule coming up in just a moment.

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This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal deposit of football history.

And welcome to another what if Wednesday.

And how about if that history was altered just a little bit, what may have happened and how could the game have been changed?

So we have some very exciting things to look at in the game of football today.

And many of those have to do with the forward pass.

I mean, just sit there and think about some of the greatest plays in National Football League history.

Plays like the Catch, the Immaculate Reception, the Philly Special, Malcolm Butler picking off that pass in the super bowl to prevent the Seahawks from scoring and the Patriots winning the game.

The just some of these great plays in football history.

David Tyree with a helmet catch, James Harrison with the 99 yard touchdown return at the end of the first half of Super Bowl 30 and the Steelers beat the Cardinals.

All of them had to do with the forward pass.

And there was no forward pass that was legal.

It was legalized.

When after, you know, many reported bad injuries and even some deaths were really highlighted in the newspapers and the media.

And there was a call for football to be banned.

And in fact, some colleges did ban the game and changed to other games, such as rugby or playing soccer.

California had quite a bit of that.

The University of California and Stanford both went back to playing rugby and not American football.

And this happened around the country where schools were adopting other sports or just getting rid of football together.

Famously, he called some very important people in football, in particular one Walter Camp of Yale and some other folks of Yale and Penn and Harvard, who were the rules makers of that time.

They sort of set the groundwork because they were the Big three, the Big Four, if you throw a pen in there too, of football.

And that's how everybody else emulated what they were doing.

So they got to call all the shots with the rules.

Well, Teddy Roosevelt encouraged them to take tame the game or it was going to be lost.

And so they went back and tried to figure out some things to do.

In the meantime, we had another group that was coming together.

It ended up being, you know, the International Athletic association rules.

And eventually these two groups merged and eventually became the NCAA.

One of the things they did was open up the game a little bit by having the forward pass.

Well, the Yale and Harvard and Columbia and Princeton influence and Penn, they had a game where the forward pass almost like was punishment.

There really wasn't much good that can happen with the forward pass.

You had to be within 5 yards of line of scrimmage, and you had to, you know, throw to certain areas of the field.

Incomplete passes were turnovers.

You couldn't throw past the goal line.

You had all kinds of crazy rules that if we watched a game today with that happening, we would say, what in the heck is going on here?

This is horrible.

But it ended up morphing.

And of course, the ball changed and everything like that, the size and the girth and made it better for throwing a football forward with a spiral.

But, you know, Tim, Tim Brown's been on before talking about how people didn't even really know how to throw the ball.

And they were shot putting in underhand, you know, slingshot and, you know, just all kinds of crazy things till they came.

Some guys came up and said, hey, the forward pass is the most efficient way.

But what would have happened if the football had not adopted a legal forward pass?

So football probably would not have survived.

You know, schools were, like we said, were already dropping out.

So game of football probably wouldn't have evolved at all.

And made of went, you know, back in time to some of these games that you don't longer.

You no longer hear of being played in American sports.

It would have been the secondary sport and maybe something else would have took its place and maybe we would be playing soccer a lot more like Europe and Asia and other parts of the world, South America.

And soccer would have been the game we've been celebrating and watching so often.

Who knows?

But it's a lot happened to get the game to what it is today.

And it's made it one of the most exciting plays in football and makes football so exciting because now you have.

You can score from anywhere on the field just by the flick of a wrist, a spiral downfield and a good set of hands on a fast receiver and you know they're going all the way for a touchdown.

And it happens every game almost.

You have a long passing play and just amazing.

And it really saved the game, made it more exciting.

So our what if is football wouldn't exist at all as a game and definitely if it did, wouldn't be the popularity that it is today.

So the forward pass, a very key element in American football history and we're sure glad that that would have never happened and it did occur the way it did and made the game it is.

That's a little bit of football history today.

Hope you enjoyed it.

Till next time, everybody.

Have a great gridiron day.

We're taking a peek over at the.

Chains and the down marker.

It's fourth and long.

We're going to have to punt the ball and get on out of here.

But we'll have another series tomorrow for your football history headlines.

So be sure, tune in.

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