The Flying Wedge and Hidden Ball Trick: Dangers of Early Football

Imagine a sport so brutal that some experts compared it to bull fighting and prize fighting, and not in a good way.

A sport where coaches encourage players to tackle opponents even after they had called for a fair catch to eat a penalty.

The scene wasn't some ancient gladiator contest.

This was American football at the turn of the 20th century.

Before the spectacular passes and complex defenses we know today, football was a grinding, bloody war of attrition fought in the mud.

It was a game defined not by finess, but by raw brutal force and crafty deception, all perfected through plays that were eventually banned for being too dangerous to exist.

These are the plays that were banned that made football a blood sport.

We have more on these coming up in just a moment.

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history on a day to day basis.

Your host, Darren Hayes is podcasting from America's North Shore to bring you the memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

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You can learn more@sportshistorynetwork.com hello my football friends.

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

The Chicago Tribune bluntly called it a death harvest.

The game had become so lethal that the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, had to step in, threatened even to abolish the sport entirely if changes weren't made.

So what turned a college pastime into a national bloodsport?

It wasn't just tough tackling.

It was a set of now banned plays, including the two we're going to discuss tonight.

Engineered for pure trickery and terrifying brute force plays like the hidden ball trick and the infamous flying wedge.

So how did things get so out of hand?

It was much closer to rugby, a slow, grinding game where the forward pass was illegal.

Offenses had to rely on relentless running plays and brute strength to gain every single inch.

In response, defenses would stack the line of scrimmage, creating a wall of human bodies.

And the result was a compressed, violent scrum where pretty Much anything went.

Slugging, kicking and even hair pulling were all just part of the game.

Now in the chaos, coaches became like battlefield generals, constantly inventing new weapons to get an edge.

One of the most creative minds of this era was Glenn Pop Warner.

Warner was a mastermind of trickery and he became notorious for plays that bent and sometimes shattered the rules of sportsmanship.

One of his most famous inventions that was along these lines was the hidden ball trick.

Now don't get me wrong, Warner had a lot of more good plays and positive improvements to the game than what we're going to discuss here.

So it's not all bad.

During a kickoff the entire team would huddle around a receiver and in Fusion, one of the players would secretly stuff the football up the back of another player's jersey.

Now the huddle would then break and players would scatter with every player taking and faking like they had the ball.

As the Harvard defense scrambled to figure out who to tackle, the real ball carrier would be sprinting completely out touched, running for long gains.

It was such a brazen play that later, Warner himself later admitted he didn't think the play was strictly legitimate.

Now this kind of deception was one way to think, but the other far more common method was by pure force.

And no play embodied that force more than the flying wedge.

Flying wedge was less of a football play and more of a military tactic on grass.

It was designed by Harvard coach at the time, Lauren Dealand who ironically never played a down of football.

At the time the kickoff rules were different.

Teams could tap the ball and then pick it up to start their advance, you know, because the ball did not have to travel 10 yards.

So it was more like a soccer play where the kicking team would keep possession.

Now Dylan exploited this perfectly.

Instead of spreading out the Harvard player split, he split them into two groups about 20 yards behind the ball.

And on a signal both groups would start to sprint forward, converging into a V shaped human battering ram with the ball carrier tucked away safely in the middle.

This nearly 1 ton mass of players would crash into defensive offenders, you know, at full speed and often targeting a single unlucky defender.

Now the result was devastating.

The play was an instant sensation, terrifying opponents while thrilling fans.

But its success came at a horrifying cost.

But the idea it introduced using mass and momentum didn't go away.

New plays designed to do the same thing kept popping up.

You know, Princeton's famous V formation was a variation of it.

That was during regular scrimmage plays and on the football fields.

They were turning into scenes of carnage.

End quote.

Some players even had leather handles sewn under their uniform so teammates could get a better grip and literally throw them into the defensive line like a human cannibal.

The violence wasn't a bug.

It was a failure.

Literally.

That year, along with almost two dozen deaths, newspapers reported that nearly 140 players were seriously injured during games of football.

One of the most publicized deaths was that of Harold Moore, a student at Union College.

And in a game against nyu, Moore charged into a line head first, a very common tactic at the time.

And no one was sure what he hit, but he dropped to the ground limp, and he died just hours later from a brain hemorrhage.

After a brief delay, that game continued.

Now the chancellor of nyu, along with others, others came into a public outcry, and it hit a fever pitch.

University presidents, including McCracken of NYU and Harvard's own, called for the sports of abolition now labeling it more brutalizing than prize fighting.

Now the game was on trial and losing, and a crisis finally reached the White House, where President Theodore Roosevelt, a champion of the strenuous life, was a huge football fan.

But he even couldn't ignore this death harvest.

It had to change.

There was images of, like, Tiny Maxwell in the scenes of newspapers, which bloodied after a game where, you know, he was playing center guard and just getting slapped around and beaten.

This was a tipping point.

Football was staring down a presidential ultimatum, reform or be abolished.

And the story of how they pulled the sport back from the brink not only created the game we know today, but it also gave us one of the most important rules of all sports, something that differentiated football from the rest.

And we'll get into that in a moment.

But if you're finding this history fascinating, as I do, take a second and hit that subscribe button and, you know, maybe hit some comments.

And it helps us to dig up more stories about the wild origins and of the game we love.

And his message was blunt quote.

Football is on trial, he told them, because I believe in the game.

I want to do all I can to save it, he said, end quote.

He demanded they reform the rules to get rid of the brutality and bring back good sportsmanship.

This presidential push was the catalyst for massive change in the following months.

Representatives from 62 colleges met to form a new rules committee, an organization that would eventually morph into the ncaa.

Their job was simple.

Crack the game wide open and end the deadly mass attack style of play.

They created a neutral zone, that football length space between the offensive defense before scrimmage plays, which ended the constant brawling before the snap.

They required more players on the line of scrimmage to stop teams from loading up the backfield having that momentum and those momentum plays.

They also doubled the yards needed for first down from five to 10, hoping to encourage more open field running instead of those low gain high impact pile ups.

But the most revolutionary change, the one that would make the biggest impact eventually, not at first, the one for over alter the sports DNA was legalizing the forward pass.

It was a radical idea.

For decades, the game was about the ground and pound rugby style attacks.

Pierce thought the forward pass was a gimmick that would turn players into sissies, making sure that it didn't take over.

These advocates for the former way of playing football, mostly in the east, attached a heavy burden and penalties to an incomplete pass which resulted in loss of possession, effectively a turnover to the other team and other costly penalties for throwing a forward pass and making it very difficult where to throw it from.

Now, despite the harsh rules of forward pass was the key.

It was the ultimate answer to the problem of mass momentum violence.

By letting teams throw the ball downfield, it forced defenses to spread out.

And this opened up the game and reduced the brutal condensed collisions that made football so deadly.

Now the impact was immediate.

The game had been pulled back from the edge of extinction.

Teams and schools that had switched from American football back to rugby and association soccer style football were starting to bring the game back, the band plays the clever hidden ball trick and a brutal flying wedge became relics of a lost era.

Powerful reminders of how football had to nearly destroy itself in order to be saved.

The legacy of that violent period is written all over the modern game.

The story of how a game defined by brute force was forced to evolve, giving birth to strategic, athletic and incredible sport that millions of us love to watch every weekend.

The ghost of the flying wedge still linger, a testament to the brutal origins of America's favorite game.

But the evolution started to become a center and a sport piece were player safety, safety equipment and the evolution of technology to make it safer and you know, by rule, making it safer.

And we still have this today.

You know, the targeting rules of recent days and, you know, some of the spearing and taking some of that brutality out of the game, throwing players out of the game that are not obeying that and doing some things to harm other players, it's starting to make the game a little bit safer.

But we still have a long ways to go.

The helmet evolution still got a lot to go to protect these players.

And we keep tweaking this game, let it keep its violence, but control and prevent accidents and people being maimed and even death out on the field.

Now, we appreciate you watching this, you know, and if you've enjoyed a look at football's wild pass, let us know in the comments and what piece of sports history you'd like us to tackle in this game of football next in these segments.

And don't forget to like and subscribe for more stories on the history of the game.

Until next time, everybody have a great gridiron day.

Peeking up at the clock, the time's running down.

We're going to go into victory formation, take a knee and let this baby run out.

Thanks for joining us.

We'll see you back tomorrow.

For the next podcast.

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