When Football Had Bigger Balls: A Historical Analysis

Football wasn't always the way it looks like.

Today we're spoiled by the modern television and watching live football, but once upon a time, football had a much larger.

Ball to play with.

Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology joins us to tell us all about this tale of when football had bigger balls.

He's up in just a moment to let us all know all about it.

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

Your host, Darren Hayes is podcasting from.

America's North Shore to bring you the.

Memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

Hello, my football friends.

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

And welcome to another Tuesday where we get to go to footballarchaeology.com's expert, Tim Brown.

Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey, Derek, this is.

Finally I have the chance to talk to you about Big balls.

Not the ACDC song from the 70s, but.

Oh, I'm not even familiar with that.

No.

Okay, well, you gotta, you gotta look it up sometime.

It's quite entertaining.

I wasn't like an AC DC guy.

I was more of a jazz, you know.

Oh, okay.

Maybe they have a jazz version of it.

Who knows?

I doubt it, but it's rather raunchy.

But anyway, you had a recent tidbit titled When Football had Bigger Balls.

And we would love to hear about this history of the ball, I'm assuming.

Yeah, yeah.

So it is about, it is about big balls.

So.

Okay, let's move on from the little double entendre.

So, I mean, the.

So the reality is that, you know, football comes from rugby and in the early days, so when football, you know, first was played in America or rugby was first played in America and then became football, these standard match ball from English rugby, what had a 30 inch circumference.

And just to kind of compare that, you know, you think about lugging a ball around or trying to throw a ball with a 30 inch circumference.

A basketball, the standard basketball today, like the NBA and colleges use, has a circumference that is 30 inches, 29.5 inches.

Oh, okay.

So I mean, the point is that.

Football, Football had a bigger girth than a basketball.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, basketball wasn't invented at the time.

But anyways, so.

But that is a large ball to be Toting around in your arm.

And so, you know, but part of that was, you know, foot like rugby and soccer were the same game for a long time, right?

I mean, there were different variations, different mixes.

But you know, with rugby, they wanted kind of an ovoid ball because that had more lift and so they could kick it over the goal post, whereas rugby was to kick it under the goalposts.

And that was kind of the whole game.

But rugby was still very much a kicking game, not a caring game, you know, at the time that Americans started playing it.

And.

But American, you know, you could, you could run with it, but most of the game was kicking.

And so, but as Americans preferred the running aspect of rugby, they, they changed, you know, they changed the rules, change the game.

And eventually they said, you know, probably be easier to carry this thing.

It was smaller.

So they, so back then, all inflated balls, whether it was a, an association or soccer ball, a rugby ball, or what they called an American ball at the time, which was kind of a canvas rubberized ball, they all came in and they started at a number 6, which was 30 inches in circumference.

The number 5 was 27 inches, the number 4 was 24 inches, blah, blah, blah.

And so they came in different sizes, 3, 3 inch increments.

And so eventually they, in American football, they started using 27 inch ball.

And then, you know, and because it was easier to carry.

And, and so anyway, you know, we progressively got a smaller and smaller ball.

And so now, you know, I cover, like, I'm kind of, I'm saying this is a little bit of his plug for my books, but I'm more just saying, like, if you're interested in this stuff in more detail, I cover the history of the football in my last book called the History of the Football.

Right.

I mean, it covers the whole history from, you know, back the rugby days through to more or less current times and, you know, all the changes to the ball and why they changed.

And then my most recent book, When Football Came to Pass, covers a forward pass.

And that really drove changes in the size of the ball.

So there were changes to make the ball easier to carry.

And then the next real kind of evolution came to make the ball easier to pass.

Right.

I mean, if you think about major eras or epics.

And so, you know, it's kind of, it's a funny thing.

Like early passers, like when they first introduced the Ford pass, people had no idea how to throw the ball.

You know, I mean, there they, there wasn't an instruction manual.

You know, it's like you can throw a forward pass, but no one told you how to do it.

So, you know, the book details, the newest book details kind of the techniques they used.

And you know, some of them are just bizarre.

But who knew, you know, I mean, no, no one knew how to do it.

So.

And part of the challenge was the ball was big.

It was this, you know, even the smaller ball is this fat kind of rotund ball, very thick in the, in the middle.

And so unless you had very large hands, it's very difficult to throw the ball in the way we now throw it, the overhand spiral.

So they, they used all kinds of different techniques.

And that is just a hundred percent wrong.

That did not happen.

But.

All they did was like codify it.

They made it official.

And so like Eddie Kokums, who was the father of the forward pass, St. Louis U.

Coach, blah, blah, blah.

The first team that really threw the forward pass effectively using the overhand spiral, he.

He kind of called for this airship design.

So he would have made it longer and narrower.

Narrower.

And he repeated it multiple times.

But that two step change is when the ball essentially became today's size.

You know, they, you know, teams were using what they call bootleg footballs to, you know, just.

They were basically using illegal balls in the games.

Mostly guys like in Texas and in the south who were more passing oriented.

And eventually the, you know, the coaches convinced the rulemakers, hey, we want a Smaller, narrower ball so it's easier to throw and it's just all about encouraging the forward pass which by then was finally really accepted.

Accepted enough that they changed the ball to support enhancing know the ability to throw the forward pass.

Before that it's like ah, screw you guys.

You know.

So anyways, I mean it's just one of those things like you just, you can't imagine how big the balls used to be.

NCAA made a tweak in like 82 that didn't really do much and you know, and like Canada claim, you know, they, the CFL has shirts like you know we have bigger balls.

Well yeah, I mean it had little bit proportions were a little bit different but their balls have been the same size as the US balls since, you know, more or less since they started using a forward pass in like 29 and a little bit later.

So anyways, that's the story of bigger balls.

If you need to cut that out to you know, feel bleep, you know, bleep me or whatever you need to do.

But that's the story.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean it's, it's fascinating and I, I mean I can't even imagine a 30 inch ball.

I know probably four or five years ago I was at a convention at the Pro Football hall of Fame and they had some balls that were the same.

And so we, so we were in this big sort of conference room.

So we're, a few of us said, you know, they even invite us, hey, try to throw a spiral with these things.

And we're, we're grabbing on this thing.

It's like basically falling out of your hand and you know, not very accurate.

And, and they were much smaller than 30 inches.

I'm sure they were probably more the 24, 22 inch size that, but they were hard to handle.

So I don't even know how you would do that other than basketball passes.

And that's probably part of the dilemma that they had.

Yeah.

When they were starting to think about that.

And it's not.

It's not just so, you know, besides the size, you know, the, the lacing was like more or less like the, the rawhide lacing that you use on a baseball glove, you know, so it wasn't.

It wasn't stiff like the poly.

Polyvinyl chloride.

The white laces stay.

Are plastic, you know, and.

And then like the pebbling and the, the grip, you know, they've changed the channing process.

There's been innovations to.

To make all of that better.

So even a wet ball is better.

Plus, they use the same ball the whole game back then, you know.

Yeah.

Until, I don't know, somewhere in the 30s or 40s, they finally said, okay, you can substitute a ball here.

And then.

So if you were playing on a muddy wet field.

Field, sorry, buddy, you know, that's the ball.

And there was no towels.

There's no wiping it off.

You just played with the ball, whatever was on it, you know, So, I mean, just if you ever, you know, besides all the past blocking problems and things like that, you ever wonder why passing, you know, like a 45 passer is considered pretty darn good at the time?

Well, guess what?

That was a big ball, and it was hard to throw and it was slippery and, you know, I mean, just so many things come.

Come into play there.

It probably looked much like the.

The modern Cincinnati Bengals offensive line.

Now they only have two seconds to throw, but that's a different story for a different day.

But, But, Tim, you.

You have some fascinating things in here.

You know, you have your books out, you know, book on the football, book on the pass that really, like you said, get.

It gets into these ball size changes and.

But you.

You have many other aspects of the game that make it very interesting to us modern fans, how we got to the point where we're at.

And you do this a lot on your site and your tidbits.

Maybe you could share with folks where they can find them.

Yep.

Just go to footballarchaeology.com it's a substack site, so subscribe.

You'll get an email every time I send.

You know, publish a new one and otherwise just hit the site whenever you want or, you know, you can find.

You can follow me on Blue sky, too, if that.

If that suits your fancy.

Because every time I publish, I put it out there in Blue sky, so whatever floats your boat.

All right, well, great stuff as usual.

We really appreciate you coming on here and sharing this and we would love to talk to you again next week.

Very good.

Look forward to it there.

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