Our Newspapers.com Football History Headline of the Day comes from the July 20,1924 edition of the Great Falls Tribune from Montana in their post that said:
Many Changes are Made in the 1924 Gridiron Code
Walter Camp released the article for the press July 19, 1924 and in his presser he told of how abuses in the game were forcing rules revisions in areas such as the use of tees and eleiminating some loopholes in the football code. Offset goal posts were in question by many and adressed in the new rules as well as the prohibition of wearing stiff hard leather shoulder pads with out padded coverings and rules on sharp metal spikes of the players' cleats. A real odd one for us to read today is that substitute players were not permitted to talk or even call out the word "signal" without being penalized. A big one added in 1924 that we still use today is that players shifting in the offense before the snap had to come to a complete stop for a moment to establish position. This was not in effect for the man in motion rule adopted back in 1895 but only for offensive shifts. The officials were given power that day as well to instruct time keepers to keep the clock rolling if they felt a team was trying to gain an advantage by delaying the game during substitution time outs etc... Other changes were that a player couldn't exit out of bounds and legally return to the field during a play and that the penalty for an illegal forward pass was switched from 10 to 15 yards of enforcement. The officials were limited to only the referee having a whistle and the time keeper having the signal pistol to notify the ref when time expired for each period. The most noticable change Camp says though was to eleiminate kicking tees altogether from the game. Balls were to be kicked from the ground, without mounds of earth but a fellow player may hold the ball in place for the kicker.
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World Stage!
- July 19, 1989 - NFL owners tally a unanimous vote to start the World League of American Football in European cities. The League was later renamed NFL Europe. The newly formed league operated from 1991 through 2007 and developed many players that went on to play in the NFL.
- July 19, 1999 - The San Francisco 49ers re-signed star wideout Terrell Owens to a 7-year, $35 million contract extension per the NFL.com. Unfortunately after the 2003 season Owens became so disgruntled with the franchise he wanted to lave. After a botched effort to trade Terrel to the Baltimore Ravens and a missed dealine by his agent to void the contract eventually the parties came to a mutual understanding that Owens became a free agent and signed with the Philadelphia Eagels and later became a Dallas Cowboy.
