1924 Rules Kick Out the Tee And More

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 were Made in the 1924 Gridiron Code
Walter Camp released the article to the press on July 19, 1924, and in his press release, he described how abuses in the game were prompting rule revisions in areas such as the use of tees and the elimination of some loopholes in the football code. Offset goal posts were a point of contention for many and were addressed in the new rules, as well as the prohibition on wearing stiff, rugged leather shoulder pads without padded coverings and regulations on the 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 significant addition 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 their 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 timekeeper having a signal pistol to notify the referee when time expired for each period. The most noticeable change, Camp says, though, was to eliminate 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.