The 1906 Changes

Here is what happened in Football History during he 1906 season, the evolution of the offenses was starting and the titles won at the pro and collegiate levels are remembered.

The new ideas and proposals from the 12 January 1906 meeting had really changed the brutal fist-to-cuff style of play to a more wide open game. This very meeting and the ones shortly there after laid the foundation for the game of today by introducing the forward pass.

The saying that “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” is very adequate to describe the introduction of the forward pass to American football. After all it was the most important aspect of the ancient Spartan game of harpaston of which in an earlier section we discussed was one of the games football evolved from. Parke H. Davis tells us in his book Football : The American Intercollegiate Game that the very word harpaston was derived from the long forward pass that started every game.

The Legal Forward Pass

Part 22 of this series made reference that John C. Bell of Pennsylvania and Paul J. Dashiell of Navy made an interesting proposal at this 1906 conference of rules makers that introduced the forward pass to the committee. The actual sponsor of this great reform was Dr. Harry Williams of Minnesota and Dashiell
was his supporter in the meetings.
There were many that did not want to see the forward pass introduced to the game, including the great Walter Camp himself. None the less the forward pass proposal had more supporters than it did opposition and the revision “passed” (pardon the cheesy use of words). Just because it passed and became legal did
not mean that wide reform in the way the game was played had occurred. Harford Powell, Jr. probably describes the mind set of football experts best at this time in his biography on the innovator of football titled, Walter Camp. “The forward pass was lightly regarded by football tacticians, who thought of it as a
last desperate resort – a sort of “shoestring” play that was more likely than not to give the ball to one’s opponents.”
It is interesting that the following season did not see a many forward passes attempted and none had any impact until the final game of the season. It is even more interesting that the first coach to use the forward pass was one the men who did not support it at the reform meetings, Walter Camp. Camp was a wise
tactician of the game, he knew the rules (as he innovated many of them) and he played them to their potential. The forward pass was no different now that it was legal.
The forward pass play that Camp developed was not a haphazard or “shoestring” type play as many thought this concept was but it was a methodical tactic worked out to use an opponent’s weakness against them.

It happened on September 5, 1906 as Saint Louis University coach Eddie Cochems braved the new rules and trained his team how to pass and catch. Before the start of the season of 1906, Cochems took his team away to a secluded Jesuit retreat in Wisconsin, for the purpose written into history by his own words, for “the sole purpose of studying and developing the pass.”

In the opening game of the season for Saint Louis against Carroll College, a young man named Bradbury Robinson threw football’s first legal forward pass. The toss hit the ground untouched, resulting in a turnover. But Robinson later connected on a 20-yard touchdown pass. St Louis College showed the world tha power of the forward pass,  as they went undefeated and outscored their opponents, 407-11.

The Big Game use of the passing game

Let us set the stage for this final game of the 1906 game and its significance. Princeton, Harvard and Yale were all undefeated coming into the second to last week of the season. The two games that would make all the difference to who were the champions were the Princeton versus Yale and the Yale versus Harvard games. The Princeton and Yale game did not contribute to the decision as the two teams battled to a scoreless tie. This draw did lead to adding drama to the Harvard-Yale game the following week though. This was in essence the championship game of that time and all eyes of the football world focused in with great attention.
Late in the scoreless game Yale had a thirty yard run which took the ball all the way to just inside the Harvard twenty-five yard line. The time for Camp’s play to be run was at hand. Yale quarterback P. L. Veeder took the snap and started to run around end. (Remember at this time players who received the snap directly could only advance the ball if they were at least five or more yards away from the point where the ball was snapped, so quarterback end runs were one of the few plays a snap receiver could run.) Veeder was running at full tilt when all of a sudden he stopped in the back field and tossed the ball forward to an awaiting C.F. Alcott who rumbled it down to the Harvard four. The defense did precisely what Camp envisioned them to do , they reacted in full force to stop the end run thus leaving potential receivers wide open down field. Yale scored on a run from the four a little later and won the game 6-0 and a share of the championship with Princeton.

The 1906 season saw, the Princeton Tigers and the Yale Bulldogs, and on November 17, 1906, play to a 0–0 tie. And don't forget about St. Louis University finishing at 11–0–0. The Helms Athletic Foundation, founded in 1936, declared retroactively that Princeton had been the best college football team of 1906. Other experts recognized Yale as the national champions for 1906. I think we have a 3 way tie with all three team  sharing the honor.

Meanwhile on the professional circuit the Massillon Tigers finished with a record of 10-1 claiming the Ohio State title and in essence being recognized as the top pro team that year.

The interest in the forward pass had now started, as all teams started to explore its possibilities for the next season. The rules regulating the pass were even tweaked a bit more during the off season as forward pass mania swept through out the nation. The forward pass was not the only big reform in 1906 though and next time we will look at more of them in detail.

The picture in the banner above is courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons collection. It is a November 30, 1906 still shot taken by an unknown of the Multnomah Athletic Club football team at Multnomah Field (now know as Providence Park).