Walter Camp 1906 and 1907

Here is what happened in Football History Rewind to 1906, Walter Camp changes his stance on footballs course with more rules revisions.

The past few editions of this series have focused on the very important reforms made to the game in early 1906 by the group of football minds that would eventually become known as the NCAA. The changes were necessary as the game itself was in jeopardy of extinction as many wanted the dangerous athletic spectacle banned.

Some changes previously discussed were the adoption of a rudimentary style of forward pass, the reduction of regulation game times to two thirty minute halves as well as countless other small changes in officiating duties and the like. We failed to mention in our last edition that a Mr. John Heisman helped initiate the idea of the forward pass after he had saw it run illegally about a decade earlier

One of the most important changes to help tame the mass grouping plays that seemed to cause most of the injures came from a proposal from our hero Walter Camp.

Camp identified the problem

Walter Camp as we have seen was not only a great player and coach but he was an innovator in the realm of football. Ironically one of Camp’s earlier innovations created the most likely contributor to the unaccepted brutality of the game, the mass momentum play.

Camp had recognized that when he promoted reform in the 1800's to create a system where by the offense needed to go at least five yards in 3 plays to prevent boring ball control style games, he had created another problematic flaw in the game. Teams could simply ram rod runners into a heavily defended line by pounding a mass of humanity against another. Injuries and ill feeling resulted from this style of play as five yards was probably too short a distance to make it a challenge to obtain.

Camp tried earlier to persuade reform of the five yard distance increased to greater yardage to no avail, in particular because rivals Princeton and Harvard used the mass momentum plays as their main offensive strategy and an increase in yardage to be gained for a first down was not in their best interest. When Camp and other members of the old Intercollegiate Football Rules Committee were invited to join the other schools across the country in joint session, Camp was faced with either being lost as little fish in a big pond or great acceptance by the broad larger population of rules makers who had a thirst for reform.

Camp knew that the meetings that he would attend would be basically an attack and harsh scrutiny of the game he had developed. Walter Camp must have been a rare person because rather than go into the arena of rules reform on a defensive mode he went into the meetings with the mind set of tweaking the rules of the game to make an even better game that could stand the test of time. He wanted football to be a game of strategy where those with knowledge and integrity could over come a larger more physical opponent by using their intellect.

Camp’s proposal of the increase of the yard to gain to ten yards in four attempts or downs was widely accepted and Camp fully expected the brutal runs up the middle to become a dinosaur of football plays and that the exciting end runs would replace it. What eventually did happen was that the forward pass eventually nullified Camp’s dream because the threat of a pass made the defensive backs drop back a little further than before to defend the pass and thus reduced the reinforcement potential that the backs used to provide to stuff the run. To Camp’s delight though the passing game provided for even more strategy by using alternate ways to attack a defense.

Mass momentum plays did not disappear though as many thought. Running off tackle using blocking backs became a very popular way to gain good yardage with the defensive backs retreating to defend the pass. This would lead way to another serious threat of mass momentum plays ruining the game of football by causing wide spread injury around the country. We will talk about this in more detail a later in a future article and how the issue was overcome.

Football though in 1906 and 1907 was a very interesting game as the coaches around the game used their newly adopted rules to try and gain advantages over opponents. One interesting example of this was the rule that stated when a forward pass went incomplete out of bounds, it became the defense’s ball at the point it went out of bounds. Many teams started using this play and its incompletion as an alternative for punting the ball away.

College National Champions of 1907

The Yale Bulldogs, unbeaten with a record of 10–0–1, had the best record. The Helms Athletic Foundation, founded in 1936, declared retroactively that Yale had been the best college football team of 1907.  Yale was named as champion by 6 different entities, Penn was not named champion by any but the University proclaimed its own name as the title bearers with their record 11–1 record . They outscored their opponents 256 to 40 but the one loss was a 26-6 drubbing at the hands of Pop Warner's Carlisle team with a young Jim Thorpe.

Professional Football's top team of 1907

Ohio professional football was weakened by the scandal in Canton and Masillon, but some how an All-Massillon team picked themselves up and fought off a tought Shelby team and also am up and coming Columbus Panhandles squad to with the Ohio State Title.

Please look for our next chapter in the history of football in this series where we will discuss some of the later revisions of rules that made the forward pass of 1906 more closely resemble what we see in today’s game.
 

The picture in the banner above was taken at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio of Joe Guyon's Canton Bulldogs jersey he wore. The Pro Football Hall of Fame needs to be a bucket list place to viiiiiisit so that you can enjoy seeing football history in person.