Football Rules 1910 Part 1

The forward pass in American football was first legalized in 1906 but the first few years it was used it was heavily restricted. The 1910 Rules revisions were aimed at reversing that and started to mold the forward pass to something we would recognize today.

The 1910 joint sessions of the of the Intercollegiate and Conference Committees established a lot of reform especially in the area of re-tooling the offense side of the ball. The last two parts of this series saw how the rough injury plagued strategies of mass momentum and interlocked blocking werebanned by the revisions of 1910. The Committees also recognized that by stripping the offenses of these weapons, which were mainstays of offensive strategy in that era, that the defense would gain a definite advantage over the opposition.

Football could not survive without balanced attacks between the offensive anddefensive sides of the ball. The football minds of 1910 saw the passing game as one tool that could be tweaked to retain the balance needed. 

Interference is addressed

The Rules Committees decided that the passes would be effective but that they had to be thrown from five yards behind and could travel no further than twenty yards beyond the line of scrimmage. This conservative reform by today’s standards was more than made up in the revisions to the pass interference rules. He first rule on this subject is a dandy and is best described by the actual verbiage used in 1910.

"No player of either side while in the act of catching a forward pass shall be tackled, thrown, pushed or pulled, shouldered, or straight-armed until
he shall have caught the ball and taken one or more step in any direction, provided that any such interference which is incidental to a bona-fide attempt
to catch or intercept the pass shall not come within this prohibition. Note:-If a forward pass is merely touched or fumbled by a player, no players of either
side may even interfere with an opponent until the ball is actually in the possession of the player except in a bona-fide attempt to get at the ball."

This rule is quite interesting when examined. On one hand it says the first person to touch a forward pass has every right to try and obtain it into his possession without the hindrance of being touched by anyone until he does possess the ball and takes one step towards any direction. This is of course unless that hindering player was trying to get at the ball. Does this sound familiar? Yes this is most likely where the rule premise of playing the ball and not the man came into being, at the very infancy of the forward pass itself. We have since the inception of the interference rule tweaked it a bit by allowing
contact by an opponent to a potential receiver who has merely touched the ball but other than that modification the rules still pretty much stands the same today as it did almost 100 years ago.

Offensive restrictions addressed

The passing rule revisions had other solid roots in 1910 that are still the basis for rules in the twenty-first century. A revision of 1910 made it illegal for offensive players to make any contact beyond the line of scrimmage during a passing play until the ball was caught by any player. Again the premise of catching the ball has been replaced by that of simply touching the ball, but this is the foundation of the restrictions of contact by offensive players beyond the neutral zone for forward passes that go beyond the zone. This rule had a few exceptions in 1910 though that included allowing offensive contact down field
in an attempt to advance the ball by running after a catch and in the actual attempt to catch the pass. The other exception was after the play had gone twenty yards beyond the line of scrimmage the defensive players were allowed to use their hands to push and pull opponents out of the way to get at the ball or the man carrying it. An interesting note to all of this is that a player was not considered to have crossed the line of scrimmage until he was past every defensive player who had started on the line of scrimmage at the play’s onset.
Only offensive players who started on their teams end of the line or in the backfield were allowed to touch a forward pass. Also only the team that put the ball in play on that particular scrimmage play could attempt a forward pass.

Defensive restrictions and exceptions

The players of the defense were under almost the same restrictions as the offensive players on forward passes beyond the line of scrimmage due to the 1910 revisions. They could only contact an offensive player who possessed the ball and had taken one step unless they were making a play on the ball or trying to get to the man with the ball. They also could not contact offensive players during a kick play from scrimmage unless it traveled at least twenty yards beyond the line of scrimmage. They could make this contact on scrimmage kicks shorter than twenty yards provided that their hands were close to their bodies in an attempt to ward off and obstruct opponents from getting to a player who was carrying the ball.

The great revisions of 1910 did not end here though. To give them justice we must use yet another edition of this series to complete them, and we will in Part 28.

The picture in the banner above is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, and was taken by an unknown photographer of the Creighton University football game in 1910. I cropped it a bit to get a better look at the game itself and the players. Don't worry it was mostly sky and some builldings that I cut off.