The 1911 football season

In this edition of the Football History Rewind series, part 29, we examine the rules changes and the season of 1911. This was the final season of old-time football before bigger changes yet to come.

The History of Football year by year series in the last few editions has just journeyed through one of the most radical rules revision periods of the history of the game in 1910. The Game of 1910 was much different because of these rules changes than it was a few years earlier. From our twentieth-century perspective, the rules more closely resemble what we are familiar within the game of football in 1910 whereas the rules of 1900 would lead one to believe it was a different sport altogether. The truth be told it was a different game! 

Items such as the forward pass, seven men on the line of scrimmage before the snap, and tackling rules took the game from a brutal battering ram of humanity thrust into a wall of flesh to a strategic game where individuals could make a difference but the concept of working as a team was still prevalent. The coming years after the year of great revision would have coaches and players exploring the new rules and concepts and would open the door for new strategies and philosophies on the gridiron. The rules makers would make their tweaks to the new rules as well as they experimented to make the game safer for participants while at the same time trying to keep the playing field level for both sides of the ball and keep the fans interested in the spectacle of the sport.

New strategies?

The 1910 rules revisions must have been somewhat of a shock to the coaches that first year for there was only one truly new concept introduced in that season. The University of Minnesota and their coach, H.L. Williams ( a Yale product), were the only ones brave enough to tread out into the unknown waters of change. All other teams stayed with what they knew and had performed before but many had to adapt these old standards to conform to the legality of the rules.

Minnesota’s Williams tried a new concept where he would not show the look of his formation until just before the snap. Under this strategy, Minnesota’s offense would gather around the line of scrimmage but not be in any certain positions or formations. Then just before the snap the players would leap into their proper positions, creating a legal formation, and snap the ball. Defenses never knew what they were going to get coming at them until the ball was snapped! The defenders never had a chance to shift to match the offensive formations due to this masking of the offensive formation. The new concept was fondly called the Minnesota Shift.    

Results of change

What was really important to those inside and outside of football’s inner ring was did the safety of the players increase due to the rule changes or was it still the same bloody game it was prior? The season of 1910 statistics proved that injuries in the game of football were drastically reduced and the new rules were the factor that caused this decrease! The public outcry against the game’s brutality had been quieted.

At the same time, the critics inside football who did not want change because they felt the game would become dull and uninteresting to spectators were silenced as well because the games were still very interesting and entertaining to the masses. The rules makers could not have hoped for better results! They and their innovations had probably saved the game!

1911 the tweaking begins

The men that met and made the rules did not sit on their hands though in the next year. On the contrary, they kept at the drawing board to revise the rules further and enhance the game to new levels. The biggest change to the rules in 1911 had to do with the forward pass aspect of the sport.

The forward pass was still only a few years old at this point in history and it was not used very much due to the risk versus rewards factor. The risk was that a pass that was not caught was treated the same as a fumble and almost always was a turnover. Coaches were afraid to use the pass in their game plans as a regular play because of the risk of losing possession of the ball. The forward pass held the status of what today we would call a gadget play. It was used mainly by offenses as a surprise tactic or one of desperation.

The rules makers decided to change this characteristic of the forward pass because most wanted to see it become a standard weapon in an offensive’s arsenal.  The “fumble” aspect of the dropped passes also provided roughness which the rules committee wanted removed from the game. In the spring meetings of 1911, the rule committee changed the rules of a dropped or incomplete forward pass that hit the ground to be a dead ball. The incomplete pass was born!

The Season of 1911

This season was the last of an era of old rules as we will the major reforms of the 1912 rules body. With that there was a big group of teams that went undefeated.  Navy finished with a record of 6–0–3. A great record indeed as two of the Midshipmen ties were scoreless games with the other top unbeaten teams, in Penn State  who sported an 8–0–1 ledger and Princeton who recorded an 8–0–2 mark themselves. Other teams that finished the season unbeaten were Florida 5–0–1 and Minnesota at 6–0–1. The Helms Athletic Foundation, which was established years later in 1936, declared retroactively that Princeton had been the best team of 1911, and this the Tigers are recognized as the National Champions.

On the professional circuit the team of the Shelby Blues once again captured the Ohio State title in football by knocking off the Akron Indians twice but won the title in their season ending victory agains the up and coming Canton Professionals. You can learn more about the Blues in a post and podcast we did a few months back titled The Shelby Blues.

The forward passing rules still had some ways to go through and more progress would be made in 1912 to that respect. Please look back for the next edition of Football History Rewind part 30 when we will examine how the 1912 revisions would make their mark on the game we love.

The photograph in the banner above is courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons collection of public Domain pictures. It is a cropped version of the Pomona College football team, 1911. First published in the 1911 Metate yearbook of Pomona College. Taken by an Unknown.