Football

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Pop Warner is one of the most well-known names for early football coaching. The innovator contributed much to the game in its early years.

Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology sat down with us to chat about the first season that Glenn Pop Warner coached at team. It was at his alma mater and it was a significant season.

This conversation is based on Tim's original Tidbit titled: footballarchaeology.com/p/todays-tidbit-warner-and-the-inexperienced?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web">Warner and the Inexperienced Cornell Eleven.

-Transcribed Conversation on Pop Warner's 1sy Season with Timothy Brown[b]

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And talking about football history, we are going into football archaeology mode because it's Tuesday, and Timothy P. Brown is here to visit with us once again to talk about one of his fantastic posts that he puts out each and every day.

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hello, Darin. Thanks for having me back. Looking forward to chatting once again.

This every Tuesday is really quite remarkable. Love hearing about your tidbits. You know, it's good to see your tidbits each and every day, but having a conversation about them once a week is really an amazing thing. Takes you a little bit more in-depth. You have Some other great facts through your research on some of these tidbits.

And today, you're going to talk about one of my favorite people in football, Glenn Pop Warner, who was born probably about an hour away from where I live, south of Buffalo, not too far from Erie. And, you know, I love Pop Warner stories, and he has so many great ones. He coached all over the country. So this one's a really interesting one from one of his early years that I love to hear about.

Yeah. Yeah. I think Pop Warner is just a fascinating character.

And so, you know, love him as well. But so, yeah, I think this is, this is another one of these where, you know, we bring certain assumptions to our view of football here in the 2020s that just were not the case back in the 1890s when this story is based. And so the key point here is that with Pop Warner being one of the guys like this, but, you know, before 1900 for sure.

And then even after that, a lot of people, a lot of, you know, young men ended up on college campuses who had never played football before and yet who went out for the football team. So, you know, if you lived out East and you were going to Harvard or Yale or something like that, well, chances are you probably attended some prep school, and they had a long history of football. You know, they started playing fairly early on, but if you were from, you know, small-town Kansas or Minnesota, they might've played and they might not, you know, I mean, there were certain, there was certainly football going on in the smallest and remotest of towns, but there was a lot of places where they just, they just weren't playing yet.

So, you know, you'd be aware of the game, it'd be in your local newspaper, but you may not have ever played. And so many top-notch athletes showed up on campus, not having any football experience. And so part of the coach's job was to figure out how to get those guys to join the team and try.

And so, you know, we've talked in the past about the alums who would come back and help coach. And a lot of that was they were teaching entirely, you know, they were teaching guys who had never played the game before. How do you block? How do you tackle it? How do you get out of your stance? All the stuff that, you know, most people now learn in youth football, or as freshmen in high school or sophomores in high school, whatever it may be, you know, they were, they had to pick up those skills as freshmen in college.

So, you know, the article is basically about him and the challenge of, you know, trying to get, at he was coaching at Cornell. He was; he had gone to Cornell and played for four years. And then I think he was gone for a year and came back at the time that, you know, this story occurred, but, you know, he's trying to figure out how do I get all these guys to join and then to get them schooled up in order to, you know, to feel the good team.

And so, you know, he was commenting that a lot of times back then, they used to call it the talent level, but they would call it the material. We have fine material, but it's inexperienced, right? And so that was his thing. And, you know, another piece of that was that it was just interesting. In that particular year, he had an athlete who had played center in the past, and he was considering having the guy play left halfback or right halfback.

And it was like, okay, how many times today in a college setting do you have one player, and you're going? Should I play him at center or halfback? Right? I mean, that just doesn't happen nowadays. You know, the body types of morphed and training and all that kind of stuff. But back then, I mean, that was just a kind of normal everyday thing.

Unfortunately for the guy, he ended up playing center. But, you know, yeah, so, you know, I think it's just that, you know, our thinking, you know, now we live in this world where these kids are recruited, you know, I mean, they're heavily recruited, and they've, you know, there's a game film, you know, there's plenty of film on every high school kid that's out there, you know, nowadays. And so, you know, but then it was like, you just, you called for, you know, he had tryouts, you called for everybody to come and join the team.

And it was whoever was there; it was there, right? And, you know, you would often have some guy who was a star fullback or tackle the previous year that, for whatever reason, financial or whatever, just didn't show up the next year. You know, the coaches wouldn't know necessarily, you know, they wouldn't have a whole lot of advance notice and just be like, oh, Bill didn't show up this year. So we got to find somebody else to play tackle.

You know, it's just the kind of manpower planning and depth charts that we think of today. Well, it might be turning back to that with the transfer portal. It seems like somebody's leaving constantly on teams, and new people are coming in.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a whole other story.

I mean, you know, just for one, I'm all for it. I mean, I may not like what it's doing to the game, but for the individual kids, I'm all for it. You know, I'm glad they get to go wherever they can go.

So, but yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, the, the, the center versus halfback thing is interesting just cause, you know, a lot of times, you know, centers were pretty good athletes back then, you know, meaning, you know, they were more like halfback or fullback type guys. A lot of times, teams pulled centers or, you know, expected them to do some special stuff. Um, you know, so they had to be pretty darn good athletes, but not a whole lot of, uh, not a whole lot of guys shifting from O line to the backfield these days, high school level.

Sure. Right. But it was a single-platoon football back in that era, too.

So, you know, they could use their athleticism at the center on defense, which we call a nose guard today, uh, you know, shooting gaps or whatever they had to do wording off to get a tackle. So, and it takes some certain athleticism to, uh, you know, rules were different than to, to get the ball snapped without getting your head knocked off too. I'm sure you had to be pretty quick at that.

So I can see where the transition is. That was a fascinating point, but it was something I really took out of that. It's sort of, uh, you know, like I said, I, uh, I like to read about pop Warner and I don't know that I've ever remembered this story and it's sort of, uh, you know, his humble beginnings, you know, I'm, you know, most of us are used to pop Warner, you know, developing, you know, a complicated single wing offense and the double wing and all these innovations he brought into football.

But just to sit there and think about the man, uh, you know, taking, having to take football, the very fundamentals and teach somebody that's not familiar with the game and, you know, put them out there on a Saturday to play as a, maybe a starting center or halfback or whatever. Uh, you know, it's just kind of an interesting aspect of the guy of the band, and probably all coaches at that time had to do something like that, or they couldn't, you know, have their schemes on play until they got the people up to speed. So, yeah.

Well, and I, but to your point, I think the fact that, um, Cornell wasn't the only school in that position, right? I mean, all their opponents, or any of their opponents anyway, were in the same kind of situation where, you know, they had a bunch of guys that had never played before. So, and, you know, I mean, that was one of the reasons why the freshmen rule, you know, worked to their advantage. Um, but, uh, you know, yeah, so it's, um, you know, Warner was just, uh, you know, he grew up in, like, as you said, I can't think of the name of the town, but a small town, you know, Western New York.

Springville, New York. Yeah. And, uh, and he was just a big dude, you know? I mean, he was, so he showed up on campus, and they were like, Hey, he started his first game, you know, and he didn't know what he was doing.

Uh, but he started just cause he was just, you know, pretty thick, you know, assorted guy, maybe not the tallest man in the world, but you know, big, thick dude. And so they, you become a lineman that way. Yeah.

I'm going to have to look it up. Cause I, you know, you may just make me think, I think Park H. Davis is in that same area. He's from Jamestown, New York, which is not too far.

I wonder if they ended up ever playing against each other. If they were in, maybe they weren't in the same years of, uh, playing high school. Yeah. I think Davis, well, Davis would have been at Princeton in the 1880s, right? In the early nineties.

Oh yeah. Maybe he's quite a bit older than Warner. Yeah.

Cause, you know, Warner showed up at Cornell at like 91, 92, something that range. Um, so I think, you know, Davis is just that much, um, just that much older. Cause he was, he was coaching Lafayette when, um, Fielding Yost, you know, was the ringer for him, you know, That's, that's true.

Yeah. He's probably 15 years older than Warner probably. Well, there goes that fantasy of seeing those two head-to-head.

I love the stories about, you know, guys who grew up in the same areas or, um, you know, even if it's cross sports, but you know, guys who knew one another or, you know, those kinds of stories and, you know, just the connections that you just normally don't think about. So it's just, it's kind of fun. So, you know, real, real fascinating, you know, from Cornell, the Carlisle, the Pitt, the Stanford, you know, Pop Warner was all across the country and had a lot of success everywhere he went and pretty interesting guy and pretty humble guy to sit there and pick out athletes and teach them how to play the game.

So I guess, uh, it's very aptly named the, uh, the junior football today. Most of them are called Pop Warner football. So very interesting.

Another great tidbit, Tim, we really appreciate that. And, uh, that you share these with us each and every day and the listeners, uh, you know, there's a way for you to, to pick up on Tim's Tidbits and get a copy of them sent to you too. And Tim will explain that to us right now.

Yeah. Uh, if you're, if you're interested, just go to footballarchaeology.com and, uh, down at the bottom of most of the pages, you know, just to, you can, um, click on it and subscribe. And if you subscribe, you're going to get an email every evening at seven o'clock and then a couple, a couple of others here and there.

Um, you know, basically, it's just whatever, whatever got published that day shows up in your inbox. And so you can read them at your leisure. Um, I also, uh, I'm still putting out everything I post on Twitter.

And so if that's your way of receiving, you know, various forms of news like this, then, um, you know, follow me on Twitter. But you know, the best thing is probably just to do them, to subscribe and make your life easier and more, much, much more pleasant. Yeah.

And it's a great site—footballarchaeology.com — and it's also a great conduit to some of Tim's books. He has his most recent one, how to hike with some football terminology, and one of my standbys, how football became football.

It's a great read, especially learning about early college football. I highly recommend both those books to anybody interested in football history because Tim does a great job on them. So, Hey, Tim, thanks a lot for joining us here again.

And, uh, and we'll talk to you again next Tuesday. Okay. Looking forward to it.

Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

Sometimes, the rough and tumble-game of football is tragic. Severe injuries and even deaths have occurred to participants who were just trying to enjoy the game.

Timothy Brown brought to light one of these circumstances from 1910 in a Tidbit he wrote about an interesting incident at Bethany College in 1910.

-[b]Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown Murder Football Field

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigScanDispatch.com. Welcome again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to another Tuesday.

We have Timothy P. Brown here from FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Hey, Darin.
Look forward to chatting.

It's a potentially difficult topic that we're going to talk about, but. I'll let that story develop as we go. Yeah, this one is kind of surprising.

Usually, your titles and your articles are a little bit lighter. And your title from early October was Murder on the Football Field. A little bit of a mystery hangs over with that.

I wanted to read this article like any good Agatha Christie or Alfred Hitchcock. I'm sure a lot of the other readers of FootballArcheology.com did, too. So we are glad you were here to tell us about this instance in this article.

Yeah, so, you know, one of the things I enjoy doing, you know, is kind of set up to some of these some of our discussions on your podcast is to just kind of talk about, well, how did I come across this issue or idea or information? And so this is one where, you know, I'm always looking at old RPPCs, so real photo postcards. And some of them I buy just, you know, because the guys are wearing some old equipment or, you know, the gear they have is just so horrible that it's just, you know, kind of almost amazing that they decided to play. And other times, it's just photographically, or something is appealing to it.

So, in this case, I came across an RPPC. It showed through the backfield for the Bethany College team in West Virginia from 1910. And I thought the picture was amusing because they're standing on the field.

You can see the goalposts in the background, and not too far behind the goalposts, but not too far to the left is a school building. With a bunch of glass windows, I just thought, OK, well, hopefully they had an accurate kicker. But, you know, if they didn't, then they broke some windows.

That's actually what got me interested in the image. But then, a lot of times, what I do is, you know, I knew it was identified as 1910 Bethany. So I did a quick search on them and found out that in one of their games, an opposing player had died.

And so then I said, OK, I'm going to bid on it. So I had a thing, and eventually, you know, I got it. And so then that's when I really kind of dove into the research.

It just did enough to know, OK, I could probably make a story out of this. So, I mean, what happened is that Bethany College, a small school in West Virginia, they were playing for the second time they were playing West Virginia University in football that year. And, you know, they'd lost, I think, a tie to a close game earlier in the year.

And so this is like, you know, if there's a 10-game season, there's a 7th or 8th game of the season. And the game had been pretty chippy. And, in fact, the Bethany coach had complained to the officials about, you know, just some of the behavior in the game.

And so, with a couple of minutes left, Virginia's quarterback, a guy named Monk, kicks a field goal to seal the game, make it 5-0. So, Bethany was pretty much going to be out of it. And then, several plays later, Monk is still on the field.

He gets by a Bethany player, falls to the ground, is carried off the field, and dies a couple of hours later. So now, you know, some of the initial reports came out. So, you know, any time a player died in a game, and especially in, you know, this is a fairly big-time game, you know, it got publicized.

So there were, you know, if you looked at almost any small town newspaper in the country, it had a short article about this player who was killed in a football game. The initial articles said that the umpire had kicked the Bethany player, a guy named McCoy and that he had seen McCoy hit Monk from behind. And then, so he thought it was deliberate.

And so then he kicked him out of the game for that. And then, you know, basically, right away, the local coroner sets up a coroner's inquest. It's going to be scheduled for a couple of days later, and he orders McCoy to appear. He wasn't arrested, but he was the next thing to being arrested.

And the whole thing was, OK, he was the coroner was viewing this as a case of he was investigating it as a murder. And so obviously that made it, you know, the headlines all the more dramatic. And, you know, pretty much right away, both schools canceled the rest of their football season.

So then, when it comes time to do the inquest, McCoy shows up. But by that time, the umpire was kind of walking back to some of his earlier comments. So, yes, he had kicked McCoy out of the game, but he was no longer saying, well, I saw him hit from behind.

And then other people, nobody on either team said, saw the hit. But there were people in the crowd who testified at this inquest that. McCoy hit Monk from in front, and it was basically a standard football play.

So nothing, you know, nothing unusual from that from that vantage point. Now, then, what was revealed in this inquest is that Monk. Had a history of concussions and even beyond anything that you can even think happened today.

The previous year, he had in a game, he had been hit, and he went down unconscious. The newspapers varied whether he was unconscious for two days or two weeks, but he was out of it for a significant amount of time. And then, you know, basically, the doctor said you cannot play football anymore.

His parents told him you could not play football anymore, but he went back to school for his senior year, went out for the football team, and, you know, because he's, you know, this hard-nosed kid or whatever, the team looks to be captain, you know. So, so basically, you know, once that testimony came out that, you know, the coroner is like, well, this is an accidental death. Right.

You know, you can't, you know, even if this, even if McCoy had done something dastardly, you know, Monk was playing when he shouldn't have been. And, you know, he had this history of, you know, significant head injury, and yet he went out there and played again. You know, so anyways, you know, it's one of those where, you know, there's some other little extenuating circumstances.

But I think for me, then, you know, I don't recall seeing other instances where, you know, somebody was being, was potentially charged with murder for activity on a football field. I'm sure there are other situations, you know, I probably should do some searching for that. But it kind of raises the question of what would it take to, you know, so what would have to happen today for people to leave the field and, or, you know, folks in the stands and look at it and say, that guy ought to be charged with murder, you know, in the event somebody was killed as a result of being hit or struck, you know, on a football field.

So, you know, you know, in my mind, I see certain, I'm not advocating necessarily for the murder charge, but I'm not advocating against it. But there are some of the targeting hits that I think are horribly foul, you know, in terms of the way that some, you know, players are hitting one another. There, I've seen cases, more at youth level, actually, than among older kids, where somebody grabs a face mask and is literally like spinning another guy around, you know, twisting his neck, that kind of thing.

What would you know if that happened? And then you got, you know, another case would be, you know, sometimes it's these fights, you know, and somebody's helmet comes off. But if somebody took their helmet and swung it, hit another guy who doesn't have his helmet on, you know, if you hit him in the head. It's sort of that Miles Garrett, Mason Rudolph from a Steelers-Browns game, probably about four or five years ago.

I think that was a famous case of that with Miles Garrett swinging the helmet at an uncapped Mason Rudolph or whatever, whatever happened before that because they were talking about maybe pressing charges there, and it didn't even make contact, you know, for assault. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, you think about it, it's like, OK, how far does the fact that you're playing a football game absolve you from your behavior? You know, behavior that, you know, I mean, you played the game.

One of the great things about it is you can go run into a guy, slam him, and take him to the ground, and it's all sanctioned. Everybody's happy that you did it, right? You can't do that on the street, right? And you can't do it in your classroom. You get to do it on the football field.

And yet where, you know, where does one cross the line? I just think it's an interesting question. Thankfully, you know, it's not one that we have to face, at least, you know, certainly very often, but, you know, the potential is out there, you know, that so it's kind of, I mean, it's not that you have to answer the question. Still, it's just, you know, to think about what would it take, what would it take to for somebody, you'd say, OK, that that guy ought to be charged with murder for that. Yeah, are you going to solve this mystery? I don't know if I want to be the judge and jury on that one. That's yeah, I mean, I think there's, you know, especially nowadays, we have video on everything from little kids' games.

You have probably three or four parents filming it. Everything's filmed, though, you know, and you get the NFL games. You got forty-five cameras from every angle of the stadium looking at it and, you know, five drones and whatever.

You know, so I think you can probably figure out what's going on pretty much on almost any football game, especially major college and professional and probably a lot of the other ones, too. So, I think you may have more video evidence if a crime happened on a football field than you would maybe even at a bank. You know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good point. I bet it was like, you know, very few games, you know, were filmed and certainly not a Bennie West Virginia game, you know, I'm right just wasn't going to happen, you know.

So, yeah, it's. Yeah, yeah, I mean, just another one of those other examples of where technology just changes, changes the questions and the answers and. So.

Yeah, and I think it's crazy, crazy, crazy; I think there's more of a camaraderie in football, maybe in the more modern eras when there's a brotherhood, and everybody understands, you know, that you're all on the same side and you can get somebody can get hurt badly if you do a cheap shot because you see, you know, teammates and opponents come together when somebody goes down. I think even more so than this era where people just, you know, wanted to hurt you sometimes, and that was just the way the game was at that period of time. Yeah, so I think it's a little bit more. It's calmed down a little bit, and people understand a little bit more that they can really do some damage to somebody.

Yeah, and I think, you know, obviously the the protective gear and everything is much better, obviously, all the concussion protocols are we're in a lot of space. Both have bigger, faster, stronger athletes. So, you know, it's.

That getting that goes on is really pretty incredible; that's true, and people are still getting hurt, and sometimes even death is occurring, and that's a bad thing, too. So hopefully, we will get some technology, rules, and techniques and try to prevent people from getting permanently injured and, you know, even worse. So, hopefully, that's in the future for football.

So, Tim, we really appreciate you bringing up this story; I mean, it brings up you bring up a lot of questions; people are going to be thinking about this, I know I'll be thinking about this and something that happened, you know, one hundred and ten, one hundred fifteen years ago and, you know, bringing some light to it and bringing some memory of this young man that passed away playing a game that he loved, even to the point where he knew he was in danger playing it and did it anyway and to his own detriment. And, you know, it all comes through just seeing a building with a bunch of windows and a goalpost by it. And you're really interesting.

So, yeah, you have some interesting things like this each day in your tidbits on footballarchaeology.com. And maybe you could share with the listeners how they, too, can participate in reading this and enjoying your work. Yeah, so, you know, the easiest, best, and my preferred way would be that somebody goes to goes to the site, you know, www.footballarchaeology.com, subscribe, you'll get an email every night at seven o'clock Eastern with that day's story. Alternatively, you can follow me on Twitter, in threads, or on the Substack app.

Of course, you can always bookmark the site and visit it periodically. But do whatever works for you. The information is out there, so have at it and consume it however you prefer.

All right, well, footballarchaeology.com is the website; we have the show notes and the links to get to this particular tidbit, we'll also have a link in there, too, that'll get you to the rest of Tim's site. And his name is Timothy P. Brown, and we enjoy him each and every Tuesday here on Pigskin Dispatch. And Tim, we thank you once again for shedding some light and enlightenment on Football of Antiquity.

Very good. Thank you, sir. And we will see you next week.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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One of the top experts in early football rules history, Timothy P. Brown, joins us in the discussion to explain the 1915 season of Brown University. Timothy Brown's FootballArchaeology.com has a daily football factoid that he shares, which is quite interesting in a short read. They uniquely preserve football history, and we are quite happy that Tim has agreed to join us each week to review some of his Today's Tidbits. Click that link, and you can subscribe for free and receive them each evening.

This post originated from a Tidbit that Tim wrote back in 2022 titled footballarchaeology.com/p/todays-tidbit-a-bad-loss-and-a-bonus?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web">A Bad Loss and a Bonus.


-Transcription of the 1915 Brown University Football Team with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and it's Tuesday. And once again, we have some football archaeology with Timothy P. Brown, author and historian that has a great website of footballarchaeology.com. Tim Brown, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Thank you for having me on again. As always, I am looking forward to chatting.

Yeah, this is a really interesting topic that we're going to talk about, the 1915 Brown Bruins, and have a very interesting story that you shared back on September 2nd, and really enjoying this one, and I think the listeners will as well.

Yeah, well, actually, you know, before chatting about that team, I think it was yesterday or the day before, an RPPC, so a real photo postcard of that 1915, of Brown's 1915 team, sold on eBay for $1,025. Wow. So, I mean, that's the, you know, it's not like I've tracked it, you know, over life, but that's, I think, the highest-priced postcard I've ever seen.

But, you know, it has Fritz Pollard on the team. So, a lot of times, especially older African Americans, you know, football stuff, you know, can command a pretty good, pretty good price. You know, it's an item that I don't think I've ever seen before until it was offered in that particular auction.

And then, you know, even for NFL people, you know, Fritz Pollard was the first African American coach in the NFL, you know, back in like 21 or, you know, something along those lines. So, you know, but just a couple of interests kind of collide, and all of a sudden, you're paying some pretty big money for a postcard. I mean, he was a tremendous player as well.

I mean, I think every team that he went to, he really brought their game up quite a bit to a different level. So, that's another reason to want to collect that, to have a legendary player. So.

Yeah. Well, you know, so the thing about that, you know, the 1915 team, you know, is that you know, Brown, I think, you know, by and large, has been kind of a second tier program, you know, and it was at the time. I mean, and I'm comparing that to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, and then, you know, probably like West Point.

Those were probably the premier, you know, year after year premier programs. But they had a long-term, you know, long-term coach at Brown, you know, during some of that period. And, you know, they have some pretty competitive teams.

And so, they actually, I think they ended up, they were, they surprisingly beat Yale that year, which they seldom did. But that was the Yale team, the 1915 Yale team. Frank Hinckley had come back to coach the team in 14.

And they kind of struggled. And then they were really struggling in 15. That was the year that the captain, Alex Wilson, fired the head coach.

So, he fired Hinckley. And he brought in Tom Shevlin to come in, you know, kind of fix things up for the last couple of games of the year. But, you know, part of his being fired was, Hinckley's being fired was that they lost to Brown.

So, you know, it was, I think that's the last instance I'm aware of where, you know, that was the last year Yale still had that, the captain runs the show, you know, kind of philosophy. But, you know, he literally fired the coach because his word was final. And then they, you know, they switched things up at, you know, the following year.

So, that was, you know, kind of an interesting element of it. And even, you know, to kind of the perspective of Percy Houghton, who was the coach at Harvard, didn't even go, or he wasn't there for the Harvard-Brown game because, you know, he thought it more important to go scout Yale, you know, and coaches used to do that sometimes. Stagg did that a few times, and you know, you read about it, and you know, here and there, people did that.

So, I mean, it just kind of tells you that it was a real upset, you know, that coach didn't even show up for the game. But that sounds, I mean, it sounds so strange, but I think you explained it the last time we had you on; we talked about the first coach and when the word coach was used, and it just recently aired as a podcast. And, you know, you usually explained to that, that the coaches really were important, not really as important at game time as the captains were, like they are today, you know.

So, it's. Yeah, the captains called the plays, there was no coaching from the sideline, all of that, you know. So, the practice week was done so he could go scout the teams, and the captain took over.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, to some extent, that, you know, that is the case. But then, you know, so the other thing that's just kind of interesting about that team and football in general at the time was Harvard, Yale, and Princeton had policies that they didn't go to bowl games, right?

And, you know, this was still, you know, they didn't have postseason games. And so, this is, you know, the Rose Bowl had a game back in 02, and then that was kind of forgotten. And then they restarted it in 1916.

So, they're inviting, you know, the best team they could get from the east that played in the 1915 season. But, you know, so Harvard, Yale, Princeton wouldn't go. And so, you know, Brown ended up being, you know, the best team that they could find, you know, who would say yes.

You know, and so then they did whatever the five-day, you know, train trip out to Pasadena. But, you know, there were, you know, the Big Ten didn't allow teams to play in postseason games. They did allow Ohio State to play in the Rose Bowl, I think in like 22, I think it was.

You know, and so just in general. And then even teams that did where the school or the faculty allowed it, you know, sometimes the kids just said, no, we're done. You know, they're just, they were just done with the season.

And, you know, they'd already turned in their equipment, whatever. They didn't want to spend time away from family for the holidays, you know, those kinds of things. So, I mean, it's just a different world.

You know, we'd know so many teams playing bowls, you know, to begin with, but it's just kind of the expectation of, you know, well, of course, you're going to go to the bowl. But back then, you know, a lot of times, you know, teams had the opportunity to go, but they turned them down. But so Brown ended up, you know, playing in the game, and then they lost to Washington State.

So, you know, that was kind of a, for the folks out West, that was a big deal is, you know, kind of a credibility boost that one of their teams could play and beat, you know, a team that's now, you know, of the Ivy caliber. So, you know, it's a big, you know, kind of a big deal, you know, for those folks. Yeah.

So, okay. So we already said that Fritz Pollard was on that team. Was there anybody else significant on that team besides Pollard? Yeah.

One of them, Wade, now I'm blanking on his name. Wade, Wade, Wade, Wade. He was a guard or tackle.

Wallace Wade, sorry. And so he was, he coached Alabama, took them, you know, to a couple of Rose Bowls. And then he, he was the coach at Duke for quite a while.

They played when Oregon State played the Rose Bowl at Duke because of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. You know, so the 42 Rose Bowl, Wade was still the coach there. So, but he, you know, he and Pollard were probably the most famous of the Brown players that year.

Very interesting. And, you know, some great, great research, and we appreciate you sharing these teams and some of these innovations from football from so long ago, your football archaeology site. I want you to share with people how they can, you can find your tidbits that you'd share with us each and every day and how they can subscribe to your website to make sure they know when that you've released them.

Sure. So, you know, my website is just, you know, footballarchaeology.com. You can also find me on Twitter under the same name. And, you know, the gist of it is I publish these, I publish a tidbit every day, comes out at seven o'clock Eastern time.

And so if you subscribe, you'll get that as an email newsletter. And then obviously, if you're, you know, you could also just visit the site anytime you want. And, you know, there's a full archive in there with, you know, now getting on, you know, 300, you know, some article, you know, fully long-form articles or tidbits, which tend to be more, you know, 30 seconds to a minute long reads.

Okay. Just little snippets. And I can tell you that it is exactly right at 7 pm.

It's very consistent because usually my family and I were watching a rerun of the Big Bang Theory. And the chime for my email signal, my notification comes right at the same time of the theme song for Big Bang Theory every time. So it's like part of the song to us now.

Well, it's just gets scheduled in the application. You could have just take more punctuality credit for than that. Well, you know, so I still have to manually do it on Twitter.

So, you know, but then it's going to be a 703, 705, somewhere in there. Yeah. Yeah.

We're well into the show by then. So. All right, Tim.

Well, thank you very much. And we'll talk to you again next week with some more great football archaeology. Cool.

We'll see you next week. Thanks.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

Up until about World War II football players by rule pretty much had to play the entire game. There were not offensive and defensive specialists. The skill sets that soldiers who trained for war by playing football gained added a surplus of roster talent and the rules were then adapted post war to allow mass substitution as often as coaches wanted to.

This ushered in the era of two-platoon football and Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology wrote a great post on the first All-America team from this new era.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on the 1st Two-Platoon All-America Team

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to another day where we get to talk to footballarchaeology.com's Timothy P. Brown about one of the great tidbits that he writes every day about football of yesteryear. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Thank you for having me on. I look forward to talking about two-platoon football.

Yeah, why don't you first let's give you a title? You titled this tidbit back in October of 2022, the first two-platoon All-America team. And why don't you explain to the audience what two-platoon football is and what was significant about this All-America team? Yeah.

So, back in the day, if you played a football game, you put your 11 guys or 15 guys out there, and that's who you played with. There were no substitutions. Then they started allowing substitutions, but pretty much, once you left the game, you were out, just like soccer remains today.

It was the same game; they came from the same origin, so similar rules applied. But over time, football allowed substitutions in certain instances, but for the most part, until 1941, if you, once you're out, you're out. There were no go-backs. And so, in 1941, because of concern about the, you know, there were a lot of guys enlisting, and they were, you know, I'm not sure if they were being drafted yet or not, but either way, there were a lot of college-age men heading into the military, even, you know, pre-Pearl Harbor.

And so, they were concerned about roster sizes. And so, they passed a rule allowing coaches to substitute anytime they wanted to in a game. And so, the funny thing is, this is, you know, I think at multiple levels, this is a story of how much people follow tradition as much as the rules.

So, even though the rule was passed in 41, pretty much without exception, the only people who got substituted, in the way that we think about it today, were kickers and punters. You know, coaches would bring in those kinds of people, but they and even those were very few because typically your punter, the kicker was your halfback or somebody, you know, one of the regular players. And so, but then in 1945, Michigan had a really depleted roster, and they were going to play, you know, Army, which had, you know, Blanchard and Davis and a bunch of other guys.

And they just knew they were just going to get their lunch handed to them. And so, Fritz Crisler, the coach, was looking for, you know, some way to try to, you know, give his team an advantage. And so, he realized, hey, the way this rule is written, I can swap my offense and defense out whenever I want to or swap players in whenever I want to.

Even though nobody's done it, the rule says I can't. So, from his vantage point, he was exploiting a loophole, right? I mean, not in the way the rule was written, but in the way it had been traditionally applied. So, he does that against the Army.

He basically plays offensive and defensive units. I think there were three or four guys who played both ways. They're, you know, that much better players.

Other coaches picked up on that, and they started doing it. Over the next couple of years, the two platoons, you know, the old no substitution was called the single tune. And two platoon, what became, you know, kind of the standard term for swapping offensive and defensive players.

And so, then, that's fine. And there, it was raining, you know, gaining speed. But it wasn't until 1948 that anyone named an all-American team with two platoons.

So, in 1945, 46, and 47, they still kept naming a single platoon all-American team. So, 11 guys, no specialists, right? And so, finally, this organization called the NEA was a big one, kind of like the UPI or the AP or somebody, you know, along those lines at the time. They named a two-platoon all-American team in 1948.

So, just, you know, some of the guys whose names, you know, a lot of people probably will recognize as Charlie Justice, who was back at, you know, North Carolina, Doke Walker of SMU, Eddie LeBaron, who played at Pacific, some guy named Darryl Royal, who was at Texas. Leon Hart was the only player named to play on both the offensive and defensive teams at Notre Dame. So, then the other thing I just said is that it doesn't so much relate to 1940. I just find it really interesting that it was not until the 1980s that all-American teams added kickers and punters to their rosters, right? So, I mean, it took all that, so, you know, we had moved into specialist players.

I mean, even through the 60s, there were still a lot of kickers and punters who were everyday players, right? You know, Don, like I grew up, so Don Chandler, an end originally and kicked, was a kicker as well. Honey Anderson was the punter, and he was a halfback, you know, so there was a lot of that going on. And like George Blanda, you know, he was a quarterback.

Yeah, Lou Groza is a lineman. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you can just go through it; there's a whole slew of guys like that.

And so, but so anyways, you know, but clearly specialists had come into the game, especially after the, you know, onset of the soccer-style kicker in the 60s, you know, with the Go-Go Axe and others. But it wasn't until the 80s that they, you know, they named separate punters and kickers. So just, you know, it's an amazing thing that it took that long.

Yeah. Wow. I didn't realize that about the punters and kickers.

I thought that would have been, you know, going on for a while. I was like, man, that's great stuff. So, you know, I guess the kickers today, even though they feel that they're shunned by the rest of football and looked down upon a little bit of not being, you know, sometimes called not real football players and everything, they would have been pissed back in the 70s when they weren't even honored.

Yeah. Well, you know, and the funny thing about it is like, you know, if you go back and you read the newspaper reports of guys who were named all American in the teens and the twenties and thirties and whatnot, a lot of backs were named, you know, especially in the heavy punting years, you know, they were named as much for their punting ability as for their running ability or their passing ability. You know, punting was just so important to the game, and they were the ones who did it.

Yeah. It wasn't like Jim Thorpe, one of the greatest punters and dropkickers ever. And that was sort of what some of his fame was besides his running.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. I mean, that's the triple threat. You know, the whole thing is running, passing, and kicking. You know, it is either a form of kicking or typically punting. So yeah, I mean, it was, there's, I mean, you just can go on and on about the, the number of guys who, who were especially running backs with, you know, fullbacks, fullbacks, a lot of times were like the big studs of the teams in the twenties and thirties.

And, you know, a lot of them were, were really, really effective punters. Yeah. So I guess, you know, World War II changed the world, and it changed the world of football, too.

So it's sort of that line of debarkation between the single platoon and the dual platoon because of the rule changes and, you know, a substitution. So very interesting. Great stuff.

Well, then, in college, they went back to single platoon in 52. The pros, you know, once the pros went, you know, swapping offensive, offense, and defense, they never looked back, you know, their game was much more about entertainment and everything. But once you went to platoon, you needed more coaches and bigger rosters.

The coaches became more specialized. I mean, think about how much more complicated the game has become. And a lot of that's because it's two platoons, you know if you only have so many minutes a week to impart, you know, knowledge and techniques to players, if you got to cut it in half, well, you know, it can't be as, you know, you just can't complicate it as much.

So, these coaches studied just defense and coached just defense. So, I mean, it's, you know, certainly among the top four, five, six rules in terms of the effect on the game, but the colleges went back in 52 to dual platoon really as a cost-saving measure. And then, you know, kind of slowly, and then especially in the late fifties and early sixties, swapped it over.

By 64, Katie had barred the door, you know, a total of two platoons. Wow. Amazing stuff.

And you sit there, and you think about how good athletes these guys had to be to be on the field for, you know, 60 minutes or 48 minutes, whatever it was at the time. It might've been longer than that back in that era, but they had longer, longer halves back then, too, like 35-minute halves. Yeah, that was more; that was all like pre-1912 or something like that.

I mean, that was earlier. Yeah. But I mean, just think about it in terms of just the shape of, you know, what players look like.

I mean, you know, you've got these six, eight, six, nine, 340-pound guys running around now, can't play a 60-minute game. They just can't. No, they can't even take all the offensive-defensive snaps, you know, unless you're an offensive lineman or a quarterback, you're, you're probably going to get substituted in while your team is on the field, and that, uh, that genre, that offense or defense.

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, my part of my argument is always looking at world-class rugby teams, and they've got guys for six, three, two 60, you know, running around as the, you know, kind of the forwards blocking, um, you know, they're the guys leading the scrum, but there aren't, you know, there aren't the kind of guys that you see in the NFL or, you know, almost any major college team.

And nowadays, half the D3 teams have kids who weigh more than 300 pounds, right? Um, you know, so it's, you know, you just can't, you can't play like that in a, in a 60-minute game, especially when there were far, there weren't TV titles, there weren't, you know, anywhere, there weren't anywhere near the number of passing completions or weren't that many balls out of bounds. The ball went out of bounds, and the clock kept running.

I mean, all that kind of, you know, the rules were so different. Um, the body types were different, but yeah, amazing stuff. Yeah.

Tremendous. Tim, you know, we enjoy these stories and, and, you know, learning about these little pieces of football, which this one's a pretty major story of the evolution of football, but, uh, you know, you, you share with these, uh, these stories and sometimes they're just fun. Sometimes they're really serious and game-changing like this one was. You call them your daily tidbits, and maybe you could tell folks how they can enjoy your daily tidbits.

Yeah. So, you know, the best thing is just to go to footballarchaeology.com and, you know, subscribe. You can subscribe for free.

You'll get an email. As a result, you'll get an email every night at seven o'clock with that day's story. Otherwise, you can follow me on Twitter, sometimes called X, but I don't call it that.

And then, catch me on the Substack app on threads or just bookmark the site and pop in whenever you want. Well, Tim, we appreciate you educating us and sharing your knowledge on football history. And we'd love to talk to you again next Tuesday about another one of your tidbits.

Well, I think we can find something to chat about next week. I'll leave that up to you. Thanks much.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

When I was researching information for my book World's Greatest Pro Gridiron Team, I kept seeing games where the time of the first half was much different from he second half.

It occurred almost every game, and though the first half was almost always the same time from game to game, the second stanza was all over the place. There had to be a reason.

Tim Brown over at Football Archaeology had the answer and he also shared it in a post he wrote and in a conversation on our podcast.

-Transcribed Conversation of Timothy Brown on the House of the Setting Sun

Football_Stadium_Minnesota_Golden_Gophers_Sunset_Panorama_-_panoramio.jpg">Tcf Bank College Football Stadium Minnesota Golden Gophers Sunset Panorama Panoramio is courtesy of mjdemay via Wikimedia Commons

Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to Tuesday, FootballArcheology.com day. We have Timothy P. Brown, the founder of FootballArcheology.com, joining us as he does each and every week to talk about one of his famous tidbits.

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Darren, good to see you, see your smiling face. It is about time.
About time. Yeah, great segue. Your segue-isms are getting better and better each and every time.
I am upping segue game. The dad jokes are a-flying, that's for sure. But Tim, now that you set it up, you have an interesting article from back in September that maybe back in September didn't mean as much as it does this time of year as we're getting closer to the winter season.

The sun going down affected the timing of games. I'll let you take it from there and tell us all about your tidbit. Yeah, so actually, the interesting thing is there is an unidentified reader.
I can't say who that is unless the reader gives permission. The reader gives you permission, Tim. Go ahead.
Oh, OK. So, one time, Darin asked me. Why is it always me? So, yeah, so just, you know, it's like anything else.

You know, you question, you go like, how did this work? So, as he was doing his own research on some things, he kept on seeing in the old newspapers. You know, 1800s and early, you know, 1900s. Oftentimes, the box score would have a little thing right at the bottom of the box, and it would say, you know, time of halves or time of quarters.

It would say 15 minutes, 15 and 10, or something like that. And so, and then typically, if there was a short quarter or a short half, it was the second half. So, you know, the question is basically, well, why the heck did they do that? Why did they shorten games? And so sometimes that happened because one team was getting blown out, but that was not generally the reason, you know, so even in tight games, it wasn't unusual to shorten, shorten a quarter or a half.

And so, you know, when I wrote it, I kind of used the, you know, the old terminology of de jure versus de facto. So de jure means, you know, by the rule or by the law, whereas de facto is in practice. Right.
And so when football first started, when we first brought it in, you know, when we were playing rugby. Football was just one of those stew of games that came out of, you know, 18th-century England and the norm was to play 45-minute halves. And so soccer still plays 45-minute halves, and rugby still plays 45-minute halves.

And when football got started here, we were playing 45-minute halves even though there was nothing in the rules that said that's how long it was. You know, the original football rules don't mention how long a game is supposed to last, but everybody knew it was 45 minutes. So that's what you did.
When football kind of, you know, as partly safety measures, you know, they were trying to give people rest and just reduce the amount of time that they're on the field. You know, football started, it went to 45 minutes and then 35 and then 30. And it's perhaps so.

Now, another tradition that was quite common was that, a lot of times, games started at about 2 o'clock or 2:30 in the afternoon. And so part of that was, you know, you had a lot of people, you know, fans who, you know, if they were factory people, they and, you know, clerks and whatnot, they work six days a week, as did their bosses. And if they were rural folks, well, farm chores have to be done.

You know, if you got a dairy herd, well, guess what you're doing every day. You know, so just from a lifestyle standpoint, a lot of people had things to do in the morning. On top of that, a lot of teams didn't have the budget to send their team to an away game and stay overnight.

So, you know, they would want to be able to take the train in the morning of the game, show up, play the game, turn around, and get home. And so not only did that mean they had to schedule a game a little bit later, but then there were times where they needed to, you know, the only way they would get home and make their connections that night was to be at the train station at, you know, 430 and or, you know, five o'clock or whatever it was. So, you know, for a combination of reasons, they ended up needing to cut games short.
And eventually, the rule makers, you know, it was kind of an understood thing. It wasn't. Again, it's one of those traditions.

It was, you know, in fact, people cut games short, even though the rules didn't say, you know, didn't allow it. But everybody did it. Right.

So, then we end up in a situation where, you know, during World War One, the government instituted light savings time, daylight saving, no S on that, daylight saving time. And so that came into effect in 1918. And so that was the first time that anybody had experienced that, at least, you know, in the US.
So you just kind of put yourself. I mean, we know what happens when daylight saving kicks in. But they just didn't anticipate it.

So there were teams that showed up at practice on Monday afternoon, right after daylight saving kicked in for the first time. And it was dark, you know. And so it's just one of those things where, you know, and then obviously that applied on Saturdays, too, because, you know, it gets dark on game day just as much as it does on practice.

But, you know, and in the tidbit, there's a discussion of like. And the USC and somebody, you know, playing in a game, and it's just like nobody could see by the end of the game; it was just so dark. And it's it's one of those things, you know, we take for granted that everybody's going to have lights.
Well, guess what? Very few places had lights. And if they did, it was jerry-rigged like the Navy used naval searchlights to light up the field for practice, you know. And, you know, so you have examples like that.
And that's that's one. I mean, some people had used them earlier, but they were painted white balls and yellow balls that came in right around. Yeah, that really became popular around that time.
That's when you start seeing them showing up in sporting goods catalogs. And it's really, you know, like. I know it's one of these things depending on where you have lived in the US; if you have not moved around a fair amount, you don't realize how much where you are in the time zone from an east, west, and north-south standpoint.

You don't realize how much impact that can have on how dark it gets early. So like Chicago is right on the east side of the central island. So it's like it's getting dark where it's like I'm in Detroit.
So, you know, still across the state, but if you're on the west side of Michigan, you know, it's light in the summer. It's like until.

You know, 10, 10 o'clock, you know, and, you know, beyond where it's like it's the same thing in Chicago, but it's nine o'clock. Right. So anyway, I mean, it's just one of those things you just and if you're northern, you know, then it's great in the summer, but then it gets darker early if you're further up north, because that whole sun, you know, the earth rotates and it tilts and not enough.

So anyway, it's just one of those things you don't think about, but like. Daylight saving was a big story in 1918. So then, because of that, in 1922, they formalized the rule that said at halftime, the referee could approach the the two team captains and ask if they wanted to shorten the halves.
And then then they they'll do so as needed. And whether that's because of the lighting or the one team getting blown out. Basically, they had they had the chance to do that.
Yeah, it's just thank God that the football didn't adopt what soccer does now with, you know, you have the two 45-minute halves, and then we're going to just kind of arbitrarily throw some time on at the end, you know, just and not tell anybody, you know, how much time is left. Just, you know, whatever that drives me crazy. Drives me nuts, you know, that they don't have that public with how much time is going on there.
But yeah, very interesting stuff, Tim. And I'm glad you mean you really cleared up mine because I kept seeing this, you know, you'd have like a 25-minute first half and, you know, something like 10 minutes for the second half. I'm like, why are they doing that? You know, you have a 13-to-nothing game.

You know, it's still still a ball game. You know, it's just driving me crazy. So, I'm glad you could clear that up for me and the listener.

So that's that's great. So, yeah, again, it's just one of those things you just don't even think about because, you know, basically, there are very few people living today if there's anybody, you know, that that's that, you know when Daylight Savings first showed up. So.
Yeah, crazy. And there are probably more people who see live games under the lights, you know, at your local high school than you do in the daytime anyway nowadays. So we're so used to the lights.

It's taken for granted, I guess. Yeah, but Tim, you have interesting items like this each and every day on your tidbits and people really love reading them. And maybe there's some listeners out there that aren't familiar with how to reach you and get ahold of your tidbits.

So maybe you could help them out with some information. Yeah, so easiest and best thing is just hit my website, footballarchaeology.com in order to find it, you got to put the WWW in front of it. And then, you know, you can every, you know, every story gives you the opportunity to subscribe.
You can subscribe for free. And then, as a result, you'll get an email every night in your inbox. And, you know, some people let them pile up, and they'll send it to you.

I know every Monday morning, I get a bunch of hits on my site because people who send them to their work address, you know, don't look at them until Monday morning. So anyways, and then you can also you can follow me on Twitter, on threads or simply, you know, or follow me within the within the Substack app. And so kind of whichever flavor works for you, have at it.

All right. Well, he is Timothy P. Brown, footballarchaeology.com. The links to Tim's site and to the tidbit are in the podcast show notes. You want to enjoy that, you know, the images and some of the great writing that Tim does there and some of those other tidbits.

You have links to get to it that way, too. So, Tim, thanks a lot for joining us again and sharing. And we will talk to you again next week.

Very good. Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

---

How important is the kick off right after the half in football? Can the game be better served by starting a half in a different way? Would this break tradition and ruin the game?

These questions were posed to rules makers long ago as well as in the modern era. Timothy P. Brown examines a session of thought along these lines from his Tidbit, footballarchaeology.com/p/todays-tidbit-getting-a-kick-out?utm_source=publication-search">Getting A Kick Out Of The Second Half.

-Transcription of the Elimination of the 2nd Half Kick with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And we are going to go in a really historic mode here and go with Timothy P. Brown and his FootballArcheology.com daily tidbits. He has one from January that we're going to talk about the kickoffs starting the second half.

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Darin, thank you. Appreciate being here and looking forward to chatting once again this evening.

Yeah, it's, you know, an interesting topic that you are talking about. We know, you know, traditionally in football, I can't think of a football game where I've ever had anything else besides unless you get some exotic like the original XFL where you start the game in each half with a kickoff, and the second half is no exception. And, you know, you've got some interesting story from the past on the second-half kickoff that we'd love to hear about.

Yeah, so this is, you know, this story, and I think, to put it in context, you kind of have to start from the standpoint that football is a game, and all games are just made up. It's got a made-up set of rules that are totally arbitrary. You know, if we decided tomorrow that a touchdown was going to be worth 24 points, boom, we make the change.

And that's what it is. It's just everything about the game is arbitrary. So, you know, basketball, you could give people two steps per dribble or use a 12 foot high basket.

Baseball could be three balls and two strikes. You know, I mean, so anything is negotiable. So, for various reasons, there have been times when people wanted to get rid of the kickoff in the second half.

And, you know, football had a kickoff in the second half because soccer or rugby had one. And, you know, that's kind of the only reason we, you know, we had it. And there's been suggestions to get rid of it for safety reasons.

You know, Amos Alonzo Stag, you know, argued for it. You know, go back in the day. But so there periodically, you know, this is what is an idea that kind of came up time and again and just never happened.

So it came up in 1898. It came up in 1928. It came up in the 30s a couple of times, but it just never happened because what they were one of the ideas that people throughout there was, instead of kicking off in the second half, just put the ball back where it was at the end of the first half.

And the team that had possession just takes possession and just carries on because, you know, kind of the thinking was halftime's really just to allow the players to rest. So, just put the ball back where it was. Right.

So it's almost like ending in the first quarter, going into the second quarter, the third quarter, and going into the fourth quarter. Yeah, exactly. Right.

So that's actually a great, you know, that's a great kind of analogy. I mean, we had the quarter system come in later on, too. Right.

But anyways, so, you know, but so if you think about it, just, you know, one of the fun things to play with this kind of what how would it change the game strategy? You know, if we adopted, you know, if next year for college football, we said, you know what, we're not going to kick off in the second half anymore. We're going to put the ball wherever it was spotted at the end of the first half. So if you're if you're on offense, how does that change your thinking about what you're doing at the end of the first half? You know, if you have it on the 48 or the 38, you're probably not going to try a long field goal just because time's running out.

You know, you're not going to be as risky, perhaps in your play calling, you know, because, you know, and both, you know, in certain situations, you might also be willing to, you know, if if you turn the ball over either on downs or otherwise, you know, you still got your opponent deep in their end zone. So even if they start the second half with the ball, they're down on the two or on the 10 or 15, whatever it may be. So just, you know, some of those kinds of things.

It's just kind of interesting to think about how that would change the game. You know, I mean, like if you're trying to manage the clock. At the end of the first half, you know, there's really no reason to manage the clock very much, right? It would definitely take an exciting element out of the game because there's that panic and urgency at the end of each half, you know, the end of the game, definitely. But at the end of the first half, there's that urgency to, hey, I got to get in field goal range or go into that two-minute or four-minute offense to get down there.

And there's an excitement that really puts you on the edge of your seat, so to speak. And, you know, that would be definitely an element that would probably be taken away that I don't I think some a lot of football traditionalists would be up in arms if they said, as you said, college football is going to no second-half kickoff. You know what I think? Well, OK, but the flip side of that.

And so, I mean, we know that this whole thing, this excitement, has evolved, right? Because, you know, there were times like the whole two-minute drill. That's, you know, that didn't really come about to the late 50s, early 60s. So, you know, some of this stuff has evolved.

Also, different approaches may have evolved. The other side of it is imagine the first half ends, and I'm on offense, and I've got the ball on your two-yard line. OK, well, half ends, we go into our locker rooms, and then we come back out on the field.

And now, the whole time, you're sitting there thinking, damn, they've got the ball on the two. And I'm like, who, we've got the ball, you know? So, I mean, there would be a whole lot of other kinds of anticipation during halftime when thinking about what you're going to do. How are you going to respond? You know, what play am I going to call? What defense are you going to try to call, you know, against it? You know, so I don't know.

I think there's some there, you know, that could potentially be interesting things. But the other side of it is some of the same kind of dissatisfaction with, you know, with kind of the way how the half ended. You know, there were times when I've written an article about this, too, but there have been times when people proposed getting rid of the clock entirely.

And instead of playing for 15 minutes, they would play 20 play quarters. So whoever got the ball, you know, if they had a 19-play drive, well, then the other team would only get one play that quarter. And they were actually, you know, there were some test games, you know, using that in the, I want to say, like 22, 23 eras.

Some people argued that the teams should be given five downs inside the 20 because they wanted to give them a chance to score. Right. So anyway, and then other people even like Pop Warner argued for giving teams a point for every first down.

You know, so, you know, I don't know. These are all kind of bizarre little. Well, we think they're bizarre because we're used to a certain set of rules, but.

All three of those or and the, you know, the change in our elimination of the kickoff makes sense to it's just. A different idea. Yeah, I can remember back in my officiating days, and this is pretty recent, probably like 15 or 20 years ago, where you had the traditional second-half coin toss when it really wasn't a coin toss.

It's just the captains that come out and make their choices. But this was before they had a deferment. You could defer the first half kickoff.

You only had to take the ball or, you know, which end of the field. Those are two choices back in high school in those days. So, about the time they had a deferment, they came up with eliminating that second-half conference of the captain of the team who lost the first-half coin toss to decide what they should do.

So you would know what they do is you go when you go in the locker room to grab the teams, the officials that go in there, you ask the coach, hey, you know, you want the ball, right? And, you know, usually you don't want to give them a choice. So they make a wrong choice. And you don't really have the kids make the choices because that really goes bonkers and sometimes upside down.

Kids just didn't understand that. And that's really what happened, why they did that with a deferment rule because the first couple of years of the deferment, kids would come out there, and their coach would say, if we win the toss, we want to defer, so we can have the second off kickoff. So the kids would come out when the coin toss and say, we want to defend that goal because that's what coach told us.

And they really that's what you want to do. Yeah, the coach says, I'm like, OK, and you go to the other team. Yeah, I'll take those.

They get the ball, both halves. So that's something that came to my mind when you're talking about eliminating the second-half kickoff because there's sort of a parody and fairness to that. OK, you get you won the coin toss, and you get the kickoff in the first half.

But in the second half, the other team gets it to sort of level that out with, you know, as best you can to have the, you know, even amount of chances to score, I guess, is, you know, it doesn't really work out that way very often. But at least on paper, it sounds pretty good, sounds pretty fair. And I'm just sitting there thinking, man, if they did something like you're talking, if that would have ever taken place, how important would that opening kick opening coin toss be? I mean, nobody would. There wouldn't be deferment anymore because you wouldn't have a second-half option, and nobody would pick a goal.

You would say, hey, I want the ball. There's no doubt about it. You'd be on offense first if you won.

Right. But, you know, originally in football. You know, just like, you know, if you watch a soccer match today, the team that starts the game by kicking the ball, they keep possession of it.

And that's the way football is, too. You know, you, the kicking team, just dribbled it a couple of feet and then picked it up and tossed it to one of their buddies. Right.

I mean, the original flying wedge was what that was all about. You dribble, dribble, kick it a couple of feet, and then the wedge closes on the guy who's the kicker, and they start running down the field. You know, so, you know, that a lot of that stuff, you know, I mean, at one point, it would have been crazy to say, well, you got to kick the ball at least 10 yards.

But, you know, that took like two decades or something for that group to come into play. So, you know, the kickoff is not always what, you know, what it is today. The other thing that comes to my mind, I guess, in comparison, is sort of what basketball did with the tip-off.

I remember we used to have a tip off both halves. Every time, you know, joint possession, you'd have a tip off. Now they have the possession arrows.

You really have that one tip-off; just alternate back and forth. Again, to try to put some parody in there. But yeah, that's a that's a that's a really good analogy.

But, you know, football also used to switch directions every time a team scored. You know, really? Wow. Yeah.

That's back, you know, the 1800s. But, you know, that's what they did. Well, you scored, and you switched.

That's an officiating nightmare there, especially with us officials that they have back in. Wow. That's something very interesting stuff.

That's interesting. I'm glad it didn't happen that way. I'm glad it is the way it is.

I'm more you're just you're just I love the way it is. Yeah, I know. I got to be more flexible there.

I'm pretty rigid about that kind of stuff. But great, great stuff. I love to hear history like that.

That's something you don't hear every day. And I haven't heard heard before. So very interesting.

So, Tim, you have these tidbits that come out each and every day. And I'm sure the listeners would love to know how they can to read about your tidbits. So why don't you please share that information with them? Well, I'm going to defer that to the next podcast.

OK, well, that while we're not having a second-half one. So sorry you lost your choice. OK, so yeah.

So, you know, if you're interested, if you want to make sure you get it every day or at least see it every day, you just go to my website, footballarchaeology.com. You can subscribe. And what will happen, you'll get an email every every night, seven o'clock Eastern with basically an email newsletter kind of format with the story. Alternatively, you can go to the site and read it, or you can follow me on Twitter at Football Archaeology.

OK, ladies and gentlemen, Timothy P. Brown, footballarchaeology.com. Make sure you check out his site, sign up for his tidbits, and listen to him every Tuesday on pigskindispatch.com. Tim, thanks again for joining us. Hey, very good. Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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There was an era of football where the punt may have been the most effective weapon for an offense. It just doesn't sound right to our modern gridiron minds to understand. No worries we brought in an expert to help.

One of the top experts in early football rules history, Timothy P. Brown, joins us to explain the kicking game strategy of early football. The story is eloquently shared below in the link that takes you to Tim's article, complete with photos of the era. Timothy Brown's

-Transcription of Punt Often with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to Tuesday, Football Archaeology Day, as we bring in our friend Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology.

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Hey, Darin. Great to see you, hear from you again, and looking forward to lots of Tuesdays during 2022, or 2023, I should say.

We already did a bunch for 2022. Old habits, old habits. It's hard to change that date. That's one of the toughest things to do.

We'll be doing that into March, I'm sure, all of us. Hey, you know, we have had a great football season. You know, we've had some great Tuesdays on Football Archaeology.

You know, I shared a lot of Rose Bowl memories with you. And, you know, now we've got into some of your interesting tidbits from November. One that really caught my eye is you had one titled from November 14th called Punning Early and Often about some early football strategy.

We'd really like to hear about it. Yeah, you know, I think for me, this is kind of a, it's kind of a fun topic, you know, for two reasons. I think, you know, one is just kind of the nature of, you know, punting was a much bigger part of the game, you know, back then.

But for me, it also, I think, just generally, you know, in line with that thought, it kind of just reinforces, you know, just the, when we're going back and doing history and reading about things that have happened in the past, it can be very difficult to make sure you have, you know, you're wearing their hat. And what I mean by that is, you know, you're working under the assumptions they worked under, not the assumptions you now work under, you know, because 100 years or 120, you know, some years have passed. And so, you know, the point of the overall article is just kind of discussing how, back in the day, teams often punted on first or second down.

And then once, you know, they got four downs, and they would punt on third down, too. But, for us, that seems like just such a strange way to play the game, right? It's like, why in the heck would you punt on first down? And yet it's, you know, if you kind of put yourself back under their assumptions and under their rules, then it starts making a bit more sense. And so, you know, in my mind, there's two kinds of key things that, you know, that are different about the game that they played versus what's played today.

And so one is just that people punted early on or on, on early downs, because it was difficult to move the ball. You know, you know, they just, you know, pretty much everybody with the, you know, exceptions here and there, but pretty much everybody played close formations, you know, with three or four backs, you know, inside the, the both ends being tight. And sometimes there'd be a wing or, you know, whatever, whatever it was, but I mean, for the most part, everybody's playing really tight together.

And, then, the defense has had a wide guy on either side to stop anybody from sweeping. So everything just got funneled into the middle. And so it was just hard to move the darn ball and do it consistently.

So it's one thing to get a first down. It's another thing that, you know, string together five, six, seven first downs, drive down the field and score. So, you know, it's just that, that whole idea that the, in a game of reasonably well-matched opponents, it typically was going to be a pretty low-scoring game.

You know, they did not have Yale and Harvard or Yale and Princeton or whomever, Michigan and Chicago, or when they played one another, they didn't play a bunch of 47 of 43 games, you know, it was 13 to 10, it was six to nothing. So just, you know, the fact of the matter is against well, you know, well-matched teams, it was really difficult to move the ball. So, they played the field position game, and they just booted it.

Right. And they booted it thinking, Hey, I'm going to have to keep the ball in their territory, and then they can make a mistake, and then I can capitalize on it. And so this particular article has a quote by a guy named George Brooke, who was a famous player and coach back then.

And, and, you know, wrote a lot of articles that were in, you know, syndicated newspaper articles, but he, he basically made an argument that the maxim he called it, that if the ball is inside your 40, you should punt it. That's it. Right.

Which is like, you know, again, what, one of those things we just can't even imagine. And so, just the way that he phrased it, I got it here. So, he considered that if you were inside your own 40, he considered dangerous ground.

And he said this is called dangerous ground because if the team should lose the ball for some foul or offside play fumble or other common means of losing it, then, you know, then their goal is going to be in danger. So it's kind of the reverse of what I was saying, which is why you want to punt it, but it just points out that, you know, so our assumptions are offenses can move the ball. And then the other assumption, you know, we understand fumbles or interceptions or something like that, losing the ball, but we don't think about it in terms of the first thing he mentioned, which is some foul or offside play.

So back then, most penalties resulted in a loss of possession, did you know? So, you know, yes, there was, you know, if you interfered with the center five-yard penalty, piling on or a couple of other things for 15-yard penalties, but an offside, if you were offside loss of possession, right? And then like, you know, the old, the forward pass before the forward pass was legalized, you know if you pitch the ball forward that was lost possession, you know, was another, another example of that. So again, it's just that we don't think about the game that way.

We don't think about, you know, jumping offside, boom, the other guy gets the ball at the spot, you know? So, so, you know, there was just, I think that much more reason, you know, you, you were risking yourself and your field position if you kept the ball and you were inside the 30, inside the 40, whatever it was. So anyway, it just kind of makes more sense now. Or, you know, if you kind of think about those two terms, you know, the offensive inefficiency and then loss of possession.

So no, no, just interesting to me. Yeah. It made me start really thinking about it, you know, especially before the forward pass was legal.

You know, we, we talked now, you know, we watch a game when they say, Oh, you know, the defense has eight in the box, or they're to stop the run. Well, they were putting, you know, 10, 11 in the box back then. There was no threat behind them to that.

So they could fill every gap and have an extra guy to shoot the gaps if they wanted to. So, so probably made moving the ball on the ground real ineffective. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, yeah. And you know, there are so many things that we just take for granted, the opposite of forward pass, but just other ways of just moving, you know, trying to move the ball, you know, just like a, well, I guess a shovel, shovel pass would have been illegal then anyways, but you know, option plays and those kinds of things that just, you know, hadn't come along yet.

So it was, it was tough. Yeah. Well, it's great.

Definitely that article and some of the photographs, the pictures you have in there and you know, Mr. Brooks quotes and things that really make you think and takes you back, you know, 120 some years ago and appreciate how the game has evolved over time and made a lot more enjoyable from a fan's point of view. And probably from an offensive and defensive strategist to make, make some headaches for them too, for the defenses, but the forward pass stuff, but Hey, just some great stuff and how important the kicking game was at that point. It really comes to light.

So we thank you for sharing that with us. And Tim, why don't we take this time? You know, you have these tidbits coming out each and every day. Maybe you could share with the listeners how they, too, can appreciate your tidbits each day.

Sure. So, my site where I post the tidbits every day is called football archeology.com. It's a site where you can just sign up for free, and you'll get, and you'll get an email delivered every night at seven o'clock Eastern. I also post on Twitter.

And so, but just to, you know, if you want to make sure you get it every day, you don't have to read it necessarily, but if you want to make sure you get it every day, just subscribe. And it'll pop right into your inbox dutifully. It most certainly does.

So, Tim, we appreciate you coming on again. Again, Timothy P Brown, footballarcheology.com, and Tim, we'll talk to you again next Tuesday. Okay.

Very good. Thanks, Darin. Appreciate it.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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NFL legend Bobby Layne wasn't just a great player, he was a player who adapted to the changing tides of the game. Today, we'll delve into a pivotal moment in his career – his transition from playing in the single-wing offense to thriving in the emerging T-formation. This wasn't just a simple position change; it was a testament to Layne's versatility and his ability to excel in a rapidly evolving landscape.

The single-wing, known for its reliance on a powerful running back and a more static quarterback role, was giving way to the T-formation, which emphasized a mobile quarterback with a stronger passing presence. Join us as we explore the challenges and triumphs of Layne's position switch, and how it not only impacted his career but also foreshadowed the increasing importance of the quarterback position in the NFL. So, grab your playbook and get ready to analyze the fascinating story of Bobby Layne's transformation from wingman to T-formation titan!

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on Bobby Layne

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And it's that time of the week again when we're going to visit Timothy Brown, the author and historian at Football Archeology, and see what he's up to with one of his famous daily tidbits.

And Tim Brown, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, thanks, Darin. Looking forward to chatting once again.

Yeah, this is a great weekly thing we got going on here. And Tim, before we get going into the tidbit, maybe you could, without giving away your secret sauce recipe here, tell us what your normal routine is for finding such interesting and off-the-wall topics for football for your writing. Yeah, you know, so I think, you know, some of it is really kind of planned out, and some of it's just happenstance or luck, I guess.

So, some of the topics are just things that, you know, I just have this the way my mind works a lot of times. I'm like, well, why is it this way? Why why do we do things this way? And so, you know, I just generally look at the game and ask the question and, you know, why do we call halfbacks, halfbacks and fullbacks, fullbacks and quarterbacks, quarterbacks? You know, I mean, just I ask kind of goofy questions like that. And so, anyways, as a result, you know, I just spend a lot of time researching football topics.

And so some of them are really kind of purposeful. I'm trying to find information on a specific thing. But oftentimes while I'm doing that, I just, you know, the article next to the one that I found, you know, for whatever I was researching happens to the headline that I noticed.

And that ends up being the more interesting article. So, you know, so and then other times just, you know, you're reading an article, and they're not just they don't just cover one topic. They talk about two or three things in an article.

And so sometimes the second or third topic is as interesting, more interesting than what I was really looking for. And so, you know, I just kind of notice them. And I have, you know, a couple of ways of tracking that information and kind of putting them in buckets. This is something I'm going to follow up on.

And once I'm done with the research I'm doing today. I just come up with judgments that are either worthy of a long article or a tidbit. Well, you really are quite the magician because I find myself quite often when you have that tidbit come out.

Yeah, I'm saying, you know, Tim's asking a question that I didn't even know that I wanted to know, but now I do want to know it. So it's something I never even thought of half the time. Like, wow, that's that's great.

This is really interesting. And it really dives into it. I think the listeners will enjoy that also.

And we'll give you a way to find Tim's tidbits here in a moment. But we're going to talk about one of his tidbits that really caught my eye back in early May. And it's on the great, legendary Bobby Lane and him switching some positions during his career.

Yeah, so this is an example of one that I kind of stumbled upon. I mean, I've always known about Bobby Lane and yada, yada. But, you know, I was I can't remember what I was looking for.

But at one point, I came across an article that said that leading into his senior season at Texas, he was going to be switching positions. And but he was just, you know, he was he played at a point when football was switching from the single wing and, to some extent, the Notre Dame box to the T formation. You know, so the T really came out.

You didn't say 1940 was really the word really bowed and then had the warrants that stopped some things. But so he's a post-war college kid, and his coach, Dana Bible at Texas, was a single-wing proponent. And so Lane was fullback slash halfback within the single wing.

And, you know, that was an offense that required. Required, I mean, the ideal was the Jim Thorpe, you know, triple threat, the guy who would who could kick, who could run, and who could pass. And Lane was all three of those.

You know, I mean, he was, you know, an absolute stud. The 46 Rose Bowl. He had three TVs rushing.

He had two passes and one receiving any kick for extra points, you know, which is, you know, 40 points every point in the game. He was a part of, you know. So, he was that kind of guy.

And, you know, some single-wing teams relied on their, most of them relied on their tailback to be the primary pastor. Some also had the fullback passing. You know, it depends on whether you have two talented pastors, and that's what you do.

But pretty much nobody had the quarterbacks pass the Notre Dame box. Yeah, they did. The Packers did that kind of stuff.

So anyway, they bring a new coach, and he installs the team. Oh, he looks around. He says, who's the best pastor on the team? Bobby Lane.

Boom. He became the quarterback during his senior year at Texas and was a total stud as a quarterback. But, you know, and it is because he was a great passer before.

You know, he's a great pastor in the single wing. So, he's a great pastor on the team. In some respects, he probably didn't utilize all his talents as well as a single wing did, but they wanted to move to the team.

OK, now I believe, you know, when he became professional, he went to the Pittsburgh Steelers, which is near and dear to my heart. And I think you even say that the Steelers were a single-wing offense at the time when they drafted Lane. I believe Jock Southern might have been the coach there and after the postwar days when they got Lane.

But then they they traded him away to the. Was it the Lions that they traded him to the Bears, the Bears, the Bears, who were a T formation team? It just seems odd to me. OK, he was a single wing in college, converted to the the the T formation and then a single wing offense drafts them and trades them to the T formation.

I'm just wondering, you know, a little bit curious about that. You know, it's part of my Steelers anxiety is part of that. But it's just a little interesting question.

I was wondering if maybe you knew. Yeah. So, you know, I think what happened there is that so he was drafted third overall by Steelers, and they were the last NFL team to be running the single league.

So that kind of tells you, maybe, you know. Maybe they should have thought it was an antiquated office at that time, right? It belonged as well. But that was the case.

But what was happening, too, is that right after the war, you had the All-American Football Conference. And so Lane also got drafted number two overall by the Baltimore Colts. So now he's in a situation where, OK, do I want to play for the Colts and the AFC, or do I play as a T formation quarterback, or do I go back single wing with the Steelers? And he basically told the Steelers he wasn't going to go play for him.

So, in order to recoup, you know, some value, the Steelers traded him to the Bears, who were one of the teams that pioneered the T formation back in 1940. OK, so he never played single-wing and professional. The Steelers traded him before he even played for him.

OK, that makes sense. OK, gotcha. Gotcha.

Because he wanted to be a T formation quarterback. Yeah, correct. Correct.

All right. That explains it. By then, you know, the NFL rules were, you know, a lot, you know, they were just more protective of quarterbacks.

They recognized the value, and they started just doing some things, liberalizing, blocking, et cetera, that just allowed quarterbacks to flourish and attract fans. And now we know what happened with NFL versus college games. Well, very interesting indeed, and a great glimpse back into both college and pro football history and one of the great players in Bobby Lane and Tim; why don't you tell people where they can find your daily tidbits and your website? Yeah, you can find the tidbits at www.footballarchaeology.com. You know, just hit the site and click on an article.

It'll give you the opportunity to subscribe. If you subscribe and you subscribe for free, you can. You'll get an email every day around seven o'clock in the evening with the tidbit or the full article.

That's what I published that day. There's also paid subscriptions that offer some additional value for those that are really into the stuff. And then or you can follow me on Twitter or Facebook using the same football archaeology name and but those, you know, potentially a few a few of my articles.

So I hope you subscribe. All right, folks, and if you're driving the car, don't try to stop and write it down or write it as you're driving. We're going to have it in the show notes.

So you can just come back later. And on PigskinDispatch.com, we'll get you right to Tim's site and to where his social medias are as well. So, Tim, thank you once again for this little glimpse into football history.

And we'll talk to you again next week.

Very good. We'll see you in seven days. Thanks.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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The 2016 AFC Divisional playoff game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Tennessee Titans was a truly exceptional event, far from being just another playoff battle. It was a rare confluence of talent, a game where five Heisman Trophy winners graced the field. This essay delves into this historic matchup, exploring the players involved and the profound significance of such a unique event.

Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology discusses the 2016 NFL contest that saw four former winners of the Heisman Trophy playing in the same game.

The Baltimore Ravens boasted a potent trio. Lamar Jackson, the reigning Heisman winner (2016), was a dynamic young quarterback waiting for his chance. Mark Ingram (2009) was a seasoned running back with a Heisman pedigree and a knack for finding the end zone. Robert Griffin III (2012), another former Heisman winner, served as a veteran backup. Across the field, the Tennessee Titans countered with their own Heisman firepower. Derrick Henry (2015), a bruising running back with exceptional power, threatened to break tackles on every carry. Marcus Mariota (2016), the newly minted Heisman winner facing his first playoff test, aimed to orchestrate the Titans' offense.

This competition shattered the record for the most Heisman winners in a single NFL game. Previously, a 1998 matchup between the Raiders and Bills featured four Heisman winners – Tim Brown, Desmond Howard, and Charles Woodson on the Raiders' side, and Doug Flutie for the Bills. However, the 2016 Ravens-Titans game upped the ante, showcasing the evolving landscape of college football and the increasing emphasis on dual-threat quarterbacks.

While the individual accolades added a layer of intrigue, the true significance of the 2016 AFC Divisional playoff game lay in the clash of styles. The Ravens, led by the dynamic Lamar Jackson, represented the future of the NFL – a mobile quarterback unafraid to use his legs. The Titans, with Derrick Henry's punishing ground game, embodied a more traditional approach. This clash of styles turned the game into a defensive battle, ultimately won by the Ravens 22-21. Even though not all the Heisman winners took center stage statistically, their presence highlighted the culmination of years of college football excellence on the biggest stage.

The 2016 Ravens-Titans game was not just a simple playoff matchup. It etched a unique line in NFL history, showcasing an unprecedented number of Heisman winners on the field. It was a testament to the talent pipeline of college football and the ever-evolving landscape of the NFL, where athleticism and versatility were becoming increasingly important. This game serves as a snapshot, where college football glory converged on the professional stage, captivating fans and leaving a lasting mark on the NFL record books, a mark that will be remembered for years to come.

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Football Archaeology's Timothy Brown shares the story of an interesting field equipment predicament that occurred in a 1974 college football game.

It is an odd case of game management versus fandom and how the outcome of a game was at stake.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on the Missing Goal Post

Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal for positive football history, and welcome to another Tuesday where we get to go to footballarchaeology.com's Timothy P. Brown, pick his brain a little bit, and talk about one of his recent tidbits. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, thanks, Darin. Looking forward to talking again and talking about something that goes missing. Yeah, and we've been missing you since last week, but that's not the missing that we're going to be talking about today.

You're going to talk about a recent tidbit you titled, The Case of the Missing Goalposts.

It sounds like a Sherlock Holmes theater here for footballarchaeology.com. I can get that in my mouth, right?

Well, I was a Hardy Boys guy as a kid, so everything was The Case of the Treasure Chest. I think Nancy drew, too, but I wasn't into Nancy. Yeah, so this one, The Case of the Missing Goalposts, goes back to the old, I should say, Princeton and Rutgers.

They played the first intercollegiate soccer games in 1869. Note, I did say soccer there, but then eventually they started playing football, gridiron football. They're very close together geographically, and so they played 60-some times, whatever it was, over the years.

Princeton totally dominated the match or the matchups, but starting in the 60s, Rutgers started winning a lot. Then, they became the dominant team. It's somewhere along the lines in the 60s that, back then, there were a lot of... Nowadays, hardly anybody tears down the goalposts because they used to... Number one, they used to be constructed of primary wood, so they're easier to tear down.

We didn't have the same level of security, and there were a lot of those. The other thing was that a little bit later on, when goalposts got torn down, a couple of people got injured, and then they sued the universities and so on. Anyway, it's easier to get into Fort Knox now than it is to tear down some goalposts.

They just made it nearly impossible to tear down a goalpost. Back in the 60s, it was very common, 50s as well. People just tore them down all the time.

What happened in the Princeton and Rutgers series was that no matter where the game was being played, the winning team and their fans tore down the goalposts. Then, there were a couple of occasions where they tore them down before the game was over. That happened in 1974 when Rutgers scored a touchdown earlier in the game.

They didn't make the extra points. They were leading six nothing with three and a half minutes left in the fourth quarter. Princeton gets the ball and they start driving.

They drive all the way down. Partly during the time that they're driving, the Rutgers fans come onto the field and tear down the goalposts at both ends. Now the field doesn't have goalposts.

With 22 seconds left, Princeton scores. It's 6-6. They've got an opportunity to go for the extra point or the two-point conversion.

They want to go for the extra point, but there's no goalposts to kick towards. The officiating crew gets together, and then they bring the coaches in, and they're having a conversation. The Princeton AD tells the referee that they've got a spare goalpost sitting on the stands, and they can have it up in five minutes.

Somehow, that got lost in the translation, and the referee didn't hear that. He basically thought they could start building a new goalpost in five minutes. They start looking at whether they should go over to a practice facility outside the stadium. The referee didn't want to go there because they were already having control issues.

He's like, I don't even know how far away this practice facility is. Then, Princeton volunteered their cheerleaders, had one cheerleader mount and stand on the shoulders of another cheerleader, and held the crossbar in place. Then they'd attempt to kick.

I'm just imagining an errant kick, like the double doink, and taking a cheerleader out. Yeah, it's a risk to the profession. Ultimately, the ref just knows, Princeton, it's on your home field.

You're responsible for field security. It doesn't matter who tore the things down. No goalposts, you have to go for two.

So Princeton goes for two. They don't make it. So the game ends in a 6-6 tie.

But basically, after that, that game is 74. In 75, the NCAA had a requirement that facilities had to have a spare set of goalposts that could be put up rapidly if they fell down during the game. But again, it was this kind of stuff that kind of encouraged the adoption of the, some people call it the fork of a slingshot style, single post goalpost and then fortified with depleted uranium or something.

They make those things, titanium, whatever it is. Those things do not come down. Except for that Fanville commercial and Dr. Pepper commercial a couple of years ago, where Brian Bosworth is the cop, and he's looking for the missing goalposts.

One guy has a satellite dish up on it, and the other one across the street is a swing set, and he can't find the slingshot goalpost. Well, I know that a lot of people are fans of the Dr. Pepper commercials. I don't count in that group.

I just said it because I had the reference of the missing goalpost. That's actually pretty funny when you watch it. Kind of clever.

Yeah. Actually, some of them are pretty good. Yeah.

But that's just something that sounds so foreign. It sounds like something maybe would happen in 1911, but in 1974, this is modern-era football and a goalpost for two major colleges playing each other. That's just crazy.

It's unbelievable that within 50 years ago. Yeah. It's like anything else.

Until something happens, you don't make the rules, or you don't make the investment. It's just easier. Back then it was kind of like, well, yeah, the kids are going to tear them down.

So let's make them cheap because they're going to tear them down anyway. And then somebody went the other direction and said, I'm going to build me a fine goalpost. So that's what we have today.

Yeah. The next thing you know, we're going to have bands out on the field before the game's over. Oh wait, that did happen, too.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh boy.

Tim, that is some great stuff. And we always enjoy your tidbits each and every day for stories just like this and learn something new from 50 years ago or a hundred and some years ago. And we really appreciate that.

And there are folks out there who would like to get in on the action, too, and read your tidbits each and every day. Maybe you could give them some information to share. Sure.

The best way to get to the tidbits is to go to www.footballarchaeology.com and subscribe. You can subscribe for free, and then you'll get an email every day with that day's story. You can also get the Substack app or follow Football Archaeology.

You can also follow me on threads or on Twitter. And I post on both of those locations every day. All right.

Well, Timothy P. Brown, footballarchaeology.com. We really appreciate you. And we will talk to you again next Tuesday.

Very good.Thank you, sir.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.