Football History

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Watch to see if you're a gridiron encyclopedia! Ready to show off your football IQ? Hit that play button for the latest daily gridiron trivia question.

We push the boundaries of the football minds and memory banks each day with a challenging question, and today is no exception. Recharge your batteries and think of NFL football even in the off season.

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February 20 is the anniversary of an important moment in football history.

According to the University of Georgia web post, it was on that day in 1892 in Atlanta, Georgia, that the University of Georgia Bulldogs played its second game ever in a 10-0 loss against the Auburn Tigers. The game would be the first in what is now known as 'The Deep South's Oldest Rivalry,' with 128 games between the schools entering the 2024 season. It was the first game of what has become the South's oldest college football rivalry, and many of the sport's historians consider February 20, 1892, to be the birth date of college football in the South and an early nod to SEC football.
Though the two teams did not square off in 1893, it has been a regular matchup since 1894.
Georgia leads the series is 64-56-8.

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Maryland Terrapins football history boasts a proud lineage of talented players who've gone on to excel at the professional level. Here's a glimpse at some of the top Terrapins:

NFL All-Stars:

-Randy White (DE, #72): A dominant defensive lineman and NFL Hall of Famer, White anchored the "Purple People Eaters" defense for the Minnesota Vikings, winning four Super Bowls and racking up 138.5 career sacks.

-Stefon Diggs (WR, #14): An electrifying wide receiver with exceptional route-running and playmaking ability, Diggs has become a star for the Buffalo Bills, earning Pro Bowl honors and showcasing his clutch skills with iconic plays like the "Minneapolis Miracle."

Offensive Standouts:

-Boomer Esiason (QB, #7): This charismatic quarterback led the Terps to an ACC Championship and later enjoyed success with the Cincinnati Bengals, earning NFL MVP honors in 1988.

-Torrey Smith (WR, #80): Known for his blazing speed and acrobatic catches, Smith became a reliable deep threat for the Baltimore Ravens, winning a Super Bowl in 2012.

Defensive Stars:

-Charles T. Brown (CB, #32): One of the most complete cornerbacks of the 1990s, Brown anchored the Washington Redskins' secondary, earning seven Pro Bowl selections and two Super Bowl victories.

-Yannick Ngakoue (DE, #91): A disruptive pass rusher with a knack for sacks, Ngakoue has made his mark on several teams, racking up over 60 sacks in his career and showcasing his explosive athleticism.

This is just a small sample of the talented players who've emerged from the Maryland Terrapins football program.

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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.

Think you know Tennessee football? Here are 20 facts you may or may not know about the history of the Vols football program. — www.saturdaydownsouth.com

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Tennessee Volunteers football boasts a rich tapestry of achievements, rivalries, and unique traditions. Here's a summary of the highlights you provided:

[b]Scoreless Season (1939): The Vols achieved footballing nirvana, shutting out all opponents for a perfect 10-0 season, ironically losing only the Rose Bowl to USC 14-0.

SEC Founding Member (1932): One of the original 13 SEC teams, Tennessee remains a pillar of the conference alongside nine other founding members.

The Third Saturday in October: Since 1901, Tennessee and Alabama have clashed in one of the SEC's fiercest rivalries, spanning 91 games and counting.

Pride of the Southland: More than a football band, this institution predates the program itself, dating back to 1869. Their iconic name originates from a 1949 pre-Alabama game stand-off with Alabama's "Million Dollar Band."

Rocky Top: The Unofficial Fight Song: Though not officially designated, this beloved bluegrass anthem has become a rallying cry for Vols fans and a thorn in the sides of their rivals since the 1970s.

These facts paint a vibrant picture of Tennessee football, showcasing their historical feats, enduring rivalries, and unique traditions that weave together the essence of being a Vol.

Indiana Hoosiers football, though sometimes overshadowed by its basketball counterpart, boasts a rich tapestry of gridiron heroes who've etched their names in Hoosier lore. From record-breaking quarterbacks to iconic defenders, these players represent the grit, talent, and resilience that define Hoosier football.

Leading the charge is Antwaan Randle El, "Mr. Versatility." This dual-threat dynamo rewrote the record books, becoming the only player in NCAA history to rush for over 3,000 yards and pass for over 7,000 in a career. His electrifying runs, pinpoint throws, and infectious energy galvanized the Hoosiers and earned him a prestigious Heisman Trophy nomination.

No story of Hoosier football is complete without Anthony Thompson, "The Indiana Express." This 1989 Heisman Trophy finalist's explosive bursts and record-breaking rushing performances brought national recognition to the program. His electrifying running style and dedication to his team continue to inspire Hoosier fans to this day.

On the defensive side, Victor Adeyanju, "The Nigerian Nightmare," was a force to be reckoned with. This intimidating presence terrorized quarterbacks, racking up an astonishing 52 career sacks, a school record that remains untouched. His relentless pursuit and thunderous hits earned him All-America honors and cemented his place among the Hoosiers' defensive legends.

Beyond individual stars, the Hoosiers are remembered for their iconic teams. The 1967 Rose Bowl squad, led by coach John Pont and featuring Bob Funk and John Isenbarger, remains the program's sole champion of the Big Ten. Their thrilling upset victory over Purdue in the "Old Hickory Bowl" and their valiant effort in the Rose Bowl etched them into Hoosier hearts forever.

These are but a few threads in the intricate tapestry of Hoosier football history. From record-breaking stars to championship teams, these players and moments capture the essence of Hoosier spirit: dedication, resilience, and an unwavering belief in the crimson and cream.

Auburn's football coaching history boasts a vibrant tapestry of legendary names, each leaving their mark on the program's legacy. Here's a glimpse into some of the top Tigers' head coaches:

-Founding Figures and National Champions:

-John Heisman (1892-1895): The man who gave his name to the prestigious trophy, Heisman laid the foundation for Auburn's football tradition.

-Ralph Jordan (1896-1927): Known as the "Father of Auburn Football," Jordan led the Tigers to their first national championship in 1913 and remains the program's longest-tenured coach.

-Pat Dye (1981-1992): The "Bear" brought a swaggering confidence and run-heavy offense, propelling Auburn to three SEC championships and a national championship appearance in 1983.

-Tommy Tuberville (1995-2008): Known for his fiery personality and potent rushing attack, Tuberville revived the program, winning an SEC championship in 2004 and reaching the national title game in 2003.

From the iconic "War Eagle" chant that echoes through Jordan-Hare Stadium to the electric atmosphere of the pre-game Tiger Walk, Auburn football is more than just a game. It's a family. It's a tradition passed down through generations, uniting fans in a sea of orange and blue. Here, victory isn't everything, it's the spirit, the claws held high, the unwavering belief that makes Auburn special. So join the roar, feel the electricity, and become part of something bigger than yourself. War Eagle!

There is so much more to explore, so check out our other stories of Auburn football history.

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It is time to jump-start the football side of your brain with a challenging question of gridiron history. Dust off the cobwebs because this question delves into the college game and two of the Poser Five Conferences.

The puzzle today is hangman-style where we will give clues and letters and light up the answer along the way.

Pause the TV, pull over the car, put the kids to bed, and test your knowledge on this little Pigskin Pop Quiz.

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They say there's a great woman behind every great man, and the world of professional football is no exception. NFL wives have played many roles, from supportive spouses to savvy businesswomen and even philanthropists who leave their mark on the league. Today, we'll test your knowledge about one such power couple.

This legendary NFL player dominated the gridiron for over a decade, striking fear into the hearts of opposing defenses with his unparalleled passing ability. He was a multiple-time Pro Bowl selection and a cornerstone of his team's success. But who was the equally impressive woman standing by his side throughout his career?

In today's fun look at football factoids, we will have those questions posed to you.

The Duke Blue Devils football program, while overshadowed by their basketball success, has had some thrilling and memorable games throughout its history. Here are a few that stand out:

-1938 Perfect Season: Led by coach Wallace Wade, the 1938 Duke team etched their name in history by achieving a perfect 9-0 record, shutting out every single opponent they faced. This undefeated season remains a significant accomplishment in program history. It was the Rose Bowl Game against USC though where the first points all season were scored late in the game handing the Deviles their only loss 3-7 to the Trojans.

-1942 Rose Bowl: Duke reached the pinnacle of college football by playing in the 1942 Rose Bowl. Though they fell short against the USC Trojans, the appearance in the prestigious bowl game marked a high point for the program.

-2015 Upset of Clemson: In a major upset for college football fans, the unranked Blue Devils defeated the heavily favored and nationally ranked Clemson Tigers 41-24. This victory sent shockwaves through the college football landscape and remains a cherished memory for Duke fans.