Football History

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We have games in recent times where punters have seldom taken the field. These are generally either high-scoring affairs or games with a bunch of turnovers, or both.

Times have changed. it used to be that punting was one of the most successful weapons of an offense. A team may even doi it on first down to try and flip the field.

Timothy Brown explores this with us in a conversation about one of his Tidbits on football archaeology.com but also tells of a game with a crazy amount of punts.

-Transcribed Conversation of Punting 67 Times 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. Welcome to another edition, where we will visit with our friend Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Good to see you again. Looking forward to having a little chat about football history. Yeah, this is a really interesting and unique point in football history.

I don't know if I've ever heard of this before until I was reading your tidbit recently, and you titled it, when it rains, it punts 65 times. Now, tell us, somebody punted in a game, or two teams punted a game 65 times. Can that actually be? Yes, it's even worse than that.

In another game, they punted 77 times. Oh, my goodness. So this is, I mean, I think a lot of times with people are kind of football history geeks, they're aware of the 1939 Texas Tech Centenary game.

And that was played in Shreveport. So Centenary was the home team. And it was just, I don't know if there was a hurricane that had come through or whatever, but it was raining.

And just, you know, so you just think about it. It was raining a lot in Louisiana that weekend. And so they, you know, play their game on a Saturday afternoon.

And it was just such a mess. I mean, back then teams punted a lot anyways. But it was just at the Centenary game, it was just, it's like a quagmire, just a muddy field, just puddles of water, you know, a couple of inches of water standing on the field.

These teams, basically, couldn't move the ball very well. You know, the balls were just like waterlogged. You certainly couldn't pass it.

So they just resorted to pretty much punting on almost every down. You know, they get the ball, and they just turn around and punt it, hoping that the other team is going to fumble it. And there were a lot of fumbles in the game.

But, you know, so they were basically playing the field position thing. And so, in the Texas Tech Centenary game, they literally punted 77 times in the game. So that was the all-time record.

There were 12 NCAA records set in that game, the record for most punts, most punt yardage, most punt returns, most punt return yardage, and then like individual records for most punts, most punt returns, most punt yardage, yada, yada, yada. And so actually this game also holds the NCAA record where most records set in the game. So it's just one of those really bizarre games and it ends in a 0-0 tie.

So I'd been aware of this game for some time. And then, one way or another, while researching something else, I came across a game that was played the same day and two hours north by interstate today. Now there weren't interstates then, but you know, so somewhere not that far north.

And it was a game between Wichita Baptist and Arkansas Teachers College, now Central Arkansas. And so, like the Centenary Texas Tech game, it was tied 0-0 at the half. You know, same kind of thing; they're punting all the time.

So then six minutes into the third quarter, Wachita punts for the 46th time or between the two teams, you know, they executed the 46th punt of the game, and it goes out of bounds at the yard line of Arkansas teachers. So, what do Arkansas teachers do? They say, okay, we're going to punt. So on first down, they try to punt, but the ball's blocked, or the punt is blocked, rolls into the end zone, and the punter falls on it for a safety.

And then, you know, so now it's 2-0. And basically, the rest of the game is the same stuff. It's one punt after another or nearly so.

And so, you know, they ended up this in that game, they ended up 65 times they punted from scrimmage. There was also the punt following the safety. So, you know, they really had 66 punts in the game.

So, but at least, you know, the game ended in a 2-0 score. So, at least, they did that. They punted all those times, and at least they came out with a winner.

Whereas the other game was a tie game. So it was like, yeah, nothing even happened, right? So anyway, it's just absolutely crazy to think about, you know, in the days before effective drainage systems on a lot of these fields, and you get enough water, and there's just not a whole lot we can do. Yeah.

Okay. Now I've got a question. All right.

Now, I understand the concept of punting. The rules, you know, were somewhat different back and back even before this. White teams punted when they got in trouble deep in their own end, but in an era where you're not throwing a forward pass as much as we do today. And we know, you know, like the old saying, there are only three things that can happen when you throw a pass, and two of them are bad.

Well, snapping a punt, which is, you know, a long backward pass, somebody going between their legs to something they're not really seeing really well, they're snapping somebody standing back there. That seems like a pretty dangerous operation. And why would you do that so often on a muddy field? I understand if you're deep in your own territory. Wouldn't it be safer to try to run and maybe get some yardage and punt on fourth down? Yeah.

And I suspect that they weren't long snapping the way we do today. You know, so you know, back then, a lot of times, even, you know, a lot of times, teams punted in much more of a, a quick kick kind of style. So they might snap back to the tailback and a wing, single-wing formation.

And, you know, just the nature of it was that people had such trouble. The players had so much trouble getting footing that they couldn't, you know, typically they weren't able to rush the punter very effectively. Now, you know, obviously, they did once, once in the game, because they blocked that punt, you know, and it ended up, you know, in safety, but there, there weren't a bunch of punt blocks, you know, despite all the punts.

So, and, you know, just like you see it every once in a while with kids in like youth football, if you don't have a decent long snapper, you know, what people used to do, and even before really long snapping developed, they'd, they'd snap the ball to the quarterback and then he'd it back to the, to the punter or to the fullback at the time. So, you know, they may have had to resort to that too, but yeah, I mean, I just, they just were having so much trouble moving the ball at all, you know, run, you know, they were just, they were more scared of fumbling the ball, mishandling it, fumbling it in their own backfield. So they were just trying to get any kind of field position they could because they'd pump the thing, and it would just plop and stay there.

It's not like it rolled just wherever it landed. I can imagine. Wow.

That is something. And I guess that's something to really think about, you know, 77 times you had a couple of really tired punters. I'm sure they had to soak their legs in ice or something that evening after the game.

Wow. Well, Tim, great stuff, as always. And, you know, we really appreciate these tidbits that you do each and every evening.

Maybe you could share it with the folks so they can enjoy your tidbits. So they're getting the action every single night at seven. Yeah.

You can just go to footballarchaeology.com. You can subscribe there. And if you subscribe, you get an email in your inbox every night at seven o'clock Eastern. And then, you know, read them at your leisure, or you can follow me on Twitter, on threads, or on the Substack app.

But basically the way Twitter is working nowadays, at least for me, you know, even if you follow me on Twitter, you're probably not going to see it. So if you want to see this stuff, you're better off subscribing. All right.

Well, Tim Brown, we thank you very much for sharing with us again. And we will talk to you again next Tuesday about another great historical football attribute. Very good.

Look forward to it. Thanks, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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Despite what people may have thought of him as a politician and President of the United States, Gerald Ford had great integrity and discipline. Perhaps this quality never shined as brightly as it did when he was the Michigan Wolverine's football team captain.

Timothy P. Brown joins us to tell the tale of the student having more integrity and conviction than the institution he played for.

Tim's original post can be found at Michigan Football, Gerald Ford, and Idealism.

-Transcription of Gerald Ford's Inegritty with Timothy Brown

Hey, it's Tuesday, and we have Tim Brown. Now, Tim, welcome to The Pigpen.

Hey, Darin.

Thank you much. Always, I look forward to my Tuesday evenings and sharing football time with you. Yeah, it's a great time and we have, you know, a great story this evening to share with everybody.

This is one that's, you know, it's almost 100 years old, but it's really pertinent to today's social environment that's going on around the world. And it's also about a former president. And I will let you set that up for you to take hold then.

Yeah. So, you know, this is one where I, you know, I guess the story is I kind of rag on the University of Michigan. And it's not so much them specifically, although this incident did involve them, certainly.

There were lots of people at fault here, you know. So this is, it's just, they're an example. And, you know, for a university, I think typically is, you know, reasonably stand up, you know, group of folks.

But so the whole thing here is it's about, you know, standing up for one principle, but not another. This occurred in 1934 when Jerry Ford was a senior and the captain of Michigan's football team, you know, played center. And so, and they were national champs in 33 and 34.

So, you know, this is, they were big time stuff. They enter the season though, and they lose to Michigan State, which is not a good thing. And then they, and they didn't even score.

They play the next week, and they play Chicago. They lose, and they don't score. So, in the third week of the season, they're playing Georgia Tech. And again, you know, at that point, there weren't a lot of intersectional games, but you know, this is one.

And so, but at the time, Georgia Tech had a rule in place that they did not play games against teams that had black players. Michigan had one black player, and his name was Willis Ward, who, it turned out, was Gerald Ford's good friend. So Ford and Ward were buddies and, you know, and they were both starters for the football team.

And so there was going to be, there was controversy, and this happened all the time when Northern teams were going to play Southern teams and Southern, that borderline, you know, moved about a bit, you know, so Missouri was, you know, didn't, didn't play, you know, teams with black players and there were others, you know, Kansas. As the week progressed, it became apparent that Michigan was not going to play Willis Ward. And so, you know, Gerald Ford is looking at it saying, look, I'm the captain of this team, and this is my teammate, and he's a friend.

If we're not going to play Willis Ward, then I'm not going to play either. So he goes into the, into the coach's office, Harry Kipke at the time, and he told him he was quitting the team and it was because of that specific issue. So, you know, he leaves and everything, and then kind of word gets around what's happening and this Willis Ward basically asked Ford to go ahead and play.

You know, he didn't want, you know, I mean, it, you know, it was a very noble gesture on his part, but he wanted, he didn't want the rest of his teammates to be hurt and Jerry Ford to be hurt because of this policy and the decision that the university administration made. So anyways, it turns out then that they, you know, Ford plays, and he was apparently rather fired up for the game, and they beat Georgia Tech 9-2. And it turned out to be Michigan's only win of the year.

You know, they lost the first two, they beat Georgia Tech, and then they lost the rest of the game of their season. So that's, you know, there's kind of that, but so the standing, you know, they didn't stand up for one principle. And then there was a little bit later in the year when Michigan's athletic department learned that there was somebody out there who was basically making bootleg programs.

So they would, you know, use last week's program or whatever names and numbers of all the players. And, you know, they'd sell programs outside the stadium, and Michigan didn't want to lose that money. So they notified these people that they were copywriting the rosters and player numbers so that they could potentially, you know, go after them, you know, from a copyright infringement standpoint, which apparently, you know, led to them stopping selling programs.

So, you know, on the one hand, hey, Michigan has certainly had the right to do that. But, you know, they're chasing this money-oriented issue and out of, well, somewhat out of principle, but they didn't follow up on a more important principle earlier in the year. So it's just, you know, it's an example of just people being kind of two-faced, saying one thing, doing another, you know, that kind of thing.

And so, and the other side of it is, I mean, the broader theme is, you know, a lot of times we, people kind of, you know, if you're out of college and you've been working for a while and you've seen the world and you're one, you know, you have that kind of an attitude, it's easy to take this perspective that these idealistic college students are just, you know, kind of don't know what they're talking about. They haven't really been out there. And yet here's one where this college kid named Gerald Ford was far wiser than these administrators, whether it was Fielding Yost, the AD, or whomever it was at the time.

He demonstrated a hell of a lot more wisdom than his supposed elders, who were supposed to teach him something at the university. So that's just a bit, you know. But another thing that I take from that is, you know, you have, here you have the only man that served as president that was not elected some 40 years later, you know, or 40 years earlier, had the integrity as a teenager, probably, or early 20s to stand up for the rights of somebody else and, you know, make a, you know, sacrifice himself to do so.

And that gives me a whole new respect for Gerald Ford. Not that I disrespected him before, but that's quite a testament to his fortitude over his lifetime. So.

Yeah. And I think, you know, generally, you agree, disagree with him on political issues and things like that. I think most people felt, you know, he was an honorable man, right?

And he kind of played fair and square and all those kinds of things. And so, you know, this is just an early illustration, like you said, of him, of him doing that, you know, basically is what, what was he, 21 or 22 or something like that at the time. Yeah.

If we only had honest politicians like that these days, it's a better place. Don't go hoping for things you're never going to get. That's true.

That's true. Tim, you know, that's one of your great tidbits from back in February. And if you would, if you could share with the audience where they, too, could learn your tidbits on a daily basis?

Yeah. So, you know, you can find me on my website, footballarchaeology.com. I use the same name on Twitter. It's not the com part, just football archaeology.

So, you know, if you want to follow me on either, either mechanism, do so. And you can subscribe on football archaeology and that, you know, gets an email into your inbox every night. And then, you know, I've got a couple of books out there.

If you like the kind of stuff I write about, then you can find those on Amazon and most of the other, you know, major platforms. Okay. And on Amazon, they want to search under your full name, Timothy P. Brown.

Yeah. Timothy P. Brown or, or look for, you know, one of my book titles, like How Football Became Football. And you'll, if you search for that, you'll, it'll pop up this first thing that shows up.

And I can highly recommend, you know, the books too, because they are some great pieces of work and you learn a lot from them as a football, a person interested in football history. So I recommend those. So Tim Brown, thank you very much from footballarchaeology.com. And we will talk to you again next Tuesday.

Very good, sir. Look forward to it. Thanks.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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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.

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Alright, settle in folks, because Timothy Brown here is about to tell you a tale. Not of knights and dragons, mind you, but of something far more thrilling – touchdowns! You see, I've been bleedin' Kohawk crimson for years now, and this year, the Coe College football team's offense is a sight to behold. We ain't talkin' trick plays or fancy footwork, no sir. This was a well-oiled machine, churnin' out points like a farmer shuckin' corn.

This all comes from Tim's original Tidbit, Coe College’s Point-A-Minute Team of 1914

From the pinpoint passes of the quarterback to the battering ram runs of the tailback, this offense is a symphony of destruction on the gridiron. So, buckle up and get ready to hear about the juggernaut that's taken the conference by storm – the Coe College high-scoring offense!

-Transcribed Conversation on Point a Minute team of Coe College 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. We're going to stare through that portal today and go back into some football archaeology because it's Tuesday, and we have our friend Timothy Brown from FootballArchaeology.com. Tim Brown, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin, good to see you once again.

Looking forward to talking about Coe College. Yeah, Coe College. And I wasn't aware of this; there was another point in a minute, team.

You had a great post about that on September 17th. You know, when I think about point-a-minute teams, you know, of course, the famous Michigan teams from the early 20th century come to mind under fielding age, Yost. And I did not realize there was another one called a point-a-minute team.

Yeah, so some, you know, listeners aren't aware. Coe College is a small liberal arts college in Iowa. And, you know, they were certainly aware, or at least the reporters were certainly aware, of fielding Yoast point a minute team at Michigan.

And so part of what I did in the article is just to point out that they didn't score a point a minute. They were they were they were under it, but they scored a lot of points, you know. And so this Coe College team ends up having a similar season.

They were just scoring all kinds of points. You know, they played other small colleges in Iowa and they played one game in Illinois. They also played their second game of the season was against Iowa State.

So they lost two. But, you know, they seem to have played respectively or respectively against them. So they you know, they kind of did their non-conference season.

And then they're during the conference. They just started playing teams, and they were kind of blown out of the water. I mean, they won one game.

It's like one hundred and twenty-one to nothing or some silly thing like that. But, you know, they just ended up. You know, just a phenomenal year.

And so then they started, you know, they started being touted as the point in a minute team, you know, obviously copying, copying Michigan. But so it's just kind of, you know, a team that basically few people are aware of or care about. You know, that's that's kind of the life of small college football.

But, you know, I love being able to bring those in, you know, here and there where there's something interesting, something compelling about a team like Coe. You know, I also happen to know one of the things that I use as illustrations for the blog and for my books, and I collect old football-related postcards. And so some time back, I had acquired one with Coe College, you know, this Coe College season.

And then I never really looked into it very much. Once, I said, oh, this might be something worthwhile, you know, a for a tidbit. And I got it, you know, started looking into it.

And there's this whole story about the point a minute. And, you know, two of the teams that they beat that year, the college no longer exists. One merged into, you know, merged with Coe.

They had this kind of incestuous thing going on with some of the Iowa schools. But anyway, it's just, you know, I think, just kind of a fun story about a team that kind of came out of nowhere and just was kicking everybody's butt, which is, you know, always fun. But, you know, those are that's the the sweet spot of your tidbits.

You know, these things that many of us that are in the football know are not aware of. And you bring it back to the forefront and make us aware of it and preserving the football history. And that's I mean, that's the magic of what you do with football archaeology.

And we really appreciate that. And, you know, especially sharing somebody like Coe College that probably most of us have never heard of. Yeah, no.

Well, I appreciate your your your comments. But yeah, I mean, I just think it's. You know, it's just interesting to see kind of how how they did things back then.

And again, it's just the whole evolution of the game. It's just there's, you know, there were bits, you know, there were spurts at times, but a lot of it's just really slow progression. And then, you know, the game cast certain elements aside.

We don't need this anymore. And, you know, we end up with the game we have today, which is, you know, as far as I'm concerned, you know, especially offensively, it's it's the most exciting game we've ever had. Right.

I mean, there are just so many different options and so many different things that teams can do now. Back then, you know, not so much the case is, you know, pretty much run it up the gut football. You know, some teams did some other things in passing, but a lot of it was pretty old school.

Yeah. And that's just so glad that you're sharing that with us and, you know, collecting those things and recording them for everybody to enjoy. So, you know, if listeners, if you would like to be aware of what Tim's coming up with, some of these antiquated items from football or teams that no longer exist or maybe had their day, you know, in the sun and it's no more.

You know, Tim is going to share with us right now how you can find him and find his tidbits and subscribe. Yeah. So my my site is football archaeology dot com.

It is on it's a substack site. So if you happen to be a substack user, then you can find it through that mechanism mechanism as well. But just football archaeology dot com.

I also post everything on the site. I posted on Twitter as well. But, you know, the advantage of subscribing is that you'll then get a newsletter.

Everything that I post becomes an email sent to your inbox on essentially a nightly basis, seven o'clock Eastern. And then my the long form articles kind of come out in a little bit more random order. But that's where that's where to find me.

If you if you enjoy it, great. Whichever way you want to access it, have at it. All right, Tim, Tim, thank you very much for sharing your footballarchaeology.com items with us.

And we'll talk to you again next week.

OK, very good. Thanks, sir.

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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Timothy P. Brown discusses the home playing fields of the Michigan Wolverines football teams. Regents Field, Ferry Field, and finally, yes, the Big House, Michigan Stadium opened by Fielding Yost in 1927.

Find out more about the den of the Wolverines and some rich history of the program and football itself.

Enjoy this presentation that airs weekly with conversations of football antiquity with Historian Timothy Brown of FootballArchaeology.com.

The Big Ten Conference Football Championship game is a must-see on many fans of college football's annual watch lists. The schools' traditions and football programs are almost as old as the game itself. These title games had to start somewhere, and in this edition, we peek back into a post our guest Tim Brown wrote a while back on the inaugural Big 10 Championship game titled The Big Ten's First Conference Championship Game (in 1931) .

-1931 Big Ten season, I can share some interesting facts:

-There were no true "champions" that year, as three teams, Minnesota, Michigan, and Northwestern, shared the title after ending with identical conference records (5-1).

-Purdue boasted the best overall record (9-1), but their lone conference loss, to Wisconsin, prevented them from claiming a share of the crown.

-The season also saw the first-ever Big Ten Conference Championship game, a three-way match between Ohio State, Michigan, and Purdue. Ohio State prevailed in that one with a 19-17 score.

-Some notable individual players included Clarence Munn (Minnesota), who was awarded the conference's MVP title, and Paul Moss (Purdue) and Ookie Miller (Purdue), who were recognized as All-Americans.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on the Big 10's 1st Championship Game

Hello, my football friends; it's Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to another Tuesday with FootballArcheology.com's Timothy P. Brown. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Thank you, sir. Looking forward to talking about old-time football and sometimes what's old is new again.
And I think this is one of those instances.

I think you're absolutely correct because, of course, our topic tonight is a tidbit you put out in December of 2022 called The Big Tens First Conference Championship Game. And we're just coming out of these championship games and getting ready for the bowl season as this is airing. And so, what an appropriate time of the year to talk about the Big Ten Championship.

-Story of the First Big 10 Conference Championship Game

So what do you get on this? Yes, this is one. So this occurred in 1931. And, you know, I've written a couple of things about 1931.

Recently, I wrote a story not too far back about Wisconsin and Minnesota, and they were playing a game, you know, at the end of the season game in 1931. And I mentioned that that was a season where a couple of Big Ten teams, including Wisconsin and Minnesota, started the season playing doubleheaders. And I've got another tidbit written on that so people can find it.

But, you know, back in the mid-20s to mid-30s, there was this whole slew of people, you know, teams playing doubleheader football games. And, you know, what they do is they kind of had one game set up against a lesser opponent that their second team would play. And then they play the varsity against, you know, also a lesser team.

So it's like basically two bye games for the price of one is what it came down to. So it's just, I mean, that really doesn't have anything to do with the story other than to just set the stage that scheduling and, you know, the game was just different back then. You know, they did some things that we would never think about doing today.

No one would schedule a doubleheader. But that 1931, you know, still, you know, depths of the depression. So there were a fair number of college teams, and pro teams did this as well.

They play exhibition games to try to, you know, raise money and they donate all the proceeds to charity. And so the Big Ten that year decided, and I think they decided real close to the end of the season, they just, they decided that they were going to extend the season by one game and play, every team would play another game. And so they took against 10 opponents.

And so, you know, those were the days where teams didn't, you know, they didn't play round-robin schedules or anything approaching that. Everybody scheduled themselves independently. And so the regular season ended with Purdue at 4-1 and losing to Wisconsin.

At least in conference, Michigan was 4-1, having lost to Ohio State. Then, they tied Michigan State in the non-conference because Michigan State wasn't in the conference. And there we had, and finally, we had the Northwestern Wildcats at 5-0.

They had tied Notre Dame, not a Big Ten team. So the regular season ended with Northwestern as the undisputed champs, you know because they just based it on win percentage at the time. But when they decided to play, you know, they collectively, yeah, we're going to play another game.
And at the, they also decided what we're going to do is these games are going to count. We want them to be meaningful. So they're going to count as a regular season game, at least, you know, in terms of determining the conference championship.

So they scheduled, you know, with ten teams, they set up Ohio State at Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Northwestern and Purdue at Soldier Field. And then the other four teams played that Saturday at Chicago's Ag Field, but they only played a half a game. So, you know, it's one of those kind of goofy things, you know, today, you know, preparing, you know, for this, I went back and looked at the official conference results, like, you know, just to see like the all-time results, Michigan just won their 1000th game, right? First college team to do that.

And so I was just looking at things like, wait, did the game after the season count or not? These doubleheader games always counted, but in those half-games, none of the teams that played the half-games counted towards their all-time record. But the 14 or the six teams that played the full games that last, you know, that extra week. So Michigan technically might have like 1000, one and a half wins to their credit or something.

Well, no, because they played one of the full games. Oh, okay. They played a full game.
Okay. All right. Yeah.

So some other teams could have half a game, but others would have lost half a game. And then there were ties. One of those games was a tie.
So it was a tied half-game. It was a tie-half game. Oh boy.

Good thing it's not like hockey. How would you score that in hockey? Because you wouldn't get half a point for that winner in the tie. So anyways, you know, they play these games, and it turns out that Purdue beat Northwestern seven to nothing.

So Purdue enters the game undefeated. They lose. So then they end up in a three-way tie.
Northwestern, Purdue, and Michigan all are five and one at the end of the season. And so it's still kind of one of those things where, you know, you never know how a season is going to end up until all the pads are put away one last time. Right.

You know, you never know if a team's going to come back if they're going to win a bowl game unexpectedly, you know, upset, you know, somebody who should have beaten them. You never know. So, Northwestern thought they were Big 10 champs, and it turned out that they weren't.

Well, you started off by saying the more things change, the more they stay the same. And I think that, going into next year, the Big 10 will become the Wild West again, of, you know, teams from coast to coast in a conference. I think we should start a petition right now that we want the end-of-year exhibition half-games brought back to the Big 10.

So it's just like it was, you know, 90 years ago. Yeah. The half games.
I mean, I'm not sure exactly why they decided to go that route. I'll actually have to go back and reread some of that stuff. But you know, to play a half-game, you know, for most of them at a neutral site, makes it even more amusing.

I wonder if tickets were half-priced to get into those half-games. Well, you know, they, so they, they still fans saw a full game because they saw two half-games. But maybe what they did was they played them early enough.

Like you, Chicago's Stagg Field is a, if you really wanted to, you could walk to Soldier Field from there. So maybe they played those games early in the morning on Saturday so that everybody could run over to catch the, to court, to catch Northwestern and Purdue at Soldier Field. Wow.

That is, that is quite the story. There's a lot going on in that one. That's for sure.
Yeah. I've got even more here on this sheet of paper that I'm looking at, but I didn't raise those issues.

It's great stuff, Tim.

And you have these fascinating stories from, from yesteryear in football that you're really enjoyable and fun to read. And, you know, some like this, so you can sit back and laugh at it and say, you know, what were they thinking type of things? But it's kind of interesting. I'd be, if, if somebody advertised that right now that, Hey, we're going to have a couple of half games that done at the local stadium, I'd, I'd buy a ticket and go see four football teams.

So, so that'd be good stuff. But you do this every day on your tidbits and it's just so fascinating and sometimes makes you think and scratch your head all at the same time. Maybe you could share with the rest of the world here how they, too, can get involved with the tidbits and read these on a daily basis.
Yeah. So, you know, the simplest thing is just go to footballarchaeology.com, hit subscribe, it's free. And if you do that from then on, you'll get a, get an email every night at seven o'clock Eastern with that day's story.

And, you know, otherwise, you can follow me on Twitter, Substack, or Threads, or, like I've said before, just bookmark it and come and visit whenever you're of a mind. All right. Well, his name is Timothy Brown, and his website is footballarchaeology.com. Tim, we thank you once again for sharing with us this Tuesday, and we look forward to next Tuesday to talk to you once again about football's antiquity.

Very good. Thank you, sir.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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The preservation of football history and rekindling memories of some bygone star of the gridiron is a passion for many of us. There are few greater research satisfactions than finding a long-forgotten story of a player one knows little about.

Timothy P. Brown looks back at how six promising athletes mentioned in a pre-season article actually did. The players are Don King of the Clemson Tigers, Frank Brooks of Georgia Tech, Joe Mastrogiovanni, a Wyoming quarterback, Kurt Burris, a linebacker of the Oklahoma Sooners, Notre Dame Fighting Irish quarterback Ralph Guglielmi, and Pat Eubel, an Army Black Knight runningback.

Presaerving the history of great players has never been so much fun!

---

The 1921 Taylorville and Carlinville football scandal wasn't just a game gone wrong, it was a full-blown Wild West showdown played out on the gridiron. Imagine two dusty Illinois towns, steeped in rivalry and fueled by moonshine, facing off in a grudge match for bragging rights. But this wasn't just any local clash; it was a battle royale with college stars brought in as hired guns, bets reaching five figures, and whispers of scandal swirling thicker than autumn smoke. Timothy P Brown of Football Archaeology examines and recounts this pivotal contest in football history.

Taylorville boasted some Notre Dame standouts, while Carlinville countered with a University of Illinois heroes. Both rosters, packed with ringers, defied amateur rules, turning the game into a pay-for-play spectacle. The tension crackled like static in the air, and when Carlinville won 33-0, accusations of dirty play and illegal payments erupted.

College conferences scrambled, reputations were tarnished, and investigations launched. Ultimately, both teams got punished, losing eligibility for their college stars and facing public censure. It was a cautionary tale, exposing the underbelly of college football in its early days.

But here's the twist: some argue the scandal actually helped pave the way for professional football's growth. The public's thirst for the gridiron drama couldn't be quenched by student athletes alone, and the 1921 Taylorville-Carlinville brawl, despite its messy ending, might have been a messy nudge towards a new era of pro football.

- Transcribed Conversation on Carlinville 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. Today is Tuesday, and on Tuesdays, we love to go back in time in football and talk to Timothy P. Brown of FootballArchaeology.com about one of his famous stories. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Darin, I'm looking forward to it. I got a chance today to talk about some small-town football that had big-time implications. Yeah, our topic is a little bit scandalous today.

This has set the football world on its own, and it's still being discussed today. This is an article you wrote back in August of 2023, and it's titled The Carlinville-Taylorville Scandal of 1921. So what can you tell us about that, Tim? Yeah, so I'm assuming most listeners have not enjoyed being in either Carlinville or Taylorville.

-The Football Archaeology of Carlinville’s Football Fame

I know I've been to at least Taylorville, but I don't recall being in Carlinville. They're both flatland towns northeast of St. Louis, so they're in the part of Illinois where people cheer for the St. Louis pro teams rather than the Chicago pro teams. So, they're downstate.

And, you know, everybody, like I mentioned last week, that you were one of these fancy East Coast guys, and everybody on the East Coast thinks Austin and New York rivalry, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that's nothing; they've got nothing; that rivalry has nothing over the Carlinville-Taylorville rivalry or any small town. Two rural towns of less than 6,000 a piece can get hacked off at one another like nobody's business.

And that's what happened in 1921. Well, these are always great. You know, I'm familiar with towns being rivals of small towns.

I wrote a book on one, too. This is very similar in stories. And this might be the continuation of that story here in 1921 because it is a pretty good one.

So go ahead and please tell us more about this. Yeah. So, you know, here are these two towns in Illinois that, you know, moderate-sized towns, and they had a town team or a semi-pro team, you know, the guys, you know, people would pay to get into the games, and they'd share the gate.

But it was comprised of people who just, you know, who lived in the town or in the surrounding rural areas, and two teams, but, you know, two towns about 40 minutes apart. So they played every year. And then, in 1921, they had a game scheduled, like always, in November.

And they end up with three to 4,000 people attending, Taylorville with 16 to nothing. And that's the story. That's the end of it, right? No big deal.

You know, it gets written up in the Decatur newspaper because Decatur's, you know, next biggest town. And kind of nobody thinks about it anymore until, like, two months later, word leaks of the scandal that surrounded the game. And in hindsight, I think this is great.

There was a line in the Decatur newspaper the day after the story or the day after the game that said each team's lineup was almost entirely changed after the half. So if you, you know, now, did the reporter put that in there, knowing what was going on, or was it just an observation? I don't know. But so what happened here was that the Taylorville or, I'm sorry, the Carlinville people started scheming.

They wanted to beat Taylorville, and they wanted to make money doing so. So there was a kid that was from Carlinville, and he played for this 11-0 Notre Dame team. He was a substitute, but he was still on the Notre Dame team.

So, somebody in Carlinville connected with him and got him to invite some of his friends to Carlinville for Thanksgiving. And maybe, you know, those guys could play football for Carlinville that weekend, like when they were playing Taylorville. So, you know, they had it set up.

It was like seven or eight, you know, Notre Dame players were going to play for this Carlinville town team. And so, and they, you tell the guys who were setting up the scheme, tell their neighbor so that they can put a bet on the, you know, they can bet with somebody they know down in Taylorville. And, you know, everybody's going to make money on it.

No one's going to know any better. And, you know, they're going to be very meritorious as a result. And so it turns out that somebody in Taylorville gets word of this.

And Taylorville has a kid who's playing for Illinois. So they set up a deal where they get a bunch of Illinois players to play for Taylorville that day. And so, you know, so the day of the game arrives, and both teams put their normal lineups out there for the first half, and Taylorville is upset.

And then just before the second half starts, all of a sudden, a bunch of, you know, kind of a whole new set of guys appears for Carlinville, and they enter the game. And, you know, they, they hadn't been, they hadn't been around for the first half. And now they're playing for Carlinville.

And then, so Taylorville notices that, and they say, okay, well, let's pull out our guys. So they pull out their guys, who are the Illinois players, including an Illinois stud quarterback. And so, then the second half is basically played between a mostly Notre Dame team and a mostly Illinois team.

And then a couple of, you know, whoever the better players were from, from the normal teams, and Taylorville gets, you know, three kicks, three field goals, but you know, that Illinois quarterback is a kid who kicks them, and they ended up winning 16 to nothing. And so, so again, nothing is really said about it until two months later. And oh yeah, another quick thing is it, so enough money was collected by the Taylorville people that it overflowed the safe at the local bank.

And so the bank had to hire armed guards to just stand around and keep people out of there. Cause it's all like, you know, one in $5 bills or whatever. Right.

So anyways, they then somehow word gets out of what happened. And so both schools investigate and, you know, the kids are like, no, no, I didn't do anything. But then eventually they, you know, they kind of give it up.

And so, in both cases, a number of the guys who were playing, who played were seniors. So, their football eligibility was up, but you know, several of them were like top track or baseball athletes. So their eligibility for those sports, you know, is gone.

And then other guys, just their college eligibility, you know, their sophomores or whatever it may be, are gone. So unfortunately, you know, and supposedly, these guys didn't get paid, but you know, who knows? But one way or another, a bunch of people lost eligibility, and it was a big scandal. And I hadn't really thought about this before, but as I was thinking about this, you know, preparing for this podcast, you know, when, when Red Green signed with the Bears after the 25 season, that was a big scandal too, right? Because he finishes his eligibility, and then Sunday, he's playing for the Bears.

And that was like, you know, you can't do that. And so you kind of have to think that some of the attitude and their reaction to that was, you know, in follow-up to what happened four years earlier with this Carlinville-Taylorville scandal, you know, where these kids, a bunch of them just, they're done with their eligibility, football eligibility, and they play in this game and, you know, at a smaller level than the bears, but still it wasn't, you know, the bears weren't that big time at the, you know, the NFL was still just a, not much of a, more than a podunk league at the time, you know? So just kind of an interesting little sidelight to, to the, to the affair itself. Well, I'll take you deeper down that rabbit hole.

I mean, sit there and think about who our coaches who are getting affected by this are. Illinois has Zupke, you know, who's kind of, kind of a hard ass. I believe Newt Rockne is at Notre Dame in 21.

And, you know, he's, you know, he's no slouch to pull anything over. So, you know, they're losing their star players and losing, you know, their guys that they're counting on for that following season. And, you know, they were both. I know through some of my research that Zupke was very much opposed to professional football.

Probably, this scandal here started off, and Red Grange just put him over the edge cause he had a lot of comments as Grange was coming out about not wanting Grange to go into pros. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, back in the twenties, so Rockne had played pro football, so, you know, he, you know, that was after his college eligibility, you know, but still he played it.

So, he couldn't really make much of an argument in that regard. But then, yeah, I mean, it was like in the, like 2021 era, you know, the colleges basically said, if you're going to, if you're going to referee in NFL games, you cannot referee in college games. And I mean, officiate, referee, you know, so, I mean, they were doing everything they could to keep the pro game at bay, not help them out at all.

And yet you had guys like, you know, the four horsemen, you know, they'd go and, you know, once they were graduated, a couple of them, you know, like they're coaching college teams, they coach college team on Saturday and then go play pro football on Sunday. You know, so those kinds of things were happening. It was just one of those tides that the colleges could not keep it hold back.

I think at one point, you had three of the four horsemen on the Providence steamroller in the NFL play. And I think they, for a couple of games, but they were bouncing around all over the place. So they were one, one week, they're on one team, one week they're on the other team, but L.A. I mean, those pro teams didn't even practice, you know. I mean, maybe they got to practice on Saturday with the guys who could be there, but lots of guys were, you know, taking the train in for the Sunday game, wherever it was being played, you know? So, you know, I mean, it was a different game then, you know, far less coordinated in terms of plays and responsibilities and more individual skill oriented, but yeah, nevertheless, I mean, it just, you know, the college has tried like anything to keep the amateur ideal in place and not have it bastardized like pro baseball, you know, had done, but didn't work.

Yeah. I'm just glad we Easterners were squeaky clean in our football, not like the treacherous Midwesterners.

It's kind of mind-boggling, actually, how clean you guys have kept it. No wonder all the Americans were on the East Coast. Well, Tim, this has been a really enjoyable story and subject, and we poked fun at it, but it was pretty serious at the time and, you know, a lot of money and people's collegiate careers are getting upset, probably their educations, probably life-changing to some of them.

And we really appreciate you memorializing the story and both in your tidbit and talking with us here today, but you do this quite a bit in your tidbits and bring these little facets of football to light once more. So maybe you could share with the listeners how they too can partake in your tidbits. Yep.

Very easy. Just go to footballarchaeology.com, submit your email to, you know, subscribe, and then you'll get an email with the contents of the story every day at seven o'clock Eastern. And then, you know, read them then or let them pile up.

And then alternatively, you can follow me on Twitter, on threads, or on the Substack app. And I go by the name Football Archaeology on all three of those. Well, Tim, again, we appreciate you coming on and sharing these great stories with us.

And this saga of the Taylorville-Carlinville scandal that happened in 1921, you know, over a hundred years ago. And we'll talk to you again next Tuesday about another subject. Yeah.

And remember, it's a much bigger deal than the Yankees and Red Sox. I mean, much bigger, much bigger.

-Transcription of Fielding Yost and the Fake Field Goal with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends, Darin Hayes and PigskinDispatch.com. It is Tuesday, and once again, we are going to visit with Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Thank you.

Look forward to chatting again. I think we've got a good one to cover this evening. Yeah, this one is a subject that I know a little bit about.

I've talked to an author that's wrote quite a bit about this famous coach, Fielding Yost of Michigan. This is probably his most famous stance or most famous position. That's where the school he's most associated with.

Let me try to get that out of my mouth. But you have a very interesting story on him that sort of takes back through his whole career and sort of settles a dispute by digging through the old newspapers and everything. It's a really interesting, great job of work on your part.

I will let you take it from here, sir. Yeah, thank you. This is one that you're kind of digging around for playing detective, reading old newspapers.

All of a sudden, you find something that I wasn't expecting, quite the ending to the story. This is one of these ideas or issues where everybody talks about football. There's nothing new, right? There's nothing new in football.

Everything gets recycled. Everything gets adapted. That's, at some level, reasonably true.

There are certain true innovations, and one of those is embedded here. It's also a bunch of these people copying ideas over and over again. Part of the funny thing about this story is that there's an instance where things got copied, and this sports writer didn't know that.

Apparently, it was the first time he saw this occur in a game. What it was is that I came across an article from a 1913 game when Michigan played Penn. During the game, Michigan attempted a fake field goal.

This writer just wrote a follow-up after the game about this fake field goal attempt and praising Fielding Yost, talking about what a great innovator he is and blah, blah, blah. When I came across that, I was like, is that possibly the first time somebody ran a fake field goal? I would have thought, even just due to a bad snap or whatever, somebody would have tried one. Then maybe said, geez, this works pretty well.

I'm going to do this again. I'm going to back up just a little bit and say that until 1886, every field goal attempt was a dropkick. There was no snap from the center to a holder who held the ball for the kicker.

It took some human beings to figure out how to do that. It turned out it was these two brothers who played at Otterbein in Ohio, a small school there. They figured out, hey, we could snap the ball, have a guy hold it, and the kicker could kick it.

We've got a better chance, especially under the right weather conditions, a place kick typically had more power and was more accurate than a drop kick because the ball didn't bounce true off the uneven turf and grass at the time. We moved ahead then to 1913 and this Penn-Michigan game. Michigan sets up for a regular field goal attempt.

They snapped the ball, but instead of the holder putting the ball down on the ground, the kicker moved forward and swung his leg forward just like normal, but the holder stood up and then went sprinting around the left end. He scored a touchdown rather than the field goal attempt. Part of what's funny about that is that the writers said, this is tremendous.

The execution of this play was incredible. In fact, the play got called back due to holding, so the execution wasn't that great. Then it was like, here was a fake field goal, obviously a planned fake field goal.

I started looking around, when did these things first occur? As I said earlier, 1886 was the first time that any team snapped to a holder and then executed a placement kick. The first fake field goal that I could find, and this is just through searching newspaper articles, was an 1897 game between Kansas and Iowa when Kansas faked a field goal. Then, the next year, the second one I found is 1898, when Nebraska ran a fake field goal against Kansas.

The guys who did it, as far as I can tell, invented it, and have it executed against them the following year. Then the key thing about that, or the interesting thing about that, is that the coach of Nebraska in 1898 was Fielding Yost, a coach at Michigan whom this writer was just effusive with praise about. So anyway, after doing additional searching and everything, there were fake field goals all over the place.

I'm not saying there were thousands a year or anything like that, but most years, once the placement kick from scrimmage got started, people were also executing the fake field goals. Unfortunately, the writer was an anonymous column, so I couldn't figure out who the writer was that came up with this because otherwise, I would have tried to reach his relatives and tell them that their grandpa was lacking in his football history skills. Okay, so Kansas did it first, and then they had it done against them the following year by Nebraska.

That's correct. Fielding Yost was the coach at Nebraska, and then he was coach again at Michigan when they did this in 1913. Well, I was trying to think about it, because I know from a previous author I had on the biography on Yost, I know he was in Kansas too, but I'm looking right now, he was in Nebraska 1898, he was at Kansas 1899, so it was reverse, where I was thinking he might have been a coach for both of those games, head coach who did it, but he was Kansas on the other side.

And then he ended up, he was at Stanford, right? In 1900? Yeah, Stanford, and then at the end of the season, San Jose State, he did a championship game and then went to Michigan. Pretty well-traveled coach. Yeah, for a little bit there.

And he was Ohio Wesleyan before all of that too. And he was a ringer when he played in college too. Yeah.

He went to West Virginia, but he played for Lafayette in the big game where they took down Penn and snapped their win streak, whatever it was, 2018. Yeah, Park H. Davis, the famous historian, was the coach of Lafayette. So yeah, there's a lot of historic ties there.

Which is why he names that team the National Champs. Yeah, he named a lot of odd ones, National Champs. You can go back and scratch your head a few times.

Yeah, that's a really, really cool story. I love how that sort of circles back around to him, you know. And what was there, 20, almost 20 years in between, 15 years in between the plays.

But I guess the credit is due to him in some respects. Yeah, well, hey, you know, he picked up something, he saw something he liked and executed it. Yeah, plus I think there was, I don't have my note here on it, but I'm almost positive Michigan ran a fake field goal too before the 1913 game, so under Gilst.

Yeah. You know, it brings back that fake field goal. And I'm sure it wasn't a rule at the time.

I'm sure it was a rule put in afterwards. But there was a rule in high school, and I think it was at the collegiate level too, that if somebody, you know how a holder was usually down on a knee to take the snap. That's the only exception where you can have a live ball with a person with their knee on the ground.

So with that exception, they have to hold for a kick or an attempted kick. So if that holder is on a knee, takes that snap, and stands up and throws a pass or runs, it's a dead ball because he was a runner with his knee on the ground with a live ball. So I'm sure, like I said, it probably wasn't back in that era.

They probably put it in. So we had a game, a high school game, where a very clever coach told us before the game, you know, usually they want to make sure we don't kill their brainstorm idea that they had all overnight or something. This guy would get down in a catcher's position.

So both knees are off the ground. He's just in a squat. And the defense, you know, is probably not paying attention to what he's doing, but he would catch the ball.

The kicker would come up similar to what you're saying, fake a kick. This kid would, the holder would pound the ball with his hand. So it sounded like there was a foot hitting the ball and then taking off.

And I think he was going to throw a pass is what his intent was. So, you know, just some clever things that they do out of these, these fake field goals, but that knee-on-the-ground exception. Well, you know, back then, both in the 1898 and the 1913 example, having a knee on the ground, wasn't yet a rule that made the ball dead.

Right. I mean, in that race, you could be tackled and still get up and run. You know, you had to be held to the ground still, but yeah, you know, the, the, the, the catcher squat that you mentioned, that was actually some of the early field goal teams did that.

I mean, those, those executing a placement kick, they did that instead of, of going to the knee. And part of that was because that was still in the time when they, when a lot of teams, still were rolling the ball sideways back from the center to the quarterback. Right.

And so the quarterback, if he was on one knee, he couldn't, you know, the ball would bounce crazily. And so, you know, the squat helped them just, you know, catch the ball properly, or at least be able to reach the ball. And I've even, I've got a picture of Arizona.

And I want to say it was like 1938 or 1936, something like that, where their, their holder is in that kind of squat position. So people continue doing that for, you know, for some time. And probably, you know, they may have just been in a situation where, you know, who knows? It might've had a substitute center, or somebody just wasn't a very, very effective long-snapper.

And so. He was a substitute center. He was also a starting catcher on the baseball team in the spring.

Yeah. Great stuff. That's very fascinating.

Just like every evening, you have these great little pieces and nuggets of information about football history that you don't hear mainstream. And you don't see in every football history book you read in, you know, just like tonight, you took, it took some digging for you to do that. I'm sure, you know, it took a few hours of research going through the old newspapers.

I can feel your pain on that sometime, but it's fun. Yeah. The problem is that, you know, half the time I'm doing these things while I'm watching some football games.

So I don't even watch half the game. I'm just looking online where those 30 points come from. Yeah.

Yeah. Good stuff as always. Why won't you share with the listeners that they, too, can enjoy your tidbits each and every night? Yeah.

So, you know, my website is footballarchaeology.com. So you can go on there. You know, every post allows you to subscribe, which then means you will get an email every night, you know, into your inbox with the story. You can also follow me on Twitter at football archaeology.

And so whichever one works for you, whichever way you prefer to consume information, have at it, or hey, you can do both. So either way. Yeah, I do.

And you get double the pleasure. You get the, the Twitter and the email. So good stuff as always.

Tim, we appreciate you sharing this with us, as well as the great research you do at footballarchaeology.com, your daily tidbits, and, you know, your great writings. Thank you very much for sharing with us each and every week. We hope to talk to you again next Tuesday.

Very good. Always enjoy it. And glad to, glad to spread the word with you on football history stuff.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.