Football History

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The American football playbook boasts an arsenal of throws, each designed to exploit specific defensive weaknesses. However, one unassuming play, the shovel pass, carves a unique niche. Unlike the glamorous deep ball or the precise drop pass, the shovel pass thrives in simplicity.

This post welcomes Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology as he delves into the murky origins of this deceptive play, exploring its evolution from a potential improvisation to a strategic weapon in the modern NFL. We'll examine the technical aspects of the shovel pass, its tactical advantages, and the impact it has had on the way offenses approach moving the ball downfield. Prepare to get down and dirty, as we uncover the surprising history and strategic power of the shovel pass.

You can find Tim's original Tidbit on this subject complete with images, at ESlowing The Pass Rush With A Shovel.

-Transcription of Slow Pass Rush with a Shovel with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to another day where we get to visit with our friend Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. This is a good opportunity for us to go Dutch on this podcast. To go Dutch on this podcast.

Dutch Myer was the coach. Oh, okay. All right.

I had to think about that for a second. I thought, you know. Well, this shows that, you know, this is not rehearsed, right? Right, right.

You're name dropping already. I throw these singers out at you and you're like. Usually it's a dad joke segue into the title.

And the title, folks, and this is my confusion, is slowing the pass rush with a shovel. So I'm trying to think what Dutch, if he's doing a play on the word on ditch or, you know, I don't know. Dutch Meyer.

Dutch Meyer. Okay. Well, why don't you tell us a story about Dutch Meyer and what he has to do with the pass rush being slowed? Yeah.

So, I mean, this is, you know, I mean, nowadays we had a recent podcast about the draw play, which, you know, has, you know, is basically kind of shows up probably in the late thirties and then, but really became more commonplace. The draw play that we now know, probably more late forties, you know, kind of a play. And so this idea of, you know, but so the whole purpose of the draw play is to give the defense one look, you know, you're showing them pass when you're actually running it.

Well, before they develop the draw play, they still had the same need of trying to deceive the defense. And one of the ways that they developed best as I can tell, you know, around the early 32, 31, 32 kind of timeframe was the shovel pass. And so, you know, if you think about like a wing T formation at the time, they might've had a wing over on the, not wing T, I'm sorry, but you know, single wing.

They might've had a wing over on the right-hand side till back gets a deep snap, you know, from the center. And then the, the wing on the right-hand side crosses comes across the formation and the quarterback doesn't talk some kind of toss or flip, even a shovel pass to that guy as he's going right to left. So, so that was, you know, and it was one of those plays where, you know, as the defense is coming in, you're, you're, you're trying to get it to somebody who's crossing over just so that they have to be looking out is, is this a play that they're going to run? Right.

I mean, is this a, is this something I need to guard against? And so it was one of the, one of the ways to slow down the pass rush. And there weren't very many of them back then. There weren't very many ways to slow them down was to, was a shovel pass.

So in the 39 Cotton Bowl game, you know, this was a game where TCU had three players drafted the next year in the first 10 of the NFL draft. And, and what their, the number one pick in the draft was Davey O'Brien, who was TCU's quarterback. And you can see him in the background, but he was, you know, five, eight, you know, fairly stockly built guy, but, you know you know, he was a hell of a hell of a quarterback and just, you know, really smart guy, all that kind of thing.

So, so they were, you know, at the time TCU was one of the teams that threw the ball all over the yard, you know, now nothing like happens today, but you know, when they, they played Carnegie Tech in that game and you know, they, both teams rushed for about 150 yards, but TCU passed for on the order of 250, whereas Carnegie passed for like 60 or so yards. So it was one of those games where, you know, they just, TCU was clearly the better player, but, or the better team, but during the game, they threw eight shovel passes. Right.

So it kind of tells you, I mean, name a game nowadays where, where a team throws eight shovel passes, just doesn't happen, you know, doesn't happen. But for them, that was like one of their central plays because, you know, a lot of the other ways that we, you know, quarterbacks still had to throw the, in college, quarterbacks still had to be five yards behind the line of scrimmage to throw a pass. So none of our bubble screens and none of our quick, quick slants, none of those existed.

They were illegal. And so this was one way that they could slow down the pass was a shovel. So, so they completed five of the eight shovel passes.

And that was one of the ways in the second half, they advanced ball down the field. And because this is also in the days of, you know, essentially no or very limited substitutions. O'Brien, the quarterback kicks the game winning field goal in the fourth quarter.

Right. I mean, it's been a while, you know, since I remember a big time quarterback in a bowl game, kicking a field goal to win the game. Now, I mean, I don't know when the last time was, you know, when that happened, there were, there's been some punters like Greg Martin, you know, he's a guy that, you know, maybe some listeners remember he punted, but it's been, you know, Blanda probably was the last guy that most of us can think of though.

And yeah. But you had Doug Flutie do a drop kick one time, but it got no points. So I don't think it was more of a. Yeah.

I mean, that, that was basically a circus kick. Right. Right.

And which is fine, but you know, for a guy who did the regular kicking for his team, O'Brien was one of the last ones and he was, you know, place kicking, not, not drop kicking. So anyways, it's just, you know, I guess it's just one of those things where, you know, it's one of those period pieces where, you know, where they're using the shovel pass in a way that we don't use today, but make sense that they had developed it. And then the same guy who's throwing the shovel pass is a guy who kicks a game winning field goal.

So then he ends up, you know, he only played like two years in the NFL. He, he ended up, you know, I think he just didn't like the pro game very much. And he was on a really bad team.

And so he ended up, he left, uh, left the NFL and became an FBI agent. That's back in that era where you make more money, you know, working in a grocery store than playing in the NFL too. And you don't get hurt as much.

So, but yeah, the, the shovel pass. So that's, uh, you know, traditionally one of the safest passes to throw because it looks weird when it's an incomplete pass, but it's not a fumble because it's a forward pass if it's dropped and it's hard for defenders to see it because you're sort of hidden behind those, those big guys up front, uh, with the throwing actions. It's really not enunciated like, uh, an over the shoulder passes.

Yeah. The challenge is, you know, it's, it's hard to know now, like how much traffic there was coming in and coming at the quarterback as the guys crossing. Um, you know, I, I didn't find any game film of that particular game.

So, um, Gosh, you would think the defenders would start to get wise to it after a little while. So maybe they just were inept. And then it served its purpose, right? I mean, that's right.

It slowed down the pass rush if they got wise to it, but yeah. Um, or, you know, maybe they left some guy, guy to be a spy or something, but you know, they weren't that bright back then. No, no surprise, especially a Western Pennsylvania team.

God, Carnegie, you know, that's, they should be brilliant. Well, they lost. So yeah, no wonder they're, they don't have a D one program anymore.

Uh, interesting stuff, Tim. That's a, that's a great story. And to hear about Davey O'Brien and, uh, you know, some of his, uh, great feats of football.

So that's some cool things. So you have some very interesting things, not only about players like Davey O'Brien and teams like, you know, TCU and a concept of the shovel pass, but you have all kinds of different, uh, intricacies of the made football, the game that it is. And some are forgotten except by folks like you reminding us on your daily tidbits on your website.

So maybe you could share, uh, you know, where people can find, uh, your, your writings at. Sure. Just, uh, go to footballarchaeology.com. Um, you know, I've got a whole archive now, you know, about a thousand articles out there on different, different elements of the game.

And, uh, so I have added subscribe. If you want to get an email every time that I publish an article, otherwise follow me on Twitter, follow me on Substack or follow me on threads and, or just go out to the site whenever you feel like it. All right.

Well, excellent job as always, Tim, we really appreciate, uh, getting informed and educated on the, the arts of football from yesteryear. And we would love to hear more about it next week. And thanks for going Dutch.

Yeah. Thanks Dutch.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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In the leather-helmeted days of yore, football jerseys were a canvas of clean lines and bold colors, proudly displaying a team's name or city across the chest. This is the untold story of how logos, once relegated to the shadows, muscled their way onto the gridiron, forever changing the face of the beautiful game. We'll delve into the fierce competition between sportswear giants, the cultural shift that embraced branding, and the trailblazing teams who dared to be different. Buckle up, football fans, as we explore the fascinating origin story of the logos that existed on jerseys before players' numbers did.

Timothy P Brown takes us on his research of football jerseys with embarrassment and who did it first. From Furman to Lafayette and points in between, we learn about uniform decor transformation.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown Jerseys with Emblems

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin. He's at pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

Welcome to Tuesday and a research journey to footballarchaeology.com and Timothy P. Brown. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Darren, thank you.

Looking forward to chatting, as always. It should be. This is, I think, actually a pretty fun one. Not that others aren't.

But, you know, this one's just particularly fun. Yeah, this is this is a neat one because we get to talk about uniform adornment. Your tidbit back in the middle of May was titled Football Jerseys with Emblems.

So this is a fascinating spectacle of football that we love colors and seeing teams with great designs on their uniforms. So this may be the start of it. Yeah.

You know, well, the weird thing is I was looking at a. Yeah, I was running through some social media that I happened to see a guy wearing a jersey from the 90s, and it may have been an arena team; it could have been, you know, whatever, some off league. But anyway, they had a big dog on the jersey, and the number was smaller. But anyway, I hadn't seen anything like that for quite some time.

So this one is about, like, you know, if you think about it. Um. You know, hockey, especially, you know, they've got jerseys on their sweaters, right? They're not jerseys.

They've got emblems on the sweaters, the red wings. You know, I live in the Detroit area. They got the wheel and the wing.

Right. And everybody else has some kind of a, even if it's just a wordmark or the Blackhawks, whomever, you know, they've got they got a big emblem. And even baseball has some.

Basketball has a pretty good number of emblems. You know, a lot of times it's just, you know, the wordmark or something like that. But it's not unusual.

Like San Francisco's, you know, Golden State has had, you know, their the Golden Gate Bridge and things like that on their jerseys. But football doesn't typically have not had that. So, you know, I was trying to figure out, OK, when they had them and, you know, kind of why and, you know, why don't they anymore, those kinds of things? And so, you know, football had.

So, you know, in the beginning, a lot of times football teams wore jerseys with the like the main letter, like why, if you were playing for Yale or an H, if you played for Harvard or they'd have smaller, you know, the smaller combination of letters like Slippery Rock Normal School might have S.R. and S. You know, so I mean, there's if you look at old time pictures, you see even on like the canvas jackets and the canvas vest, you see those kinds of initials. But oftentimes, they were just plain. And even when, you know, the first numbers were worn on the backs of jerseys in 1905.

And it took a long time, took a couple of decades, really, for teams to start wearing numbers on the front of their jerseys. So in the meantime, you end up having, you know, you had the onset in mid-teens. You had the onset of, you know, stickum cloth or friction strips.

I mean, there are different names for it. But, you know, if you think about, you know, almost any picture of red grains, you see, you know, vertical stripes on his jersey. And he probably has stripes on the inside of his arms.

And that was kind of treated leather that, you know, the belief was that it held running backs, in particular, you know, hold on to the ball. And when those first came out, a lot of times, you're just big ovals or even squares on the front of the jerseys. But they, you know, they had a functional use, but then people kind of got fancy with them, and they started creating designs, and they started putting them on the linemen, too, who sometimes carried the ball.

But, you know, for the most part, did not. And became quite a laundering nightmare, I'm sure, after the game, trying to clean up. Yeah, I don't know how the heck they did it sometimes, you know.

Probably didn't wash them is probably what they did. Yeah. Well, in fact, then they didn't, you know, I mean, hardly anybody wore white.

But here and there, you know, there were teams that did. But how they got that stuff clean, I don't know. But so then, you know, they kind of started having taken some artistic license.

And so often it was like teams that were like their main letter, their name, their school started with what I'll just call a straight a straight letter, meaning a K and an L, a Y. So it's just a series of straight lines. And then they'd incorporate that letter into the friction strip pattern, you know, and so there are some of them that are actually pretty cool looking. But, they still weren't like emblems in the way that's like hockey, you know, a sweater might have.

But then the earliest one I found was Furman in 1925 had a bullseye on there. You know, I think it had three rings in it. So folks, you have to see go to the show notes and go to the link of Tim's story on this on the tidbit.

And you'll see this great image of the Furman team from 1925 that he's describing. You'll see exactly what he talks about. These uniforms are really great.

I'm looking at it right now. It's looks like a certain red department store would be very pleased with these jerseys that make a commercial out of this. Although it was purple and white.

So. Oh, OK. And actually, somehow, they got ahold of one of those things.

So their their archives has one of those original jerseys. You know, really cool looking. So now why Furman had a target on their jerseys? I don't know, but.

Maybe it will help the quarterback with the forward pass downfield. Well, all the linemen had it, too. The next one I found was Bucknell, which is actually kind of interesting. It was like Bucknell in 1930.

They've got they've got a small number up kind of on the chest on the front of their jersey and then down basically on the belly. There are two Bucknell is the bison. And so there are two buffalos or bisons kind of charging at each other.

You know, kind of across the belly. And so, you know, they've got both the emblem and the number. And then, kind of the weirdest one, I think, is probably 1932 Lafayette.

So, it's the same general neighborhood as Bucknell. It's, you know, there are goofballs from Pennsylvania. And so, you know, they're named after the Marquis de Lafayette.

And so they have this kind of looks like the outline of George Washington on a court, right? You know that profile. But it's it's an image, or it's a profile of the Marquis, and it's sitting there on the jersey. It's like it's fine enough.

You know, there are little inset lines where his nose or his ears are, whatever they are. And there's no way anybody in the stands can see that stuff. You know, even in a small stadium.

So it's it's kind of it's so finely done that it kind of just didn't make any sense, frankly. But anyways, it's just this great image. And it's like, who the heck decided to put that baby on the jersey? Yeah, you have two different images.

You have like a full team picture of the Lafayette team. You know, all the members are sitting in bleachers. It's kind of far away.

And you can you can see it's maybe somebody's head looks almost like, you know, the front of a dime, you know, that kind of image. But then you have a picture of five players a little bit closer, and you can see, you know, the marquee there. So it's very, very detailed for an emblem on the front of a jersey.

Yeah. Yeah. A hundred years ago.

Yeah. You know, you know, I mean, presumably, it's a black-and-white image. So I assume it's all just a white or a gray or something, you know, logo.

So you're like the Blackhawks. You know, there's multiple colors. And so at least it helps, you know, kind of differentiate the features in a face.

But anyway, this is one of those things that, you know, I mean, football at that time, you know, football didn't require numbers on the jerseys on the front of the jerseys until 1937. And it was like in 41, where they started numbering by position. You know, guards are wearing this number, and tackles are wearing that.

But, you know, so I mean, these preceded those rules. Right. So it's one of those like, OK, well, why didn't football have more emblems? You know, they could, they could have.

Right. Right. And other sports did.

But football, for whatever reason, didn't go the emblem route. And, you know, ultimately, the space got taken over by numbers. Well, perhaps it was this 1932 Lafayette jersey that just did them in.

We've got to stop this. We've got to stop the madness. That's a reasonable assumption to make.

However, is it 1932? Isn't it that same era where you have claims to the ugliest uniforms in football history? Yes. The 30s, 30s are the 30s in general. And kind of the longer you got it, the further you got into the decade, the worse it got.

So so maybe Lafayette was not so bad compared to their their peers at the time. Yeah, I'd have to see the back of their pants. Make a judgment because in the 30s, you saw those stripes up the back of the pants that are absolutely hideous.

Of course, the poor guy's head is trapped in between two friction strips. You know, if those are walls, he's not going to have a very good view of anything looking off that jersey. Well, very interesting, Tim.

This is something I've never really thought about with the emblems being on hockey and, you know, so prevalent and why they aren't in football. I never really thought of it. But you really pointed out something else, the obvious that probably many of us overlook and gave us a history on it.

And we really appreciate that. And you do this a lot. You have these little oddities that, you know, we we probably should know and just don't think about.

But you do it on a daily basis. And it's really fascinating. I think the listeners would love to enjoy some of these and your tidbits each and every day.

So please share with us how we can share in learning this. Sure. Real simple.

Go out to my website, FootballArcheology.com. Any story that's out there gives you an opportunity to subscribe at the end. And if you haven't been there before, I think it kind of forces you to at least say yes or no to subscribing. But anyway, if you subscribe, you'll get an email every day at seven o'clock Eastern that has that day's story.

Typically, a one or two-minute read with a couple of pictures. Alternatively, you can follow me on Twitter at Football Archeology. And, you know, then it becomes more hit or miss because of the way Twitter is working nowadays.

Who sees what is a total mystery? All right. Well, Tim, we thank you very much for sharing your time and knowledge and information with us on a daily basis.

And we thank you for joining us each Tuesday to talk about some of these. And we hope to talk to you again next Tuesday. Yeah, I'll see you a week from now.

Thanks.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

Love the football jersey designs and evolution wait till you check out the History of American Football Jersey.

-Football Jersey Frequently Asked Questions

-What are American football jerseys made of? Modern jerseys are a mix of synthetic fibers such as polyester or a blend of different materials such asspandex, for more check out our in-depth study ofThe Make up and Materials of Football Jerseys.

-When did football jerseys start having numbers on them? Though there was documented talk of it since 1894, players did not all wear digits in a game until the 1905 Iowa State at Drake game, check this out more on this storyThe Origins Of Football Player Numbers.

-Whose college football jersey was the first to be retired? Red Grange's Number 77 Ilinois Illini jersey was the first college uni to be shelved in 1925. There were a couple more about the same time and we chatted with a college football expert historian help divulge College Football and its First Retired Jerseys.

-Who are some of the most famous NFL players at each jersey number? From Red Grange's jersey number 77 to Tom Brady's iconic number 12, a slew of NFL players made their digits proud. Want to know more? You are in the right place as we covered all 100 jersey numbers and the best to wear each:About Football By Numbers.

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Calling all gridiron gurus! Ever wonder how fans first paid a premium to watch football on TV? Today, we have historian Timothy Brown joining us to delve into the forgotten era of early pay-per-view for America's favorite sport. Buckle up and get ready for a touchdown worth of knowledge!

Broadcasters aren't entirely switching to paid subscriptions for NFL games. They're offering a mix. Traditional channels like CBS and FOX still air in-market games for free. However, for out-of-market games and exclusive content, streaming services like YouTube TV with NFL Sunday Ticket or ESPN+ are becoming increasingly important. The NFL is adapting to the changing viewership landscape, offering both free and paid options.

This conversation is based on Tim’s original Tidbit found at: Football and Early Pay-Per-View Television.

Also available is the Podcast Version of "The Original Football TV Subscription Service with Timothy Brown".

-Conversation Transcribed on Football's Early Pay-Per-View TV with Timothy Brown

Darin Hayes: 
Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes at Pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. Welcome to another Tuesday, where we will go and visit with our friend Timothy Brown of footballarchaeology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. 

Timothy Brown: 
Hey, Darin. How are you doing? As you said, I am looking forward to chatting about pay-per-view. 

Darin Hayes: 
Yeah, I think you are because you told me just to have the video of you here. I had to pay you to, uh, to view it. So, so yeah, that, that money's in the mail. So don't worry, it's coming. 

Timothy Brown: 
Okay, good. 

Darin Hayes: 
is in cash, right? Yeah, it's a Canadian cash. Is that okay? 

Timothy Brown: 
That's fine. I live right across the river. So, okay. Well, good news. Canadian dollars. That's, that's great. Or loonies or toonies, whatever you got. 

Darin Hayes: 
Oh, he's got the whole vernacular done. All right, all right, Tim, you are referring to, of course, a tidbit that you wrote recently titled Football and early pay-per-view television. And that's an interesting thing, especially what we've been seeing here in the last year or two with the NFL, which is taking us into some different venues for watching TV. Maybe you could speak on those, the history and what's going on now. 

-Football and early pay-per-view television

Timothy Brown: 
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, this tidbit got published, and it looks like it was February. And so I published it in reaction to, you know, NFL games being on peacock. And, you know, for whatever reason, I get peacock for free. So it didn't bother me that games are on peacock. But, you know, it's a bunch of people who don't have peacocks. And, you know, I mean, there are different things. For example, I'm a big CFL fan. And I couldn't get CFL games for part of last year because they had switched their package. And, you know, so access to the games is a big deal, you know, and, even if you're a casual fan, you know, I mean, you want to be able to watch the game. So, you know, and, and just generally, we've become so accustomed to easy access to games, whether it's high school, college or pro, but especially NFL, you know, we were so accustomed to just, all you got to do is go to one of the major channels, and the game's going to be there. You know, it's just an assumption. And so, you know, part of the reason for writing this is because that certainly was not always so, right? I mean, the game was not always available. And so, you know, I mean, historically, football teams didn't have television money; they relied on the ticket sales or the gate; they got, you know if they own the stadium, they got some money for billboards, you know, from an advertising perspective, they got, you know, vent, you know, from vendors that were selling goods in the stadium. Later on, they also picked up the radio, but, you know, not a whole lot of money was coming out of the radio. So but the huge influx and, you know, yeah, it was certainly one of the several biggest influences in the game of Football, at least in terms of college and pro, was the influx of television money because it just funded so much in the way of salaries and specialized coaching and just, you know, just so many things that changed the nature of the game. So, but it's one of those deals where when we, you know, sometimes, you know, people look at history and say, well, okay, this is the way it happened. So that was the way it was going to happen, or it had to happen. And that's just not true. I mean, you know, it's as much history as much about what could have happened as what did happen, you know, because there's just all kinds of alternative histories of something else that had changed; it could have happened a different way. And so pay-per-view is one of those, you know, we think that the only way it could have happened, you know, as far as television rights and everything in college and pro Football is the way it occurred. But there were other, you know, other forces at work that just didn't play out as well. And so, you know, I use, you know, kind of that kind of background thinking, and then talk about the 1963 NFL championship game. And so even then, you know, so television was getting, you know, was starting to really run and, you know, they had already negotiated the, and, you know, probably the biggest turning point was that they got them, they basically, you know, Congress passed the, the whatever, it's the Sports Act of 1963, or whatever it was, but that basically, you know, gave antitrust exemptions to pro Football, that allowed them to negotiate league-wide contracts rather than franchise by franchise contracts, which is changed the dynamic, but, you know, still PPV was, was still out there. So, at the time, in 63, it carried on, and I forget when it finally ended. But, you know, NFL teams and NFL teams had blackouts. So, any game, like if you lived in Green Bay, or Pittsburgh, or Baltimore, or wherever you lived, you could not broadcast that game; you could not broadcast an NFL game within 75 miles of the site of the game. And so, you know, if, you know, basically, people never saw home games unless they had tickets because they wanted to force people to buy tickets, right? Because that's where the money was, the money wasn't the money, and it still wasn't in television; the money was in the tickets and ticket sales. 

Darin Hayes: 
I can tell you we still have blackouts here. 

Timothy Brown: 
What? 

Darin Hayes: 
They even black out when you have an NFL ticket. We're in Buffalo, the Buffalo Bills market here. We're within a hundred miles of Buffalo, a hundred miles of Cleveland, a hundred miles of Pittsburgh. So we sort of, if there isn't a way game for Buffalo, they have all the rights because they have to show the way games for Buffalo. Even if Cleveland is playing Pittsburgh in a rivalry game, we sometimes can't see that because of that. Now I had, I had pay-per-view, and I think it was Pittsburgh playing at Buffalo. It didn't sell out, and the game was blacked out in my area, even though I had the NFL ticket. So, they still black things out for the home teams. 

Timothy Brown: 
OK, so I didn't realize that was still going on. 

Darin Hayes: 
Oh, crazy. I don't know why, but they do. 

Timothy Brown: 
So, but OK, so I mean, if you live in an area like that, then, you know, then then it's the current experience for people. Right. But, you know, back then, it was so this: here it is, the NFL championship game. And in a darn good-sized city like Chicago, which at the time was probably the number three city in the country. Right. And the game is being televised. You know, it's played at Wrigley Field. So only forty-eight thousand people can get in there. And so what they did was, you know, this is, again, still the time when people are thinking pay-per-view is going to be the model. And at that point, there was kind of a it is pay -that something is going to happen in movie theaters. When I was a kid, there were still boxing matches that you'd go to the theater to watch. Or is it something that's going to happen at home? And so at that point, what it was, they had three locations like the McCormick Center, a big convention center like Chicago Stadium or something like that, and some big theater. But they had forty-eight thousand in Wrigley Field. They had twenty-five and a half thousand people in the history theaters to watch the game, you know. And, you know, if you live far enough outside of Chicago, then you just drove to the boundary line, and you went to a bar and watched it, you know, watch the game there. But so, I mean, it just tells you how many people would want to go watch a game and pay for it. And it was, you know, this game was the end of December. So if you went and watched it at a pay-per-view location, it was warm, which is nice, you know. And, you know, there were still a lot of people at that time predicting pay-per-view was going to be the model. Right. And, you know, we've talked about this before, where the idea is there, but the technology isn't to make it happen. Right. Whether that's equipment or broadcasting. And in this case, it was broadcasting. So there were people saying that what was going to happen was that they were going to be in a community. You'd have your television, and then you'd have an attachment on top of your television where you would feed quarters into this little box, you know, like a parking meter kind of thing, and get to watch some show for 25 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever it was. And but it was like, I mean, people were like, yeah, this is going to happen. And, you know, then it's like, well, who the hell is going to come around and collect all these all these quarters? You know, you've got to make sure somebody is home to get in their house to collect them and but actually, actually, after writing this, I found out there was actually one city, I forget where it was, but there was one city, at least, where they actually had this whole system set up, and people would go around and collect the quarters from people's houses. It's just bizarre. But, you know, again, this is, you know, there weren't credit cards, there weren't magnetic strips. I mean, there were credit cards, but there were paper, you know, there were no magnetic strips. There's no subscription, and you can't pay by the Internet. There's no streaming, you know, all that kind of stuff. Things we take for granted today. So you can't hear it? Well, why didn't they just stream it? Well, you know, there was no streaming. Right. So anyway, I just think it's really fun to kind of look back at that. But it's this thing of, you know, it's, you know, what they call the naturalistic assumption just because you can't get an ought from it, just because something is that way. It doesn't mean it ought to be that way or had to be that way. And so, you know, that's kind of the history that is written by what happened, largely by what happened as opposed to what could have happened. You know, so yeah, it's just an amusing, amusing episode. 

Darin Hayes: 
Yeah, definitely. Did they call it pay-per-view in your area when you were growing up? Here, they called those for boxing, wrestling, and anything like that. It was called Close Circuit TV. 

Timothy Brown: 
Yeah, I think most people call it the closed circuit. But yeah, actually, closed circuit. Another thing about football, you know, there was a period, actually, mostly in the early 60s, where maybe it was a little bit earlier, maybe it was the late 50s too. But there was a time when people's football coaches started using closed circuit technology to watch game film while the game was going on, or game tape. And they do it on the sidelines; they do it up in the booth. And then they finally axed that because at the college level, they axed it more for money. You know, it just became an arms race, you know, a technology arms race. And then the NFL just said, boom, no more of this. So that is the underlying reason why even today, I mean, people now have the pads and iPads on the sideline. But basically, 

Darin Hayes: 
You get the sponsor; it's Microsoft Surface. That's the only thing else. Yes, yes, sorry. 

Timothy Brown: 
My bad. Well, the NFL police were coming to your sponsorship rights, not mine. I've got my socks pulled up all the way, by the way. Um, so yeah, but you know, so, I mean that whole thing of not having technology on the sideline originated during this pay-per-view and closed circuit, you know, same, same technology, same underlying technology and time. 

Darin Hayes: 
Yeah, I guess the other question is that it's more of an ethical question. I know you said in the beginning that you have the free peacock, and you got it on. Well, I have the free version of Peacock, and I couldn't get that game. They, they, they wanted me to pay the, whatever, $5, $7 a month, uh, to join their, their peacock hub or whatever the hall it is to watch this. I was one of the ones that, uh, I, I said, just on the purpose of it. I said, why, why can I watch every other playoff game? And I can't watch this sub-zero game with the Dolphins going to Kansas City. 

Timothy Brown: 
Well, so, like myself, I do ESPN Plus because that gives me access to the college games for basically an FCS kind of school that I, you know, follow; I get their Football and basketball that way. And in the past, it gave me access to a lot of CFL games. So you know, it's like, I'll pay that, you know, to get access, right? I have that as well. Yeah, but, you know, I don't think it'd be a tough call for me to pay more money for something else just to watch a couple of games here and there. 

Darin Hayes: 
Yeah, I don't know where they plan because I know they plan on doing more games this coming year on that same thing. And I heard they might be because I think every team is going to be playing a game out of the country. That's what they had in 17 games. So, every team will eventually lose one home game. I don't think it's going to be fully that way this year. But I think they may be doing that to those games, not just in 2024 but years beyond that, I heard, where you can't go to the stadium. And the only way you can watch your team is to do, you know, Amazon; you have to have Amazon Prime where you got to have peacock, or you have Paramount or whatever there, whoever else is going to join the club here for viewing televisions. 

Timothy Brown: 
you know, we'll see how all that stuff works out. I mean, you know, it's, it's one of those things where, you know, I think, generally the the availability has increased the popularity, you know, over time. And now, they're starting to try to figure out, okay, is there still a way to make even more money? And, you know, maybe they're gonna kill the golden goose, but, you know, that's for other people to decide. 

Darin Hayes: 
Yeah, right. And I didn't even see what the numbers were. I don't know if they made them public or what the numbers were for that peacock game. I would have to believe they got a small portion of what they would have normally gotten if it had been on NBC. 

Timothy Brown: 
Yeah, I don't know, you know, I don't, you know, I, I watch, I'm pretty religious about watching my favorite teams, but for the, the average, you know, Sunday afternoon NFL game, I don't watch much of anything. You know, I'll watch a little bit here and there, but not really. 

Darin Hayes: 
Yeah. All right. Well, Hey, I mean, it's a great story, and it's something that's, uh, you know, sort of coming true in our lifetime here. So we may have to be facing that more and more as we go on. Cause I know there's at least two or three games this coming season, regular season and playoff games where they plan on having it, uh, you know, well, there's Amazon every week. So, I guess we are paying for it now in some respects. People don't have enough Amazon to pay for that, but yeah, it's coming. And, uh, you know, like I say, the NFL is a billion-dollar industry for a reason. And that's, uh, they know how to make money off folks like us. That's for sure. Um, we'll see. Yeah. Right now, Tim, you have, uh, you know, some great pieces of history, just like you spoke about here, uh, that you write about on a regular basis. And, uh, you, you have, I believe, a thousand of them now. Maybe you could share with the listeners and viewers where they can enjoy some of your writing. 

Timothy Brown: 
Yeah, it's footballarcheology.com. It's a Substack app or Substack newsletter blog. So just go there, subscribe. You'll get an email every day, or not every day, but every time I publish. And alternatively, you can follow me on Twitter, on threads, or on the Substack app. And at least you'll get exposed to what's out there. 

Darin Hayes: 
All right, Tim, we really appreciate you sharing this story with us and enjoy having you here each week, and we hope to talk to you again next Tuesday. 

Timothy Brown: 
Yeah, look forward to it. Thank you. 

---

Remember the days of scrambling to find a bar with the big game on, or praying your free trial of a streaming service wouldn't cut out during the winning touchdown? Today, catching the NFL's most anticipated matchups often requires a click and a credit card – a far cry from the days of local broadcasts and shared experiences.

This post dives into the fascinating history of pay-per-view (PPV) for American football, exploring its evolution, impact on the game, and the changing landscape of how we consume the sport we love. So, grab your remote, settle into the comfort of your couch, and join us as we rewind and explore the rise of PPV in the world of football.

From Turnstiles to Touchdowns: How Pay-Per-View Revolutionized Watching Football From Your Couch

-Conversation Transcribed on Football's Early Pay-Per-View TV with Timothy Brown
Darin Hayes:
Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes at Pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. Welcome to another Tuesday, where we will go and visit with our friend Timothy Brown of footballarchaeology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Timothy Brown:
Hey, Darin. How are you doing? As you said, I am looking forward to chatting about pay-per-view.

Darin Hayes:
Yeah, I think you are because you told me just to have the video of you here. I had to pay you to, uh, to view it. So, so yeah, that, that money's in the mail. So don't worry, it's coming.

Timothy Brown:
Okay, good.

Darin Hayes:
is in cash, right? Yeah, it's a Canadian cash. Is that okay?

Timothy Brown:
That's fine. I live right across the river. So, okay. Well, good news. Canadian dollars. That's, that's great. Or loonies or toonies, whatever you got.

Darin Hayes:
Oh, he's got the whole vernacular done. All right, all right, Tim, you are referring to, of course, a tidbit that you wrote recently titled Football and early pay-per-view television. And that's an interesting thing, especially what we've been seeing here in the last year or two with the NFL, which is taking us into some different venues for watching TV. Maybe you could speak on those, the history and what's going on now.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, this tidbit got published, and it looks like it was February. And so I published it in reaction to, you know, NFL games being on peacock. And, you know, for whatever reason, I get peacock for free. So it didn't bother me that games are on peacock. But, you know, it's a bunch of people who don't have peacocks. And, you know, I mean, there are different things. For example, I'm a big CFL fan. And I couldn't get CFL games for part of last year because they had switched their package. And, you know, so access to the games is a big deal, you know, and, even if you're a casual fan, you know, I mean, you want to be able to watch the game. So, you know, and, and just generally, we've become so accustomed to easy access to games, whether it's high school, college or pro, but especially NFL, you know, we were so accustomed to just, all you got to do is go to one of the major channels, and the game's going to be there. You know, it's just an assumption. And so, you know, part of the reason for writing this is because that certainly was not always so, right? I mean, the game was not always available. And so, you know, I mean, historically, football teams didn't have television money; they relied on the ticket sales or the gate; they got, you know if they own the stadium, they got some money for billboards, you know, from an advertising perspective, they got, you know, vent, you know, from vendors that were selling goods in the stadium. Later on, they also picked up the radio, but, you know, not a whole lot of money was coming out of the radio. So but the huge influx and, you know, yeah, it was certainly one of the several biggest influences in the game of Football, at least in terms of college and pro, was the influx of television money because it just funded so much in the way of salaries and specialized coaching and just, you know, just so many things that changed the nature of the game. So, but it's one of those deals where when we, you know, sometimes, you know, people look at history and say, well, okay, this is the way it happened. So that was the way it was going to happen, or it had to happen. And that's just not true. I mean, you know, it's as much history as much about what could have happened as what did happen, you know, because there's just all kinds of alternative histories of something else that had changed; it could have happened a different way. And so pay-per-view is one of those, you know, we think that the only way it could have happened, you know, as far as television rights and everything in college and pro Football is the way it occurred. But there were other, you know, other forces at work that just didn't play out as well. And so, you know, I use, you know, kind of that kind of background thinking, and then talk about the 1963 NFL championship game. And so even then, you know, so television was getting, you know, was starting to really run and, you know, they had already negotiated the, and, you know, probably the biggest turning point was that they got them, they basically, you know, Congress passed the, the whatever, it's the Sports Act of 1963, or whatever it was, but that basically, you know, gave antitrust exemptions to pro Football, that allowed them to negotiate league-wide contracts rather than franchise by franchise contracts, which is changed the dynamic, but, you know, still PPV was, was still out there. So, at the time, in 63, it carried on, and I forget when it finally ended. But, you know, NFL teams and NFL teams had blackouts. So, any game, like if you lived in Green Bay, or Pittsburgh, or Baltimore, or wherever you lived, you could not broadcast that game; you could not broadcast an NFL game within 75 miles of the site of the game. And so, you know, if, you know, basically, people never saw home games unless they had tickets because they wanted to force people to buy tickets, right? Because that's where the money was, the money wasn't the money, and it still wasn't in television; the money was in the tickets and ticket sales.
Darin Hayes:
I can tell you we still have blackouts here.

Timothy Brown:
What?

Darin Hayes:
They even black out when you have an NFL ticket. We're in Buffalo, the Buffalo Bills market here. We're within a hundred miles of Buffalo, a hundred miles of Cleveland, a hundred miles of Pittsburgh. So we sort of, if there isn't a way game for Buffalo, they have all the rights because they have to show the way games for Buffalo. Even if Cleveland is playing Pittsburgh in a rivalry game, we sometimes can't see that because of that. Now I had, I had pay-per-view, and I think it was Pittsburgh playing at Buffalo. It didn't sell out, and the game was blacked out in my area, even though I had the NFL ticket. So, they still black things out for the home teams.

Timothy Brown:
OK, so I didn't realize that was still going on.

Darin Hayes:
Oh, crazy. I don't know why, but they do.

Timothy Brown:
So, but OK, so I mean, if you live in an area like that, then, you know, then then it's the current experience for people. Right. But, you know, back then, it was so this: here it is, the NFL championship game. And in a darn good-sized city like Chicago, which at the time was probably the number three city in the country. Right. And the game is being televised. You know, it's played at Wrigley Field. So only forty-eight thousand people can get in there. And so what they did was, you know, this is, again, still the time when people are thinking pay-per-view is going to be the model. And at that point, there was kind of a it is pay -that something is going to happen in movie theaters. When I was a kid, there were still boxing matches that you'd go to the theater to watch. Or is it something that's going to happen at home? And so at that point, what it was, they had three locations like the McCormick Center, a big convention center like Chicago Stadium or something like that, and some big theater. But they had forty-eight thousand in Wrigley Field. They had twenty-five and a half thousand people in the history theaters to watch the game, you know. And, you know, if you live far enough outside of Chicago, then you just drove to the boundary line, and you went to a bar and watched it, you know, watch the game there. But so, I mean, it just tells you how many people would want to go watch a game and pay for it. And it was, you know, this game was the end of December. So if you went and watched it at a pay-per-view location, it was warm, which is nice, you know. And, you know, there were still a lot of people at that time predicting pay-per-view was going to be the model. Right. And, you know, we've talked about this before, where the idea is there, but the technology isn't to make it happen. Right. Whether that's equipment or broadcasting. And in this case, it was broadcasting. So there were people saying that what was going to happen was that they were going to be in a community. You'd have your television, and then you'd have an attachment on top of your television where you would feed quarters into this little box, you know, like a parking meter kind of thing, and get to watch some show for 25 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever it was. And but it was like, I mean, people were like, yeah, this is going to happen. And, you know, then it's like, well, who the hell is going to come around and collect all these all these quarters? You know, you've got to make sure somebody is home to get in their house to collect them and but actually, actually, after writing this, I found out there was actually one city, I forget where it was, but there was one city, at least, where they actually had this whole system set up, and people would go around and collect the quarters from people's houses. It's just bizarre. But, you know, again, this is, you know, there weren't credit cards, there weren't magnetic strips. I mean, there were credit cards, but there were paper, you know, there were no magnetic strips. There's no subscription, and you can't pay by the Internet. There's no streaming, you know, all that kind of stuff. Things we take for granted today. So you can't hear it? Well, why didn't they just stream it? Well, you know, there was no streaming. Right. So anyway, I just think it's really fun to kind of look back at that. But it's this thing of, you know, it's, you know, what they call the naturalistic assumption just because you can't get an ought from it, just because something is that way. It doesn't mean it ought to be that way or had to be that way. And so, you know, that's kind of the history that is written by what happened, largely by what happened as opposed to what could have happened. You know, so yeah, it's just an amusing, amusing episode.

Darin Hayes:
Yeah, definitely. Did they call it pay-per-view in your area when you were growing up? Here, they called those for boxing, wrestling, and anything like that. It was called Close Circuit TV.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, I think most people call it the closed circuit. But yeah, actually, closed circuit. Another thing about football, you know, there was a period, actually, mostly in the early 60s, where maybe it was a little bit earlier, maybe it was the late 50s too. But there was a time when people's football coaches started using closed circuit technology to watch game film while the game was going on, or game tape. And they do it on the sidelines; they do it up in the booth. And then they finally axed that because at the college level, they axed it more for money. You know, it just became an arms race, you know, a technology arms race. And then the NFL just said, boom, no more of this. So that is the underlying reason why even today, I mean, people now have the pads and iPads on the sideline. But basically,

Darin Hayes:
You get the sponsor; it's Microsoft Surface. That's the only thing else. Yes, yes, sorry.

Timothy Brown:
My bad. Well, the NFL police were coming to your sponsorship rights, not mine. I've got my socks pulled up all the way, by the way. Um, so yeah, but you know, so, I mean that whole thing of not having technology on the sideline originated during this pay-per-view and closed circuit, you know, same, same technology, same underlying technology and time.

Darin Hayes:
Yeah, I guess the other question is that it's more of an ethical question. I know you said in the beginning that you have the free peacock, and you got it on. Well, I have the free version of Peacock, and I couldn't get that game. They, they, they wanted me to pay the, whatever, $5, $7 a month, uh, to join their, their peacock hub or whatever the hall it is to watch this. I was one of the ones that, uh, I, I said, just on the purpose of it. I said, why, why can I watch every other playoff game? And I can't watch this sub-zero game with the Dolphins going to Kansas City.

Timothy Brown:
Well, so, like myself, I do ESPN Plus because that gives me access to the college games for basically an FCS kind of school that I, you know, follow; I get their Football and basketball that way. And in the past, it gave me access to a lot of CFL games. So you know, it's like, I'll pay that, you know, to get access, right? I have that as well. Yeah, but, you know, I don't think it'd be a tough call for me to pay more money for something else just to watch a couple of games here and there.

Darin Hayes:
Yeah, I don't know where they plan because I know they plan on doing more games this coming year on that same thing. And I heard they might be because I think every team is going to be playing a game out of the country. That's what they had in 17 games. So, every team will eventually lose one home game. I don't think it's going to be fully that way this year. But I think they may be doing that to those games, not just in 2024 but years beyond that, I heard, where you can't go to the stadium. And the only way you can watch your team is to do, you know, Amazon; you have to have Amazon Prime where you got to have peacock, or you have Paramount or whatever there, whoever else is going to join the club here for viewing televisions.

Timothy Brown:
you know, we'll see how all that stuff works out. I mean, you know, it's, it's one of those things where, you know, I think, generally the the availability has increased the popularity, you know, over time. And now, they're starting to try to figure out, okay, is there still a way to make even more money? And, you know, maybe they're gonna kill the golden goose, but, you know, that's for other people to decide.

Darin Hayes:
Yeah, right. And I didn't even see what the numbers were. I don't know if they made them public or what the numbers were for that peacock game. I would have to believe they got a small portion of what they would have normally gotten if it had been on NBC.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, I don't know, you know, I don't, you know, I, I watch, I'm pretty religious about watching my favorite teams, but for the, the average, you know, Sunday afternoon NFL game, I don't watch much of anything. You know, I'll watch a little bit here and there, but not really.

Darin Hayes:
Yeah. All right. Well, Hey, I mean, it's a great story, and it's something that's, uh, you know, sort of coming true in our lifetime here. So we may have to be facing that more and more as we go on. Cause I know there's at least two or three games this coming season, regular season and playoff games where they plan on having it, uh, you know, well, there's Amazon every week. So, I guess we are paying for it now in some respects. People don't have enough Amazon to pay for that, but yeah, it's coming. And, uh, you know, like I say, the NFL is a billion-dollar industry for a reason. And that's, uh, they know how to make money off folks like us. That's for sure. Um, we'll see. Yeah. Right now, Tim, you have, uh, you know, some great pieces of history, just like you spoke about here, uh, that you write about on a regular basis. And, uh, you, you have, I believe, a thousand of them now. Maybe you could share with the listeners and viewers where they can enjoy some of your writing.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, it's footballarcheology.com. It's a Substack app or Substack newsletter blog. So just go there, subscribe. You'll get an email every day, or not every day, but every time I publish. And alternatively, you can follow me on Twitter, on threads, or on the Substack app. And at least you'll get exposed to what's out there.

Darin Hayes:
All right, Tim, we really appreciate you sharing this story with us and enjoy having you here each week, and we hope to talk to you again next Tuesday.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, look forward to it. Thank you.

---

One of the biggest football rules about faces of all time may be in the game-time relationship of a coach in communicating with his players.

Here is Tim's original Tidbit that the topic derived from, Coaching One Player During Timeouts

-Transcription of One Coach 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 look in that portal today and go back and do some football archaeological work with Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Darin, thank you. Looking forward to chatting once again.

Always fun to talk about old-time football. Yeah, and you have some real dandies that come out in the tidbits each and every day, and one that really caught my eye that I'd like to talk about tonight is you have, it's titled Coaching One Player, and I find this very interesting on multiple levels, and my officiating ears go up on this one because, you know, I can appreciate what the officials had to deal with during these times too. So I'll let you take the floor here and tell us all about this.

Well, I think I said this two weeks ago, but there are certain stories that need background in order for a more current story to make sense. Hey, we're here to hear old football stories, so the more we can hear, the better. Then you're going to benefit from that kind of idea and thinking today.

So this, for I think everybody, whether you've lived through this era or not if you're a football fan, you've seen images of a coach standing on the sideline talking typically to his quarterback. Sometimes, it could have been his mid linebacker, but most often, the pictures would show the quarterback. And so it's obviously a timeout, and so they're, you know, the two are conferring about game strategies and which plays to call, et cetera.

And so, but the odd thing is, why the heck is he just talking to his quarterback? Because nowadays the whole team comes over or, yeah, I mean, especially like high school, the old team will come running over coach and listen to coach jabber, you know, 35 seconds and then run back and execute a play. But so this whole thing of the coach being able to talk to one player at a time during a timeout all has this background in the idea of coaching from the sideline. And so that was illegal really until, you know, in the college game, it was illegal until the 1960s.

It was illegal in the pro game until 1944. But so it all has to do with this idea that, you know, originally the football teams were organized by the athletes themselves, just they were club teams, just like any, I don't quite want to make it sound like, you know, the club Quidditch team at some college or university today, but, you know, fundamentally, it's the same thing. A bunch of guys got together and said, hey, let's play football.

And so they organized themselves and then it got popular. So a lot of people wanted to attend and blah, blah, blah. So the game, you know, evolved, but it had this fundamental belief that the game was for the players, not for the fan, not for the coaches.

And so there's a whole slew of football rules and underlying beliefs that are aligned with that. And, you know, I mean, some of it's kind of hidden, but even things like, you know, numbering the players was for the fans, but it was opposed by the coaches for a long time. So that's why we didn't have numbers.

But so one of the things that was by tradition, you're supposed to engage the player's brawn and the brain. Therefore, coaches, fans, and spectators are not supposed to yell instructions to the players. And so that all worked and was, you know, the tradition and kind of the etiquette allowed that or made sure that didn't happen until the late 1880s.

And then people kind of started cheating a bit. And so they enacted a rule in 1892 that said, if somebody coaches from the sideline, it's a 15-yard penalty. And so if you think about other and older pictures that you've seen of football teams when you saw, you see pictures of all the players sitting on a bench on the sideline, you see pictures of all the players sitting or kneeling on the sideline, or you see one or two coaches standing.

And all of that was just at various times, the rules morphed a bit, especially in terms of the number of coaches that could stand on the sideline or move up and down during play. But the, you know, even when they could move around a bit, they still could not instruct the players. So there were things in the 19, I want to say it's the late 1930s, there were some experimental games where they had a 12th student, so a team member, maybe he was a smart guy, but he was like the third string quarter.

They put him out on the field to call the plays and instruct the team because he was a student, not a coach. So there were some experimental games, you know, trying that because, again, student, not a coach. So, even the rule that they had was the kicker; if there were times when they did allow teams, the kicker had to request the tee.

You couldn't, you know, some of the sidelines couldn't just toss a tee out onto the field; the kicker had to request it. Because if you just toss the tee out there, that meant the coach had said, I want them kicking, you know, I want them to try the field goal here from the 35-yard line or whatever. Anyway, there is a whole set of rules like that.

But then in, you know, say, 1940s, you have two platoon footballs coming along. That allowed coaches to coach the defense while they were off the field or the offense when they were off the field. And then eventually, in the 50s, you had, you know, in the pro level, anyways, they had what they called messenger guards, where teams would swap, they'd have guards run back and forth between days.

So that, you know, one, the right guard would swap between one guy and the other, and they would bring in the play each ball. Interestingly, a guy named Chuck Knoll was one of the first messenger guards to play and perform that function. So... I think I've heard of him before.

Yeah, I think he, well, I know the listeners can't see that, but you're wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers hat. So, I think you've heard of Chuck Knoll before. But so eventually, in 1967, they passed a rule that said, okay, now when we call a timeout, you know, previously, even during a timeout, the players, the coach could not talk to the players; they had to stay out there on the field.

And even with injuries, the coach could not go out there; just one person who was a medical professional could go out there. And so in 1967, in the colleges anyways, they said, one player can talk to a coach. And so that's why you see all those pictures.

And actually, the high schools had made that rule change a couple of years earlier. And then, you know, early 70s, maybe late 60s, somewhere in there, the high schools also just said, let's allow all 11 players to come over to the sideline to talk to the coach. So again, it's one of those goofy things, but it's grounded in this whole background, underlying people's belief systems about football.

But believe it or not, at the high school level, the phenomenon, you know, even through my officiating career, it's only the last 10 or 15 years that more than one coach can go out on the field and more than 11 players can be out there. When they had it for a long time that I officiated, you had to have only 11 players and one coach, and they had to be at least inside the nine-yard marks, which is the top of the numbers. And, and you had to call, you know, technically, if they did that, you're supposed to call it illegal substitution.

I mean, we just tried to enforce it and keep them back, but it was a pain in the neck because you know how timeouts are; it's sort of chaotic. And you're trying to tell these coaches, they can't, you know, the defensive assistant wants to come out with the head coach and whatever you got to chase them back. But they, they did a promotion.

Right. Right. So the national federation had to be like 10, 15 years ago, finally in this century said, Hey, you can have as many players and as many coaches come out anywhere on the field.

And as long, you know, but when that minute's up, you know, everybody's got to be out of there. And just the 11 players are on their own side of the ball. So it's still an evolving transition of that rule, at least at the high school level.

And it's much easier to do it now. I think, you know, you raised a really interesting point of view from the official, right? So, you know, I played, I coached. So I have that perspective on what it's like to do those things, but I never officiated.

And so I don't understand the game from that perspective, as well as the pressures and the concerns. Right. And so there's, there's just, I mean, there's a lot of things out there in the rules that, you know, even like the, the stripes, stripes on the gridiron, you know, the 10, the five-yard stripes, when there was a checkerboard, the checkerboard stripes, there are lots of things that were put on the field to help the officials, not to help the, you know, the players.

Like the game, they're playing behind me right now. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the difference between whistles and horns and all that kind of stuff, the final gun, you know, there were so many things that, that really, you know, they were instituted to make officiating easier and, and more regulated, more consistent, you know, because what do people complain about? Inconsistent officiating, right? So, you know, there's a reason.

They still complain about that. If you watched the games in the playoffs this year and the regular season, you know, even us old officials complained about some of them, but it's. Yeah.

But, but it really, I mean, it really, you know, like your perspective just lends a different lens, a different way to look at the game. And, you know, so I just, I appreciate that. It's just, you know, I get it, but I don't get it.

Yeah. It's, it's, it's definitely something. I mean, I, I miss, I love being out on the field.

I love the people that I work with. I love, you know, the coaches and the kids, but there's some, some parts of it that I don't miss, especially when you have a, a coach that had a bad day and he's going to take it out on you because you're the easiest target for him. And you're a sideline official.

You know, those are always fun, but yeah, I like the game and ship. I love doing it and going back and forth with the coach, and that's part of the fun of it. And it's an exciting thing.

And it's part of the game. I have a quick little story I have to tell you. One of my favorite college memories is that I played at a small college, and we had a game with a backup quarterback who was just a kind of poster.

And at one point, you know, in the middle of a game, a referee threw a flag, and then the play ended up at about 20, 30 yards downfield. And so, but he had thrown his flag near the line of scrimmage. And so this quarterback goes out on the field, picks up the guy's flag, stuffs it in his pants.

And so the, the official comes running back, you know, he's a headlinesman or whatever, cause he's right along the side. He comes back, and he can't find his flag. And so our coach starts yelling at him like, what are you doing? You know, you're delaying the game, you know, sticks.

So then the guy heads back upfield, looking for his flag, and when the quarterback takes the flag and dumps it back on the field, where, you know, it is behind him. And then the official turns around, sees the flag sitting there, and knows that it wasn't there like five seconds ago. He just, he just smiled, and he didn't say a damn thing.

He knew one of the kids was in his chain. And I just think I recall that it's just one of my favorite memories in college. It was just like a small college.

It really didn't matter, but it mattered. And so for somebody to think about, to think that quickly to do, to pull off that trick, and for the official to just let it go, I thought it was just total class. Cause he could have he could have flagged somebody.

Right. But it seems like you'd have it like every, every season, at least once or twice, you'd have that, that kid that just wants to help you out. You know, they, they, they're, they're just that helpful soul, and you throw a flag, and it's a spot foul.

And if the flag means something, you know, it wasn't like, you know, offsides or something, it's a holding or, you know, intentional grounding where the flag really matters, and you throw it, and you're, you know, you're, you're, that's why you have a flag. You're marking that spot, and you're following the rest of the play. And you, like you said, you might end up 30 yards downfield or 80 yards downfield, and you got to come back to the spot, but I'd always be turning around to come back.

And there's this kid, I can see him pick up the flag and say, I'll bring your flag to you, Mr. No, no, no, don't, don't do that. Thank you. But thank you.

But no, thanks. Yes. But yeah, that's all you always run into that kind of stuff, too.

But my teammate didn't have the official best interest at heart. Yeah. I think that was a little bit more malicious.

Are you sure this was a teammate, and it wasn't the person telling the story? No, it wasn't me. You seem to really have a lot of firsthand knowledge here. I've done, I've done, I was kind of a trickster, you know, sort of person.

So I've done things like that, but no, I, I, I didn't have the guts to do that. Yeah, that would be; it took a little bit of moxie to do that. I'm sure, especially with everybody in a stand, seeing what you're doing.

So, hey, Tim, great stuff as always, you know, this coaching and quarterback relationship and coaching with the, from the sidelines is always an interesting subject. And it's amazing how much that's evolved over the years and how much the perception of what the coach should be doing on the field and what he shouldn't be doing has changed over the last hundred years. It's just great stuff.

And I really like how you portrayed that out here in a story and this podcast tonight. And you know, you have these thoughts and these tidbits that come out each and every day on your website, social media, and email, and maybe you could share with the listeners how they could enjoy some of these, too. Yeah, so it's really easy.

My site is footballarchaeology.com. And as long as you spell it right, you'll find it. And so you can, there's, you know, every story that's out there, there's a subscribe button. And if you subscribe, you get get the email at seven o'clock Eastern every day, which comes right to your inbox.

And then alternatively, you can just follow me on Twitter at Football Archaeology. And then, you know, obviously, you can just go find it and, you know, periodically search it and see, see what's been published. But you know, from my perspective, the best thing for me is if you get the thing every day and, you know, if you've got a busy week, let them pile up.

And then when you got a little bit of time over the weekend, scan through them and see what interests you. All right. I, I'm glad that you, you mentioned that, that I'm not the only one that has trouble spelling archaeology every time I write it out.

And even if I spell it right, I look at it, and I, is that right? That's just one of those words that just doesn't look right, but hey. A-R-C-H-A-E-O-L-O-G-Y. Yeah.

I think maybe, maybe as an American, we pronounce it with that archaeology and A just doesn't seem like it belongs there, but hey, hey, great stuff and spell it right and put the dot com on the end and you'll get to Tim's site. And Tim, we'll talk to you again next week. Hey, very good.

Thanks, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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They say necessity is the mother of invention, and in the world of football, that invention sometimes comes wrapped in a pigskin and launched downfield. Today, we delve into a groundbreaking moment – the first ever extra point conversion by forward pass in American football history.

This wasn't just another point attempt; it was a play that challenged the status quo and redefined the way points were scored. Join us on a podcast journey with Timothy Brown and article exploration as we dissect this pivotal moment. We'll meet the players and coaches who dared to defy convention, analyze the strategic thinking behind the play call, and explore the impact it had on the game's evolution.

Was it a stroke of genius or a desperate gamble? Did it spark a revolution in offensive strategy, or was it a one-off act of audacious improvisation? We'll uncover the story behind the throw, the roar of the crowd, and the lasting legacy of this innovative play that forever changed the way extra points were scored. So, buckle up, football fans, and get ready to revisit a moment where forward-thinking met football history!

Could this be the first instance of a converted extra-point attempt after a TD via a forward pass? Timothy P. Brown tells the play's story as the Washington & Jefferson Presidents played the Lafayette Leopards in 1921.

-Transcription of Extra Point via the Forward Pass with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And guess what? It's Tuesday again.

And we are here with Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. And he has some great tidbits from some of his past writings that he's going to come on and chat a little bit about. Tonight, we're going to be talking about a very interesting one that came out in March. Tim Brown, welcome to The Pig Pen.

Darin, good to see you again and get a chance to chat about old-time football stuff. Always fun. Yeah, old time football.

There's nothing like it. And there's so much that we don't know about it that your tidbits really bring to light. And, you know, I learned so much from really enjoying them.

And you always have something that I'm going to take out of each one of those and, you know, store it in the old crock pot because it's something interesting from football yesteryear. And tonight is no exception. You really have an interesting one, sort of a development of the game that, in some cases, we still see today.

Yeah. You know, so this one's about the first. Extra point conversion by forward pass.

Right. And so, you know, there's a lot of stuff in football, and sometimes when I'm writing stuff, it's like, well, this was the first time this happened. OK, well, this is the first time we know it happened.

In a number of cases, you know, did it happen another time before that could be, you know, and especially earlier on, we get the more it's dependent on, you know, it happens when there was a reporter there when they wrote it in the newspaper. So, I just wrote fairly recently about the first crisscross or reverse in a football game. And that occurred in 1888 at Phillips Handover, the prep school, you know, in the east.

And but, you know, big time school, wealthy kids, wealthy alums got reported in Boston newspapers. And therefore, we know what happened. Did somebody else pull it off somewhere else beforehand? Could have been.

But, you know, the received wisdom is this is when it happened. So now, with the first extra point conversion by forward passes, the timing is a lot easier to figure out than when that first happened because until 1922, if you were going to convert the, you know, after scoring a touchdown, if you were going to do the goal after touchdown, you had to kick it there. You couldn't run it.

You couldn't pass it. So it had to be by kick. So we know that the first conversion bypass couldn't have occurred until 1922.

So then we get into, OK, well, when in 1922 did it happen? And so I at least don't have it. I mean, try as I might, I could search every newspaper archive and comb through every book that I own. I don't have a real effective way to try to find that first time. So, in this case, I'm relying on a newspaper report from 1954.

So a look back article saying, hey, here's what happened in 1922. But the cool thing was it wasn't a high-profile game. By two teams that you might not think of as high profile teams nowadays, but in 22, they were.

So it was a game, you know, kind of, you know, maybe the fourth week of the season, a game between Lafayette and Washington and Jefferson. So, you know, nowadays you go, OK, Lafayette and Washington and Jefferson. But at the time, Lafayette was riding a 17-game winning streak.

Washington and Jefferson was on a 17 point unbeaten streak. And I say unbeaten because they had tied California in the 1922 Rose Bowl or. Yeah, so.

So anyway. You know, they. You know, so really, two top teams are playing, and they're playing on the polo grounds.

So in until 1922, I guess, you know, you had to you had to kick it. Typically, people drop-kicked it, but they did the placement kick as well. So then in 22, you got the ball at the five-yard line.

You could kick it, you could drop kick it, you could snap it to a holder in place, kick it, you could run it, or you could pass it in for a touchdown or not for a touchdown, but for the conversion. But of course, you know, since it's starting from the five. The kick is probably your better option unless you don't have a good drop kicker, or you don't have a good place kicker, a good snapper, or a good holder.

Right. So, as it turned out, in this game, Lafayette went ahead 13 to nothing in the first half. And so, you know, Washington Jefferson's kind of chugging along a little bit.

But then in the third quarter, they score a touchdown and convert. So now it's 13 to seven in the fourth quarter. Lafayette, Washington Jefferson's quarterback, a guy named Brinkert.

He throws a touchdown pass. So now it's a 13-13 tie. And so the game depends on their ability to convert.

So he had the previous time they scored; he had drop-kicked it. The quarterback had drop-kicked for the extra point. So this time around, he sets up, you know, the team sets up just like he's going to dropkick again.

They snap it to him. And one of their ends, who are playing in tight as they typically did, then, you know, scoot out into the end zone all alone, and he tosses him the P, and they convert the extra point bypass. So again, we think that's the first conversion by a forward pass.

And they, you know, they ended up winning the game. That was that was the last score of the game. And so all the.

You know, all the other W and J fans leave happily in the Lafayette fans are disappointed. So what? So I have a trivia question for you. But if about what's well about Washington Jefferson.

But I'm going to set that aside to see if you want to cover it. If you have questions about the game or anything like that, we need to discuss. Well, I guess one of the questions is not particularly about the forward pass, but it's right about that time, as you share in your story, and you just mentioned it is one of the ways was the kick for the extra point similar to what we know today. Maybe the scoring was a little bit different.

Now, where's how was I'm interested in how the holder may have been because I know on free kicks, the holder was lying flat on their stomach, which I'm not exactly sure why, why they laid on their stomach to do that. You know, we said that we have holders today for free kicks on a windy day when, in the NFL, you have a holder on the ball. But I was just wondering, would did they take a snap from their stomach while the holder was on a stomach for those kicks? Or is it more similar on a knee like we do today? Yeah, I think I've seen different versions of that.

Initially, they may have tried to do the thing on the stomach. So, you know, the reason they did it on the stomach was on the free kick. The defense had to be 10 yards back of the ball.

And so as soon as as soon as the holder or they used to call him a placer, but as soon as the holder set the ball on the ground or as soon as the ball touched the ground, the defense could rush. So what they what the holder would do is lay prone. You know, you basically run on it.

You'd lay on his stomach and perpendicular to the path of the kicker. Right. Then he put one hand under the ball and one hand over the ball, balanced it, and held it right close to the ground.

And then, when the kicker was ready, he pulled the underhand out. And then, you know, so the ball was sitting on the ground, held by his upper hand. And then the kicker would come through, you know, follow the path and kick it.

So, you know, I think. You know exactly why it developed that way. It's kind of hard to know, but it does make sense.

You know, I mean, in a nun or in a free-kick situation, that particular method of holding makes sense. Now, once you introduce the snap. So, the snap to the holder originated in 1896.

And, you know, it's just one of those nobody thought about it before. So two brothers who, you know, played at Otterbein in Ohio developed it and then it spread quickly. But they but still most people still drop kicked anyways, because that's what, you know, the guys were trained to do.

So in those situations, I mean, early on, I believe mostly what they did was you know, the football was still transitioning from rolling the ball on its side. There was still some of that or tumbling it back rather than really kind of a long snap like we think of it today. So they a lot of times a holder would kind of squat like a catcher in baseball.

And, you know, so you could move a little bit to grab the ball and then set it down. And then they started switching to, you know, what we think of today as a holder. I don't know what you call that position, you know, one knee on the ground or one knee.

Raised, but, you know, I've got pictures of even into the late 30s. I believe it is. I've got a picture of an Arizona player still doing it.

The squatter, you know, the squatting catcher's way. So it probably depended on how accurate your long snapper was, you know, all that kind of stuff. So, you know, it's one of those that, you know, when we think of the snapping position or the holder's position, that's the only way that makes sense.

But, you know, they tried different things along the way. But the catcher's position definitely makes a lot of sense. You know, adopting it from baseball, you know, you have a wild pitch, which is much like a snap.

You don't know where it's going to go sometimes. And they can maneuver a little bit. And probably they probably had a guy that played catcher on the baseball team, maybe as a holder to he's familiar from maneuvering that.

So that makes a good sense. So, all right. Well, thank you for that.

That's a good explanation. So, OK, what do you get for your trivia question? OK, so this may be one of my favorite trivia questions, but, you know, we've talked enough that maybe this is an obvious answer to you, but maybe not so much for your audience. So, you probably should allow the audience a little bit of time to figure it out.

OK, so the question is, there are four teams that do not currently play. FBS football has played in the Rose Bowl game. What are those four teams that are not currently in the FBS and played in a Rose Bowl game? Yeah.

OK, folks, before I answer, if you want to hit pause and answer it yourself, and I'm going to proceed to answer. I think I mentioned one of them earlier in the podcast. OK, well, let me let me say, does it does it count military teams? Are you counting military teams in that? Yes, I am.

OK. All right. Well, after spending almost 50 days of Rose Bowl coverage just a few months ago, I hope I get this right.

So, I think the Great Lakes team, I'm going to say Washington and Jefferson because we're talking about them tonight. That's two.

Let's see. Was it Columbia? No, no, Cornell, the other Ivy League. No, neither one of them ever played.

Well, Cornell or Columbia played in the 34. Yeah, Columbia. I must say, but it's not them.

No. OK, Harvard, because they're not FBS. No.

OK, I'm trying to think about who the other military team that played in the World War One era was. Well, actually. OK, so I asked the question, which should be, are you currently not playing Division One because there are teams like Harvard and Columbia?

OK. All right. OK.

FCS. Yeah. OK.

OK. Not a problem. No problem.

All right. OK, so they're so they're they're not playing in Division One football at all. So.

All right. So, OK, so you said Great Lakes, W and W and J, W and J. I'm trying to think of the military team from California that the one starts with an M. I took my tongue out. I'm not it's like Miramont or something.

And it's not. Yeah. So Mare Island, Mare Island, that's what they played twice.

They played in 18 and 19. And then. Another military team.

Great Lakes, I'm stumped on the last one; I'm stumped on the last military team. Great Lakes and Mare Island played in the 1919 game, and Mare Island and Camp Lewis played. OK, in the 18 game.

Camp Lewis is sometimes referred to as the 91st Division because that's where that Division was stationed. OK, you took away my easy bunnies with the Ivy League schools. I thought I had.

Yeah, I screwed up with the way I asked the question. So, I apologize. And to all the listeners that are scouring their brains trying to figure out the answer.

So it should have been like FBS or FCS schools. Yeah, or just D1. So normally, you know, there are some people when I ask this question, who either just draw a blank, or they might know there are these military teams.

But hardly anybody knows about Washington Jefferson. They're typically the toughest ones. The only reason I know about Washington Jefferson is because I'm in the process of doing a lot of research on a book that has a lot of W and J players in it.

However, from the late 1890s and early 1900s, they played with W and J. But I have a couple of books on W and J football. It's kind of still fresh in my mind. So, I know you're a PA guy.

That's right. They're the Western PA team. So, for the South Southern team from us, I think you can be a Western PA, and we're the first Norse.

But hey, that's true. Hey, great question, though. I really like the fact that it was a good one.

So, Tim, your tidbits are, you know, bringing up items like this constantly every single day, sometimes a couple of times a day. Why don't you share with the listeners how they, too, can share in on all the fun of hearing these? Yeah, so, you know, best way is just to go to my website, footballarchaeology.com, subscribe. And that by doing that, you'll you'll get an email every night at like seven o'clock.

I may actually push that a little bit later. But anyways, we'll get an email that with, you know, with the story for that that evening. And, you know, if you if you don't want the emails, then just you can follow me on Twitter, though, that's becoming less and less useful as the days go on.

I even did a blue checkmark, which, you know, I normally wouldn't have done. But, you know, that doesn't seem to help. I did the same and had mixed results myself, but we'll see how it goes.

So. All right, Tim, I appreciate it. And we'll talk to you again next week with some more great football history.

Hey, thank you, sir. I appreciate it and look forward to it.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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One of the top experts in early football rules history, Timothy P. Brown joins us on the discussion to celebrate Pop Warner to give some input on his brother Bill, a famous gridiron coach and player in his own right.. Timothy Brown's FootballArchaeology.com has a daily football factoid that he shares that are really quite interesting in a short read. They preserve football history uniquely, and we are quite happy that Tim has agreed to join us each week to go over some of his Today's Tidbits. Click that link, and you can subscribe for free to receive them yourself each evening.

Here is a link to Tim's original post. The Other Warner Brother and Chemawa Indian School.

-Transcription of the Other Warner Brother with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes at pigskindispatch.com. Welcome, once again, to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

Welcome to Tuesday. We are going on an archeological dig into football history with our friend Timothy P. Brown of footballarcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Thank you. I'm looking forward to talking about the Warner Brothers, not the cartoon guys. Oh, well, I was getting ready my Bugs Bunny stuff out to talk about that. You can use it if you want.

I'm just... That's not what I'm here to talk about. Oh, okay. I came to the wrong show.

All right. No, but your topic is much more interesting than the Warner Brothers, which makes films and cartoons. We're talking about some great innovators in football and the Warner Brothers of football coaching and playing days of the early 20th century.

So you have a topic that you talked about, February 6th was your tidbit, and you're actually talking about Pop Warner, his brother, Bill, who's a little bit lesser known, and it's a great and interesting story that we'd love to have you share with us. So, I mean, I kind of always liked the brother combinations. There's a number of brothers and even cousins who are active, especially in coaching nowadays, but who've been very successful.

As a kid growing up, Hank Aaron and his brother, Tommy, were a brother combination that I think may still hold the record for most home runs by a set of brothers, but anyway. But this is one where, like, Pop Warner, everybody knows Pop Warner. Even if you don't really know much about him or you're just barely a fan because of his influence on youth football, Pop Warner's side of things, and even somebody who ignores football history is going to have heard his name.

But so Pop was the older brother, and they grew up in Western New York State, and they ended up going to Cornell. So, both of them went to Cornell, both were linemen, and Bill was considered a pretty big guy, or I should say Pop was considered a pretty big guy, but Bill was bigger, and he was better. He was a first-team All-American his senior year, and then he graduated from Cornell.

As was fairly common at the time, the preceding year's captain coached the next year's team. And so he graduated in 03 from Cornell and then coached in the fall of 03. And so then he, I don't know exactly how it worked out, but for one reason or another, he left Cornell, but at the same time, his brother was leaving, who had coached Cornell previously, and his brother was coming back to Cornell from Carlisle.

So, he did Pop coach Cornell twice and Carlisle twice, two different stints. So anyways, Bill leaves and his brother comes in. And so, Bill then goes to Sherman Institute, which they call Indian Schools out in California.

For 04, he's at North Carolina in 05, he was at Colgate for 06 and 07, he goes back to Sherman in 08, goes to St. Louis University in 09, and then he's at Oregon in 1910 and 1911. So, back then, a lot of coaches had full-time jobs, they weren't on campus. Part of the reason they were only there at Indian School for a year was they got hired for one year, and then they'd go back to whatever they did.

So, both of them lawyered up during the off-season. But interestingly, both of them had connections at Indian Schools, right? I mean, they were both Cornell and at the Indian Schools, but Bill never had a Jim Thorpe playing for him, so he didn't get quite the notoriety of Pop. And Bill, I think, also just, you know, he kind of got out of coaching a little bit earlier.

You know, Pop worked forever. And then, you know, so the story then, you know, so he was, Bill stayed out in Oregon and, you know, basically was a lawyer in a town out there. And then for, you know, for whatever reason, in 1917, he ends up picking up at another Indian School, Chemiwa, which is, you know, over on the, he was living more towards eastern Oregon, and he ended up, Chemiwa's over on the west side of the state.

And, you know, they had been, you know, they used to play a lot of, you know, college teams. You know, the Northwest especially didn't have that many colleges. So, you know, there were some pretty good athletic clubs like Multnomah.

And then during the war, because this was 1917, there were all kinds of military bases that they could play, or even National Guard units, you know, whatever it was. So that's kind of who they played. But, you know, he coached this Indian team again.

And he ends up with a 1, 2, and 3 record, which, you know, you don't have those too much anymore. And, you know, I think they scored like 25 points the whole season or something like that. You know, because they had a couple of nothing, nothing shutouts.

But then he just went back. And, you know, his brother was, Pop was still coaching. You know, he'd left Carlisle and gone to Pitt.

He was at Pitt for a long time. And so then Pop had, he left Pitt after the 23 season and took over at Stanford. So then Bill at least had the opportunity to work with his brother a little bit.

You know, all he really did was he scouted when he would scout like the Oregon, Oregon State, Montana, Washington, Washington State, you know, those teams. He would scout them for, you know, for Bill and for Stanford. So, you know, he kept his, kept himself in football at least from, say, 24 to 32.

Well, while Bill was on the West Coast. But the other thing that's just kind of interesting about it was that it's just, Chemiwa is still open, you know, it's a, and it's the longest serving school dedicated to educating North American or Native Americans. So it's now just a high school, you know, back even like Carlisle was this real mix of kind of, you know, a lot of them, a lot of the emphasis tended to be on like trades and manual arts and things like that.

And so they had; they covered both high school and college curricula. That was pretty typical of Haskell in Kansas, which was the same kind of way. A lot of the Indian schools, you know, had that kind of curriculum. So, but anyways, they, you know, they played some decent football, and Bill helped them, led them to a one, two, and three records, which, as I said, got to give them credit for that because, you know.

Yeah. You don't hear that. I don't think I've ever heard of a coach having a one--, two-, and three-record or a team.

That's amazing for football, especially, you know, six games have three ties, but a different game back in that era. Now I have; I'm pretty sure that Bill and Pop got to play a professional season, or at least a few games together, on the same team they had for two years back in 1902 and 1903. In the first year, 1902, they had the World Series of football, which was an indoor game at Madison Square Garden, sort of during the holidays to help with festivities.

The manager of the Madison Square Garden wanted to make a couple of bucks and, you know, put some fannies in the seats to have some revenue coming in, so they had this world series of football. So they invited four or five teams, and they were trying to get 1902.

There was the original NFL, which was a three team league of, uh, you know, two from Pittsburgh or two from Philadelphia for the baseball teams, the athletics and the Phillies each had a football team sponsored. And there was a team from Pittsburgh to Pittsburgh stars. They were trying to get those teams to come in, but they, they wouldn't, uh, they, they couldn't make it.

So they were members of those teams that went to this world series of football. So the Philadelphia athletics actually would a team, they formed, they made it be the New York Philadelphians. It's been called or the New York, the New York team, they call it.

They were sort of the favorites. They want everybody to roof flexors in New York city. And they thought they were just going to dominate this thing.

Everybody is involved with it. Well, a team from Syracuse, uh, an all-star team from Syracuse, which had both Pop and Bill Warner on that team, came in and ended up winning the tournament. They beat New York and like the second round and, you know, just, uh, went on from there, but Pop ended up getting hurt in one of those early games.

I think it might've been a game against the New York Philadelphians and a guy that, uh, for them, so for the next game, uh, Syracuse was sort of scrambling to try to find a tackle. Cause they, you know, like we talked about, uh, you know, before tackles were very important at that time. And that's what pop was.

And so they got, uh, from the New York team that lost, they got Blondie Wallace, who was, uh, sort of an enigma figure of early professional football. He ended up playing for Syracuse after losing to New York. So, but, uh, it was great to see that.

I'm pretty sure I know Pop is playing that team. I'm pretty sure Bill did too on that 1902, uh, world's football team. Yeah.

I hadn't thought about that before. You know, he was still in college at the time. Right. Um, so, you know, who knows, you know, who knows if he played under his own name or an assumed name or how it worked, but I think it's in the newspapers as he has it down as his name, you know, and it, you know, of course, Glenn Warner for pop Warner.

So yeah. It was so interesting, too. You know, you think about them in the coaching realm, but they were pretty, pretty big-time players back that day, too. Yeah.

Before they're coaching pop was not the most financially responsible man. He had some gambling issues. So he, uh, he probably needed a couple of extra bucks somehow playing in this plane in that, uh, in the tournament.

Yeah. Uh, well, it's sort of a programming note. Um, we were going to try to have something special, uh, chasing down a good friend of the program.

Uh, Jeffrey Miller, uh, authors wrote a bunch of different books, including a book on pop Warner. And April 5th is Pop Warner's birthday. We're trying to put together a nice little episode where Jeff comes on.

We pay tribute to Pop Warner. Uh, but in Jeff's book, something I didn't realize it sort of starts off. Uh, they grew up; the brothers grew up in Springville.

The whole family was there in Springville, which was sort of Southeast of Buffalo. And they all of a sudden packed up when, uh, pop was of high school age, like early high school age. And they moved to Texas.

And so they had a big ranch down there, and the boys worked on the farm, and that's how they got big and big and strong. I guess that doing the ranching work is what Jeff attributes it to in the story. And, uh, they pop back to New York to visit some buddies, uh, during pretty great before Thanksgiving time. And, uh, the guys got him involved in playing some football, and, uh, he was having a good time doing that and getting a couple of bucks.

And he told his father, he, you know, wired back and said, Hey, I need, I need some money because I, uh, want to stay up here. And he's like, your father's like, what do you want to stay up there for? So he had to make up an excuse. He said cause I want to go to school.

I want to become a lawyer. You always want me to become a lawyer. So the father sends him money.

He has some more fun with it. And he's like, Oh crap, I can't go back to my dad and tell him that. So he went and entered into Cornell's law school.

That's how I ended up going to college. So that was kind of interesting. Yeah.

Well, he's, he did a few other things where like his first year coaching, uh, he was coaching both Iowa state and, uh, Auburn. Cause they, cause they're right next to each other, uh, geographically. Oh yeah.

Yeah. It's an easy commute. And, uh, but you know, he, he basically, he coached Iowa State from like, uh, mid-August till towards the end of September and then moved down to Auburn where he kind of had his primary contract, I guess.

And, but there's a story in there where like, you know, he did continue by telegram, he coached Iowa state, but at some point, he took, took Iowa state out to like Montana to, to Butte and they, he gambled on the outcome of the game. And, you know, it didn't sound like it was a fair match, but one way or another, he lost his money. So, he had to keep coaching both places in order to make up for it.

Yeah. Yeah. There are some interesting rabbit hole stories you can go down to with the legends of the game, like Pop Warner and Bill Warner.

So definitely we could talk all day about them. There's some, some great, interesting things, but, uh, yeah, so stay tuned. Uh, we'll have more on, on pop here on some of these, I'm sure some more football archeology.com visits and, uh, hopefully with Jeff Miller too, on April 5th.

Yeah. Well, the Pop Warner thing sounds fun. That'll, that'll be a great episode.

Yeah. Yeah, sure. Well, um, well, Tim, why don't you share with us, this, this came out of one of your tidbits.

It comes out each and every day at about 7.00 PM Eastern. Uh, why don't you share with us how the listeners, too, can get involved in and read your tidbits each and every day? Sure. Uh, just, you know, go to the, uh, so my site is football archeology.com. You just gotta make sure you spell archeology correctly.

A R C H A E O L O G Y. And then, um, yeah, so if you, if you subscribe, you'll get an email every, every night at seven Eastern with the story that day story, but you can also just go to the site anytime you want there. You know, you can search by topic to find old articles. Um, and if you're not, you know if you prefer not to get an email every night, you can also follow me on Twitter at Football Archeology.

And, um, so anyways, you can subscribe, you can just hit the site whenever you want to, or you can follow me on, on Twitter. It's definitely worth the while to take that 10 seconds to sign up for it because it's a fantastic and you'll have some great football information each and every day, uh, at 7:00 PM. So, uh, I highly recommend it.

So Tim, thank you once again for joining us and sharing your knowledge and your stories, uh, from football archeology.com and your tidbits and, uh, for joining us.

Hey, very good. Thank you once again, and look forward to seeing you and talking next week.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

---

Dive into the fascinating history of football with Timothy P. Brown, the expert behind Football Archaeology.com! In this episode, we'll unravel the origins of the sideline and pass eligibility rules, exploring how these fundamental aspects of the game we know today came to be. Join us as Tim sheds light on the evolution of football through the ages! #footballhistory #rules #sideline #passeligibility #footballarchaeology

This information comes from his original post titled: Eligible Receivers and the Sideline

For audio only check out the Podcast version -The Football History of Sidelines and Eligible Pass Catchers with Timothy Brown.

-Tim Brown on the Origins of Eligible Receivers and Sideline Play

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal for positive football history. Welcome to another exciting Tuesday where we get to go back in time and talk about an aspect of football history that may not be mainstream, but it is definitely worth the listen and education that we're going to get with Timothy Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey Darin, good to chat with you again, and I look forward to talking about the eligibility of receivers.

Yeah, the eligible... No dad pun there, just straightforward information. Now, you don't want to talk about the married receivers, just the eligible ones, right? That's right. I had to throw the dad joke again.

That's really pretty bad. Yeah, that was bad. We'll let you do the dad jokes and I'll just be the straight man.

Yeah, so tell us a little bit about the history of the eligible receivers in the sideline. Yeah, this one's fun. I think just one of the things that I like about researching almost any aspect of football history is trying to find stories where the reason we have something today, a rule that's in place today, sometimes isn't the reason that rule was put in place originally.

Conditions change, so sometimes the rule still makes sense despite football evolving. However, the original rule was put in place for a different reason than why it makes sense today. So like a great example of that is the roughing of the punter penalty, and I won't get into the details of that. There's a tidbit out there, and if anybody wants to search for it, if you put in roughing the punter penalty in football archaeology, it'll come up right away.

Sounds like a future episode to talk to you about. Well, I'm surprised we haven't already. Yeah, I don't think we have.

Maybe we did. So, but that's one where, you know, that penalty was put in place. It was actually called roughing the fullback originally.

And so, you know, it just, it evolved for reasons that no longer exist in football based on rule changes. So, and the eligible receiver, like stepping out of bounds, that's really what this tidbit is about. And that originated kind of for reasons that no longer exist.

So, you know, back in the day, so pre-1933, football did not have hash marks. And so when a player was tackled close to the sideline, if they're tackled three yards from the sideline or two yards from the sideline or one yard from the sideline, the ball, the next play started wherever that player had been tackled, just as if they'd been tackled in the middle of the field. So, you know, offenses, every offense practiced and kind of had plays in their playbook that were called sideline plays.

You'd, you know, you'd change the formation. So you only had one, you know, you might, sometimes you had to have the center right on the sideline snapping the ball. Other times you might be able to fit the guard, the tackle or the end in there.

So one of the things that would happen is that if it was safe, four or five yards from the line of scrimmage or from the sideline, you might be able to put your whole right side of the line of scrimmage or of your offensive line in place, you know, inside the boundary. But sometimes in order for that, at that end wasn't, you know, if he's the eligible receiver and you're running a pass play in order for him to get, you know, to avoid the tackle or the defensive end and get down field, he'd just run out of bounds, you know, to dodge him, right. And which is perfectly legal.

There was no, there's no restriction on somebody leaving the field and reentering the field at that time. The other thing was that that was in the days of the coaching rules against coaching from the sideline, which typically required all the players and the coaches to be seated or kneeling back on the bench. So the sidelines were barren, you know, there is nobody there other than, you know, maybe a linesman, assistant linesman or two.

So if the end was aligned next to the sideline, he could scoot, you know, run 10 yards down field while out of bounds and then reenter and hopefully, you know, catch a pass. I think I, I think I officiated in the wrong era. That sounds like a much better sideline than when I officiated.

Yes. So anyways, you know, so these guys could reenter, you know, so if you went out of bounds, you could reenter, you know, nothing, nothing against doing so. But then, you know, then they decided, okay, well, these guys are going out of bounds.

I mean, they could have gone 10 yards outside of bounds and then reenter. So they, in 24, they made a rule change. And they said, okay, if the receiver goes, if an eligible receiver goes out of bounds, he's no longer eligible to catch a pass.

And then, and that stayed in place until 1978. And at that point, they said, okay, if he goes out of bounds on his own accord, then he's not eligible. But if a defender pushes him out of bounds or forces him out of bounds, then he can reenter and be an eligible receiver.

So, so that's kind of the, the other catch that he had to return immediately. You know, he got pushed out of bounds. He couldn't run down to five, 10 yards.

Like you said, he had to try to get back on the field as soon as he could. Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, so it's just one of those things where, you know, the original reason for putting this rule in place was because of these sideline plays. And then, you know, once he had the hash hash marks, then, okay, that reason goes away, but the underlying rationale still made sense. So they left it in place until making a modification, you know, basically 50 years later.

So, you know, it's just kind of goofy how some of those rules come into play and, you know, what, what the original reason, you know, was for them. Yeah, that, that is, that is interesting. Now, I'm not sure what they do in college and the professional level, but I know high school, that instance, now we're a receiver when they go out of bounds on their own and they come back in, it goes under the substitution rule.

It's an illegal substitution when they come back in, which is kind of interesting during live ball action. You know, he's a, cause they're a player where when they're one of the 11 that are inside the numbers, you know, at the ready for play and, you know, they break out on go wherever they'd like to on their side of the ball. But so they no longer are player when they exit on their own and they now become a substitute and now it's an illegal substitution when they come back on.

So it's, it's kind of an odd thing where you're, cause most of the rule books, I know for the NFHS, they're broke up in dead ball. You know, there's a bunch of rules on dead ball and then there's a bunch of rules on live ball and kicking and snap and everything. But this one is a live ball.

That's actually in the dead ball section, which is kind of drives you crazy if you don't know where to find it. Yeah. It is funny.

I mean, so just, that's a classic example of, you know, you have to try to categorize these things. So what is it? Right. Right.

And I can't think of the examples right now, but there, you know, there are other situations where like the logic, I mean, it's kind of like, you know, I've never been a lawyer, but I imagine some of these things, you know, when you're making the rules and trying to classify them and categorize them, you know, you're trying to find what, what's the fundamental logic behind this rule. And, and sometimes that changes over time as we've seen. But so you kind of classify things based on the logic, which may not be apparent to somebody who doesn't really know the rules inside and out like an official one.

Yeah. It's, it's right up there on par when, if you have somebody let's say somebody punches a player and it's during live ball. Well, that is a personal foul.

If they do it during dead ball, it's an unsportsmanlike foul. They're both 15 yard penalties, but you know, the enforcement may be different depending on the style of play. I'm not sure.

I don't think I recognize that. Yeah. So it's, so you have, but that's why there's two different signals, one for unsportsmanlike, one for personal foul.

Personals are always live ball fouls, unsportsmanlike are dead ball fouls. All right. So, but you can do the same action.

It's illegal. It just depends when you do it. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it makes sense.

Right. Right. Right.

You know, you need, you need the distinction, but, but again, I would guess 95% of football fans don't know that. No, that's, that's true. I didn't know it until I officiated.

I mean, I was kind of surprised when I, I did that when I learned that. So kind of, kind of an interesting aspect though too. So, you know, Tim, that's a great thing.

And I, I'm glad that you shared this with us and wrote about it, and you know, how the rule came about. And it's just interesting how it, for a totally different predicament and they turn it into something with the modernization of the game and how the game flows. So that's pretty cool how they tied that in and how you brought the story to us.

But you have a lot of unique stories like this that you share on a regular basis. And maybe some of the listeners out there and viewers would, would like to be interested in hearing what you have to say on, you know, as you, as you're saying them and your tidbits and how, how can they participate in something like that? Yep. Just, you know, go to footballarchaeology.com and subscribe. You'll get an email every time I send out a new post.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Substack or the Substack app or on threads, or just go to the site, you know, whenever it suits your fancy. Okay. Hopefully, hopefully very often.

Yeah. And folks, it's, you know, Tim said in a segment we had last week, keep watching the social media and footballarchaeology.com for his new book coming out on the history of the football. It's going to be a great read and something I'm sure you'll all want on your bookshelf.

So, Tim, we thank you for sharing with us again, another piece of football history, and we'd love to talk to you again next week. Okay. Look forward to it.

Thanks, Darin.

---

Strap on your helmets and step back in time! This podcast dives into the gridiron twilight of a coaching legend: Amos Alonzo Stagg. We'll be dissecting the final game Stagg coached for the Chicago Maroons, a team he led for an astonishing 41 seasons.

Join us as we uncover the secrets behind Stagg's coaching prowess, explore the atmosphere surrounding this momentous game, and analyze its impact on both Stagg's legacy and the trajectory of Chicago Maroons football. Whether you're a die-hard football fan or a history buff curious about a bygone era, this podcast promises a fascinating journey into the world of early college football.

Timothy Brown shares the information and story of this epic moment in gridiron history based on his original Tidbit titled: Stagg's Last Game At Chicago .

You can also enjoy this conversation on our podcast format: Stagg's Fianl Game Coaching U of Chicago.

-Transcription of Stagg's Final Game in Chicago with Timothy Brown

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 visit with FootballArcheology.com's Timothy P. Brown, the master historian, who's going to tell us about another one of his great tidbits. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Thank you. Thank you. I have a quiz for you.

I'm not going to hit you with the dad joke, but I'm going to hit you with a quiz. Okay. What makes this podcast special? This particular one, this episode.

This episode, what makes it special?

Well, probably the guest, as most people are going to tell us.

Come on. Come on. You and I have done 99 podcasts together before this one.

Really? Is this the 100th one? What makes this one special? This is the century mark, huh? That's right. Wow.

That is quite an accomplishment. Numero one hundred. I'm mixing my German and my Spanish, but yeah, this is our 100th podcast.

Now I think, you know, I was on your podcast once or twice before we kind of got together on a regular basis. So this is our 100th when it was, you know, on a regular basis. So this is the 100th Tuesday in a row that- That's correct.

Yes. Wow. So we're going to hit the two-year mark in two or four more episodes.

Yeah. All right. Well, hey, that is quite an accomplishment.

Anything. So, thank you for sharing. I didn't realize that.

I knew it was a whole bunch, but- Yeah. So I just, you know, I'm kind of a dork. And so I've numbered them. Just when we started doing them, I started numbering them.

So we just happened, this happens to be the one that says 100 before. Well, if I would have known that I would have baked a cake or something. So, I apologize.

I just wanted to surprise you. Yeah. Surprise parties are always the best.

Yeah, that sure is. I need to have some like fireworks things going off in the background here when we go to do the editing on here. So, well, hey, great.

Great for sharing that. So, you know, this is, well, part of this century mark. We're going to talk about somebody who lived for almost a century.

That's right. And then a tidbit that you wrote a little while ago called Stagg's last game at Chicago. So the grand old man of football had his last game for the Chicago Maroons on the sideline.

So, you know, the background here is Mr. Stagg right there. Now, this isn't at the 100th game, but that's him along the sidelines at Chicago. And so, you know, one of the things that I actually opened that tidbit with was just the thought that you know, so from my vantage point, football really started in 1876, not 1869.

And then Camp died in 1925. He was actually at one of the meetings too, you know, one of the rulemaking meetings. So he, Camp, saw the first 50 years of college football.

And Stagg, who was, I think, three years younger than him, and just, you know, maybe a couple of more, it took him a little bit longer to get to Yale as a young man. But so he's a little bit delayed in terms of, you know, his class from Yale. But nevertheless, he was born before football came about.

He was born during the Civil War. And, you know, he saw football's first 90 some years, you know. So, I mean, two central figures, obviously, you know, if Camp is the father of football, Stagg's the uncle, right, you know.

And so here's two really influential guys in the history of the game. And then Stagg lives 40 years longer, you know. So he saw, I mean, you just think about what he saw after 1925.

So, you know, very much, you know, the forward pass coming into play, he saw the, you know, more, you know, a greater acceptance of African American players. He sees, you know, modern transportation, allowing teams to travel and, you know, much more intersectional play. Radio, he saw the beginnings of television, you know.

So, I mean, there were things that he saw and changes to the game that, you know, Stagg or Camp never saw. So anyway, it's just kind of an interesting way to think about their times. But so, you know, Stagg went to Yale, coached and attended Springfield College, so the YMCA school for, you know, for a year or two.

He was then recruited to the University of Chicago by the then president, who was a former Yale faculty member who had had him as a student. And so he recruits him to become the head of athletics. So, it was a faculty position, but, you know, that meant he was the football coach, baseball coach, track coach, you know.

So he became a really influential figure, actually, you know, football and track for sure, you know, major figure. And so he was the coach there from 1892 through 1932. So, in the first 40 years of school, you know, he's the football coach.

And, you know, won a national championship or two and, you know, a bunch of Big 10 championships and everything. But as he was, you know, kind of getting on in the years, Chicago brought in this new young president who didn't like athletics and especially didn't like football. So the guy eventually just, you know, bled the budget of the athletic department.

And then he forced Stagg to retire. So, at age 70, which was the university policy. So, you know, he can do that.

And so then Stagg ends up. So, you know, it was known before the season started that this was last year. So every opponent would like to honor him, you know because he had been such a central figure.

And so most of the teams were giving them like a letter sweater from their school or an award blanket, which a lot of schools gave out at the time, rather than sweaters and jackets. Michigan was so damn happy to get rid of them that they gave them a silver service. So, but then his last game is they're playing Chicago, and they got a new coach by the name of Clarence Spears, who I just say that because, you know, he'd hung around, he was coached in a number of places, you know, for 30 years or whatever.

He was one of those guys who was a doctor and a physician and would coach during the fall. Another interesting thing about the game. So, in the last game of the season, the referee for the game was Frank Birch, who was the guy that invented the referee signals, you know, for penalties and touchdowns and all that kind of stuff.

So, you know, here's another barely central figure in the game. But, you know, it was one of those games where, you know, Wisconsin scores first, they don't convert, then Chicago scores in the second quarter to take the lead because they converted. And then the Badgers score again before halftime, a 12-7 lead.

And then, I mean, I'm a Badger fan, but unfortunately for Stack, the Badgers scored again. And then, you know, there was one play in the second half where the Chicago halfback takes off wide open, nobody there to touch him, and he trips over a line or whatever, but he trips and falls. And so they never score, and they end up losing 18-7.

So Stack loses his last game, ends up with the losing record for the season. So he ends up 3-4-1 that year, which left him at 244, 111 and 27 in his career at Chicago. And in the big 10, he went 115-74-12, with 30 of those losses coming since his last championship in 24.

So he lost a lot of his games in the last ten years of his coaching because they just, again, like I said, they kind of got bled out and, you know, academics just became the key. But then what's kind of cool is that he then leaves Chicago, gets hired at the University of Pacific, and he coached there for 14 years. He won five conference titles.

And then once that passed, then he goes out, one of his sons was coaching out at Susquehanna in Pennsylvania. So he was, sometimes his son would say, well, he was a coach and officially his son was a coach. So I'm just going to say he assisted there for six years.

And then he goes out, he's like 91 or something like that, goes out to, retires in California, but it still is the kicking coach for a local junior college. You know, so the guy ended up, you know, with, the guy ended up with, what is it? Sixty plus years of coaching football, you know, at the college level. And even more, because I'm not even counting his Springfield years.

So, you know, low sixties. So anyway, I'm just unbelievable, you know, the guy who was, you know, on the rules committee, you know, a number of football innovations are credited to him. He was one of the guys he and the Harvard captain in the same year who invented tackling dummies.

Right. So, I mean, there are so many things, like flankers. You know, he was the guy who really created a lot of core football elements that, you know, we just take for granted today. And as you said, he's right there within the first, you know, not even a decade; football's not even a decade old when he starts playing the game.

So he's probably observing it, you know, as a youngster, but it's amazing just to take that full circle, and what a brilliant career. Excellent. Yeah.

Yeah. There's something else. And, you know, obviously, playing at Yale at the time, Yale and Princeton were the best football teams during the 1800s.

Yeah. So he was right there in the middle of it all. And he was quite the baseball player, too.

I think major league baseball sort of wanted him, and he decided he was against professional sports, and that's sort of why he went to the coaching career. He was a very big advocate of collegiate and amateur sports. So.

Yeah. He was, you know, a religious guy, too. And so, you know, he's an interesting dude.

He's a vegetarian and he's just, you know, kind of unconventional in a lot of ways. But yeah, unique individual. If you live well into your nineties and you're still coaching in your nineties and working and still good brainpower, maybe we should all get rid of meat then and become vegetarians.

Cause yeah. Well, you know, the other thing that's funny is that he was. There are a lot of stories about him, and there were different times when I forgot exactly what it was. He had some health issues, you know, from time to time, and his wife would take over.

And so, you know, like his wife, a lot of times would be at practice. Like if he couldn't be there, she'd kind of run things. And she apparently knew her share of football, right? And the team was not, you know, it wasn't like a substitute teacher where kids are trying to screw around.

Like they knew that she knew what was going on, and they weren't going to get away with anything with her, or they'd meet the consequences of nothing else. I wonder if Nick Saban's wife was doing that, like when he had to take a day off. Yeah, I doubt it, but I'm not sure.

He probably had more assistants. That could be, that could be. Well, Tim, that is great stuff on a great, you know, innovator and an important figure in football history.

And God, we really enjoy that you were able to talk about that last game and give us some of the history before and after that game too. So it comes full circle on there. But you, you have some interesting topics like this all the time on your website.

Maybe you could tell folks how they could engage and read your stuff. Yeah. So just go to footballarchaeology.com, you know, bookmark it, go there whenever you want.

Alternatively, you can, you can subscribe, subscribe for free. You can follow me on Twitter or on threads or on the Substack app and, you know, read it as you please. All right.

He is Timothy P. Brown of footballarchaeology.com. And Tim, we thank you for joining us in this, giving us another glimpse of football history. And we'd love to talk to you again next Tuesday. Very good.

We'll do 101 next week.

101. Thanks, Tim.

All right.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

---

This is something that sports fans probably take for granted in the modern scoreboard when attending an athletic event. These generally large appendages are an information hub for what is happening in the event.

The questions arise: Who invented the scoreboard concept and when? What problem did the invention and resolve?

-Arthur Irwin and the First Football Scoreboards

A great piece of gridiron history comes from a famous baseball player who designed the template for the modern scoreboard. Timothy P Brown tells the tale of Arthur Irwin and his invention.

-Transcribed Conversation on Arthur Irwin Scoreboard with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to another evening when we will be honored with the presence of Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.
Hey, thanks, Darin.

And the honor is all mine. All mine, sir.

No, no, it's me and the listeners. We get this weekly treat where you reminisce about a piece you've written recently and your daily tidbits. We get to talk to you about it, pick your brain, and learn something new about football history. Tonight, we will go up on the scoreboard and learn a little about that and some of its associations with other sports.

Then, I'll let you talk about this gentleman and his invention. Yeah, so this one is one of my favorite stories in a while, largely because this is one where I just really learned something. It's one of those where, you know, I don't know, I'm, you know, I probably put in 20, 30, 40 hours of research in the past on maybe more, you know, on a couple of different topics related to early scoreboards and game simulations and things like that. And I'd always seen them as three separate things floating around, you know, in the ether that wasn't connected.

And then, for some reason, I was, you know, checking into, you know, doing another dig on scoreboards. And I came across a mention of an Irwin scoreboard, which, if I'd seen it before, I don't remember it. So I dig into that.

And all of a sudden, it's like, everything makes sense. Everything is connected, so it was just like this great revelation for me. So, I mean, the story is that there's this guy, Arthur Irwin, who, perhaps people who are into old-time baseball would know because he played like 13 years in the majors.

He was also a player-manager in the latter part of his playing career. And then he, you know, once he was done playing, he continued managing. So, there was a point in his career when he was managing the Phillies.

And as was the case back then, baseball players needed jobs after the season. So, being an athlete, he got a job as a trainer at Penn, you know, University of Pennsylvania. So, you know, back then, the trainers were like the guys who would physically condition athletes across sports.

They were the guys who would diagnose, you know, they didn't have sports medicine per se back then. So they were the guys who'd figure out how to resolve a Charlie horse, you know, how to, you know, fix a sprain, tape them up. So that was his role.

But while he's there, he designs and builds a scoreboard. And I think it was actually before they had Franklin Field, but, you know, he builds a scoreboard for, you know, for Penn. Because prior to that, everybody used baseball scoreboards, you know, if they were in a baseball stadium or they didn't have any scoreboards.

So he builds this thing, and it's got the rudiments of what scoreboards have today. You know, down a distance, you know, it said who had the ball and who was in possession. It had a little thing up at the top, a little kind of a football field graphic that they'd moved this football along, you know, as the team progressed on the field. So things like that.

Then he ends up patenting it. So, you know, there are drawings on his patent application that show the format of this scoreboard. And then I found a couple of early photographs of his scoreboards, you know, up there on the field, and they look, you know, just like his patent application.

So then what happens is, you know, he builds a business while he builds multiple scoreboards. And, you know, in some cases, they permanently install in locations, and in other cases, as he moves them around, you know, they're like the Goodyear Blimp; they show up at different places. But, you know, he's hired to do it.

He then has people, and he staffs the operation when a scoreboard is being used. And in the course of all that, you know, they had to develop a system of, you know, they didn't have really telephones on the field, and they didn't have walkie-talkies or, you know, those kinds of things. So they developed this signal system, what they would call wig wagging back in the day.

So a guy or two on the field would follow the plays and, you know, use these contortions, something similar to the semaphore flags of, you know, in the military or like referee signals, you know, they contorted their bodies, or they spelled out letters. They would essentially communicate with the guys operating the scoreboard, the down and distance, who had substituted whatever information they had. And so, you know, it became this thing that, you know, for the big games in the East, you pretty much, you know, it became an expectation. You have an Irwin scoreboard up there, and everybody knew what the Irwin scoreboard was.

So when they built Harvard Stadium, then I think they, you know, I've never gotten a real, I've got one image that isn't too great of an early scoreboard there. So, you know, I think it was an advanced version of an Irwin scoreboard, but he ended up hiring a guy whose name was Eddie Morris. He ends up being the wigwag.

You know, he always wore a red sweater and a white hat. And for about 20 years, everybody at this guy was following along. Sometimes, he'd be out on the field doing his signals up to the guys in the box or up on the scoreboard.

And so he became like, before mascots, he became like one of the mascots, you know, something like that. And so anyways, you know, then they also started at Harvard, where he would signal in, like who made the tackle, who ran the ball, those kinds of things. And so they were selling, you know, scorecards that had the number of each of the players.

Now, the players didn't wear the numbers, but there was a number on a scorecard for Smith and Jones. And then if Smith made the tackle and Jones made the run, they'd signal that and they'd post those numbers, the corresponding numbers up on the scoreboard. So it was just a way to, you know, for the people in the stands to kind of know who the heck was who, because nobody wore numbers and they all look the same and, you know, whatever.

And they're just running in these mushes. You know, that was the nature of football at the time. So then eventually, you know, then later on, obviously they added numbers to the players, you know, on their jerseys.

The other thing that he did was they would do the Irwin scoreboards in the gymnasiums or in theaters. So they do it, especially for an away game, and they'll get connected by telephone or telegraph. And then, so it became a thing where you'd pay some money, go to the theater, and you could watch the game as a simulation based on what was happening down in Philadelphia, you know if you were in Boston.

And they even did it in Boston. They do games at Harvard, and for the big games, like the Princeton and Yale games, those would sell out. And so people who couldn't get into the game would go to the theater to watch the simulation. And then, so, I mean, it's just kind of crazy stuff like that.

Now that that image you have from 1893 and so, I mean, listeners, you can go to the show notes, and we have a link that'll take you right to Tim's article, and you can, you can see this image, and it's sort of like a sketch of what the intention of what the board should be for 1893. But it's really interesting because at the top, as you said earlier, they've got a thing called field board, and it's got an image of a football that sort of slides down, and the points of the ball indicate what yard line, I guess, the ball is on for the, for the next down. And it almost reminds me of the modern day, if you're watching an NFL game and you follow on nfl.com or cbs.com and you want to know real play because you can't watch a game or whatever your, you know, your wife makes you go shopping or something.

You can see, you know, where the plays are going. So it was kind of interesting, you know, 130 years ago, when similar technology started then. So that's really cool.

Yeah. Yeah. From a representation.

So, and that image is right from his, it's just the front page of his patent, you know, documents. So yeah, I mean, fundamentally, you know, everything that he had listed on his early thing is right there, you know? So, and as you said, you know, I mean, I do that where I'm like, I'm watching one game, and I got another one on my computer that I'm just, you know, tracking the, the progress of the game. Right.

So, right. Yeah, it's definitely very cool. So now the other thing that's really, that's pretty bizarre about this guy is that he ends up, you know, so at the time, you know, I mean, he was a ball player, so he was traveling a lot of the year and then he would, you know, when he's doing these scoreboards, he's traveling basically on the East coast.

And at one point, he was diagnosed, I don't know if he was formally diagnosed with cancer, but basically, he was told, you know, you don't have long to live. And so he gets on a boat and goes from New York to Boston and falls overboard or just jumps in the water to end it. And so he, he dies.

And then, as they're trying to settle his estate, it turns out that, you know, kind of came up that he had a wife in New York and another one in Boston, you know, with children on it. No wonder he had to keep score. He had to know what was going on.

You need to make some cash. Yeah. So anyways, I mean, it's, it's a sad, a sad end, but yeah, I mean, so just kind of a bizarre ending to a pretty wild story, but you know, for me, it just brought together the simulation.

So, I mean, I now believe he was his, you know, Irwin's scoreboard was the first simulation. He was the designer of the first football-specific scoreboard. And then, you know, I'd always made a big deal out of the Harvard stadium sport and their wigwag system.

And then I, you know, now kind of understand that he was the one behind that. And that is, his stuff was around, you know, ten years earlier, you know, maybe not as quite sophisticated form, but nevertheless. Very interesting.

And it's great that you see them, especially that image from 1893, and the similarities to our modern scoreboard still carry on the tradition of what he started. It's just a fascinating and a great testament, a great idea. Yeah.

It was pretty brilliant. That's a great story, Tim; I appreciate that you're sharing that with us. Like you do every day on the tidbits that you have from footballarchaeology.com, and maybe you could share with the listeners how they, too, could get into the tidbits.

Yeah. So ideally, you go to www.footballarchaeology.com and subscribe, and you'll get an email every, every evening, seven o'clock Eastern with, you know, just basically it got the contents of that, of that night's story. You can also just bookmark it and, you know, go whenever you want.

I also post links on Twitter and on threads as well as on the Substack app because my site—I've got my own name for it—is actually a Substack application. So those are the ways to get there and have at it. Yeah.

And help you keep your score on the scoreboard each and every night. So. I do.

We definitely appreciate you sharing your story and bringing some of this football antiquity to us to our modern day making it relevant again and carrying on and letting us know the name of Arthur Irwin and his great idea that he had and some great stories from him too. I also forgot to mention, he was the first non-catcher, non-first baseman to wear a glove in the major leagues. And so Spalding then sold the Irwin glove, you know, throughout the 1890s and early aughts.

So I forgot to mention that, but that's another, you know, he's a big deal in baseball. Yeah. Wow.

It's definitely an all-around sport. We can all thank him for the sports that we watch. So wow.

Some great stuff, Tim. We appreciate it. And we will talk to you again next week.

Okay. Thanks, Darin. All right.

Bye.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.