Football History

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

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

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown Murder Football Field

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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Anyone that has traveled to a North American Tourist destination has probably walked by or in to a wax museum of the uncanny called 'Ripley's Believe It or Not."

We that are old enough probably remember the 1980s television series of the same name. The concept is just what the name says, they tell stories that are so off the charts that they are hard to believe to be true.

One of the top experts in early football rules history, Timothy P. Brown, joins us in the discussion to chat about the work of Robert Ripley and an early connection to the history of football.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown about Ripley Believe It or Not Football

Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And as we try to do every Tuesday, we will talk to our friend from football archaeology, Tim Brown, the great historian and author of multiple books and many tidbits that come out every evening for our football enjoyment. Tim Brown, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin, thank you. Thank you. Football season is well underway, so it's always the best time of year.

We hate to see the weather start to change, but we know it's football season. It is the most exciting part of the year, especially on the weekends.

And now it's spreading out throughout the whole week. So it's even better, but better for us, maybe worse for the players. But I so love the game.

Yeah, exactly. So tonight, I thought we could talk about one of your tidbits from mid-August on Ripley's Believe It or Not and some of their thoughts on football. And I think most of our listeners are familiar with Ripley's Believe It or Not.

We're going to get rid of the not part when we talk to you. We always believe you. But let's hear what Ripley has to say about football.

Yeah, I'm a truth-teller. I don't. I don't make anything up. So, you know, just to take a step back when I'm researching any topic that's football related, if I spot and, you know, a lot of the early newspapers, so, you know, into even 1920 or something like that.

A lot of times, they didn't print photographs. They printed line drawings, you know, illustrations rather than photographs. And so I always find those really interesting.

I find, you know, just the artwork interesting in general. And so if I spot one that I think I could write a tidbit about and, you know, make it interesting, then I just kind of have a way of cataloging them and coming back to them. So, not too long ago, I came across this one, and I think his name is Robert Ripley.

But so is the guy from Ripley's Believe It or Not. And he, you know, grew up in California and ended up working for the New York Globe as a cartoonist. And this is like the World War I era.

And so. In 1919, he published a cartoon that looked back at football prior to all the rule changes of 1905. So he's showing all these kinds of conditions of what the game was like at the time.

But the interesting thing about it was. His first Believe It or Not was published about two weeks after he did this cartoon. So this cartoon is a tree, believe it or not, if you can believe it or not.

So anyways, and then, you know, once he did the Believe It or Not a thing, he became famous, rich, and all kinds of good stuff. So at the time when he was still just, you know, a young illustrator, he did a thing, and he basically showed stuff like, you know, tandem blocking. And, you know, that's where before you had to have, you know, seven men on the line of scrimmage, sometimes teams would line up.

They take the guard and tackle from the other side and line them up right behind, you know, the right tackle or whatever. And, you know, so two guys in tandem would then push through the hole. He showed kind of the whole days when running backs had handles sewn on their pants so that guys could grab them by the handles and throw them over the pile to gain yardage and hurtling.

He specifically showed or mentioned Harold Weeks of Columbia in that cartoon, who is famous for he was famous for jumping, leaping over the line with both feet forward so that he could hit the opposing player in the chest, knock him down, and continue. But was it he the one that they sort of had that play where they would almost throw him over the line? Yeah. Yeah.

OK. They did it both ways somewhere. He got a good head start, and he leaped, you know, with both feet forward and others where they would swing them and then, poof, you know, pop them over.

Old alley-oop. You know, so I mean, we still know it's back. You know, Mullins were outlawed for for quite a long time, but now they're back in football.

And so we see our offensive linemen. We just saw an example that gave one of the games an opening weekend. Yes, there was a lineman who pushed his guy across the goal line.

Right. And so that's legal again. It wasn't for a long time.

But, you know, it's still not legal to pull. But back then, you know, linemen pulled there. They're running backs forward as well.

I think they sort of opened that back up again, that famous USC Notre Dame game back when Reggie Bush got pushed over by Matt Leinert, I think, and a couple of others. I think that that critical play at the end is where they sort of because it was illegal at that time, but they let it happen. And I think it was like the year after that, they sort of lessened up on that rule and allowed that to happen again.

Yeah, I mean, it was a big, you know, that was a big part of it. It's just like a rugby scrum. I mean, it's it's kind of where that all came from. But they got rid of that for a long time.

But then, you know, they also talked about, or his cartoon also includes a little thing on pumping and talking about, you know, roughing the punter and which originally was roughing the fullback because the fullback is typically who pumped it. And, you know, as there's a long involved explanation of that, which if you search on my blog, you can find, you know, find that whole thing roughing, roughing the punter and the origins of that. But anyway, it's just a cute cartoon.

And so, you know, just kind of it. The other thing I liked about it was that in the article beneath it, he mentions that the changes in rules and more open play that had developed by 1919, when he published this thing, allowed some smaller schools to become prominent. You know, he listed Colgate, Georgia Tech, Dartmouth, Washington and Jefferson, Occidental, and Brown.

And, you know, really, Georgia Tech's the only one now that we consider prominent W&J, and Occidental played Division three, and Occidental doesn't play anymore at all, you know, so. So, you know, their time in the limelight didn't necessarily last that long. Yeah, that's definitely true.

There are a lot of those schools, the Lafayettes and Suwannees of the world, too. Those are sort of. They had some big seasons. And now they're, like you said, they either don't have teams, or they're playing Division II, Division Three, or something else.

Yeah. And the flip side is, you know, there are a lot of schools that Wernie didn't exist at the time that are now playing big-time football. You know, I mean, we didn't realize that Florida State was a women's school until 1948.

So, you know, they've they've changed quite a bit, right? I mean, they were male back in 1902 or three or something like that. And then they went all female. So, you know, school is like that.

Then, Central Florida is in the FAUs. Florida's got a million of those schools. And so does Texas, you know, schools.

But, you know, we're little commuter schools or normal schools, you know, that kind of thing. But they, you know, times changed, and now they're massive, you know, massive significant universities. So as one of those like Florida International or Florida Atlantic, one of them I was reading about recently, and I was surprised to see that they just started having a football program like in the 1980s, or it might have been even, you know, 1990s, even it wasn't that long ago.

They started a football program. Now they're playing, you know, you know, FBS D1 football. And it's kind of unbelievable.

Yeah, I think there are about six schools playing FBS right now that didn't have football in 2000. So that's how, you know, that's how fast some of those programs got up and running. And then there were a bunch of them that, you know, even more that the school didn't exist until, well, the school didn't exist in, say, 1960.

You know, you got a Boise State that was a junior college for a lot of its history, you know. Anyways, I mean, there are as many examples as there are of schools that dropped down. There's probably an equal number that have kind of risen up or, you know.

They've become substantial schools, and, you know, so they go with the advertising benefits of intercollegiate athletics. Football's a moneymaker, that's for sure. That's I think it's been like that for over 100 years and still is that way today.

It's amazing. There's some good stuff. And folks, if you want to enjoy this picture that Mr. Ripley drew way back when on Tim's site, there are some links through Pigskin Dispatch.

We'll also try to put the link in the show notes of this podcast, as well as how to connect to Tim to have his daily tidbits delivered to you. And maybe, Tim, you could talk about that just a little bit. Yeah.

So you can, you know, go to FootballArcheology.com, subscribe and, you know, you can subscribe for free. There's also some paid levels. But if you subscribe for free, you'll get at least one email every day that has whatever the tidbit is.

And then I'm also on Twitter. Just look for Football Archeology as well. And you should be able to find me.

Well, Tim, thank you so much for sharing this tidbit of football again with us and our listeners. And I hope to talk to you again next week about some more. Very good.

Look forward to it. And yeah, we'll get together as always.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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Some football seasons stand out for the reasons of championships or amazing play. Other like the one we will discuss in this edition is for reasons of happenstance or some otherworldly event that affects football.

The tale of the very odd season of 1905 where there were very few Seniors eligible to play football due to a new guideline in college football. Timothy P Brown breaks it down and tells the details.

Based on Tim's Tidbit EThe Year of Living Seniorlessly.

-Transcribed A Year With No Seniors with Timothy Brown


Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes, PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, and welcome to another edition where we get to talk to Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology.com about some very interesting and unique features of football history. And Tim's got a real dandy tonight. Tim, welcome back, and glad to have you here.

Thank you, sir. Darin, look forward to chatting once again. Let's see where we go.

Yeah, this one, which is tonight and we're going to go to, is one of your recent tidbits. It really concerns the college game, and I guess eligibility is the general scope of it.

And I'll let you take it away from here. Yeah, so this one is called the Year of Living Seniorlessly. It's supposed to be a takeoff on the movie A Year of Living Dangerously, which was from the 80s.

So, if you didn't get that really clever little play on words. I was in high school and college during the 80s. I don't remember much of them.

But yeah, we'll talk about that some other time. Okay. So anyways, so the gist of this is that you know, I mean, everybody's familiar.

There was this big crisis in football in the early, early in the, you know, after the turn of the century, it kind of culminated in 1905. You know, demand for new rules and, you know, dramatic changes to the game. And so I think generally people think of that and talk about it in terms of changes to the game as played on the field.

And while, you know, there were certainly a lot of changes that occurred from 1906 through 1912 in that regard. Part of that struggle and issue was not just on the field of play. It was also the commercialization of the game and eligibility standards.

And so, you know, these had all been things that had been, you know, issues that had been addressed since probably the mid-80s or early 90s. But, you know, they just hadn't. They were still, you know, it was still out there, and it was still an issue that not everybody was satisfied with the solutions that had been presented. But, you know, it's like we've talked before about the IFA rules started in 1876.

And, you know, those were rules only made up by, you know, at most six or seven schools. And but everybody followed their rules. You know, I mean, it wasn't even like a formal thing.

Everybody just followed, those were the football rules. And, but the IFA also had a whole set of, they had a constitution that set out commercialization and eligibility rules. And most other schools didn't follow that.

That was kind of a separate gig. So, you know, in the late 90s or so, when the Big Ten or the Western Conference and what's Big Ten got started, they developed a lot of rules along the same lines. And, but the whole 1905 crisis, you know, kind of brought things to a head, and they were looking to make things stricter.

So, the Big Ten adopted rules. You know, one of the rules was that for 1906, Big Ten teams would only play five games a year. And that athletes would only have three years of eligibility.

Okay. It now seems like, okay, well, freshmen are eligible again. But, you know, if you're old enough, you remember when, you know, freshmen weren't eligible, you know, for football, basketball, and maybe another, maybe baseball.

So they adopted that rule, but when they did it, they made it retroactive. And so what that meant was that going, at least they did it in like early, say January of 1906, that meant that seniors who were planning to play baseball and run track at those, at the Big Ten schools, if they had done so as freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, suddenly they weren't eligible. It also meant that the freshmen weren't going to be eligible, assuming they wanted to compete as sophomores, juniors, and seniors.

So you were in a situation where you were only going to be represented by two classes. And so that's actually what happened that spring, but kind of, you know, cooler heads prevailed by the time fall rolled around, and they allowed it. They kept the three-year eligibility rule, but they did not make it retroactive. So those who were already in school were kind of grandfathered.

So, seniors did get to play in 1906, but freshmen typically did not. And so, you know, the year of living sensorless really only applied to the spring. And by fall, you know, things kind of turned around, and they were eligible to play, but, you know, they just did a lot of, but by 1907 or for the 1907 season, they said, okay, you can play seven games a year.

Then, they made the three-year eligibility apply only to football, baseball, and track. Basketball was not, you know, a big deal at the time. And they had a couple of other rules.

I mean, one of them that I thought was really silly was they did not allow their scrub or reserve team to play. Previously, they could play two games a year against outside opponents. And they scrapped that, which to me, of all the people, you know, freshmen need to play somebody else, you know, and the reserves and scrubs.

So, anyway, that's kind of just one of those things you can't imagine. Now, I mean, a rule that was retroactive, you know, as far as eligibility concerned, just craziness, you know, but that's what the faculties wanted. And so that's what they got back in 1906.

Now, was it that, refresh my memory, was it that that made Michigan leave the Western Conference or the Big Ten for a period of time? Was it the fire game? You know, that, you know, that was just one more thing, one more log on the fire. Michigan had, Michigan had a very successful program prior to that. And they pissed off a lot of people.

They, you know, they stopped, you know, back then, teams would have these feuds; Harvard and Princeton had a feud where they wouldn't play one another, you know, for like a dozen years and things like that. Harvard or Michigan had that kind of situation with a bunch of different schools. All of a sudden, they said, oh, we're not gonna play you because X, Y, or Z. So, it was just one of those things or one of the things that certainly didn't help the situation.

And so they left the conference in 1907 for the 1907 season. And they got back in, in either 17 or 18. So they were gone, you know, for 10, 11 years.

Yeah, it's, it's still shocking when you, one of the first teams you think about, when you think about the Big Ten, it's probably Michigan, Ohio State, Wisconsin, you know, Michigan State, having one of those big guys leave, you know. Well, you know, it's funny you mentioned Ohio State because they were nothing, you know, at that period, they were nothing. They just, they were like a, you know, they, they were late, you know, getting into the conference.

And they just weren't very successful until, you know, mid-teens, then they started having some, you know, some really good teams. But, you know, that's one of those teams you, you just kind of assume Ohio State has always been there. They've always been good because, in living memory, they certainly have been right.

And, but, you know, they were kind of a little bit of Johnny come lately, you know, to the Big Ten. Nothing like a Penn State or Nebraska, and now the West Coast teams, but nevertheless, even Michigan State, Michigan State was, you know, after the war. So.

Well, that is good stuff, as always, Tim, and we definitely appreciate it. Now, you have your daily tidbits that come out each and every day. And you have some other great posts that you put up on your website.

Maybe give some information to folks on how they can find you and get your information daily. Yeah, it's really simple. Go to footballarchaeology.com. Just subscribe; that'll lead to you getting an email in your inbox every night.

And, you know, pile them up, let them gestate for a little bit or read at that moment, and, you know, kind of whatever suits your fancy. If you don't want it, if you don't want emails, and, you know, the only other thing you can obviously visit the site whenever, or follow me on Twitter. And with Twitter, you have a one in 4 billion chance of ever seeing anything I post there because that's just the nature of Twitter these days.

It's like the lottery. So, if you really want to read any of this stuff, subscribe because Twitter is probably not going to do you any good. Well, I can make a recommendation.

If you want to follow Tim on Twitter, or you want to follow us on Twitter, you can set the notification bell. So every time that something posts, unfortunately, when you reply to things that other people post or retweet, you're going to get that notification as well. But so you can pick your poise in there, different ways to get the information.

So, Tim, we really appreciate you coming on and talking about this great subject from football history once again, and we'd like to talk to you again next week.

Well, enjoy it as always, and I look forward to the coming week.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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

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

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

-Transcribed Conversation of Punting 67 Times with Timothy Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look forward to it. Thanks, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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

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

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on the Missing Goal Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. Yeah. Oh boy.

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

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

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

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

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

Very good.Thank you, sir.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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

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

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

The football fields on which modern games are played have undergone many transformations over the years. The field has been morphed almost as many times as the rules of the game have been changed.

Our guest, Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology, has admired and brought to our attention the work of a historian who has really captured the evolution of the American Football Field.

James Gilbert has put together an impressive research study on the evolution of the American football field over the years of rules revisions and modifications since 1876, complete with graphics. Enjoy this Substack post that he put out recently.

-Transcribed Conversation on Football Field Evolution with Timothy Brown and James Gilbert

Hello, my football friends. This is Darren Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And wow, we have a great episode coming on tonight.

We have Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology joining us, and we're going to be talking about the football field and some evolutionary changes that have happened to it over the years. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Darren, good to see you again, as always.

Thanks for having me. Never want to take it for granted that you're going to let me come onto your show. The invitation is always there, my friend, and I'm never going to take it for granted that you join us each week because it's quite a treat for myself and the listeners.

We get to learn about something new with football or be reminded of something maybe that's been long forgotten. And I think that's kind of typical of what we have tonight. You know, something that we see every single game that we watch, and it's so obvious that we probably take it for granted.

That's the football field itself. You know, without it, there's not much of a game going on. And you came across a friend of yours that you guys wrote a piece together a few years ago on the evolution of the football field, and it's really quite interesting.

And maybe you could talk about that a little bit tonight. Yeah, so this is, you know, the friend that you're mentioning is James Gilbert. And, you know, kind of longtime readers or somebody who's gone back through the archives might remember that back in November 2021, he and I co-authored a story about the University of North Carolina team from 1893.

They were the first Southern team to go to the North and play a game because they played Lehigh towards the end of the season in Manhattan. So, you know, he and I kind of worked together on that. And I forget, even now, how he and I first connected.

But, you know, he's in the kind of old football and just general sports, you know, arcane information, you know, like me. And I had, you know, like in my How Football Became Football, I documented at least the major sequences of how the field and markings changed. You know, goalpost locations, all that kind of stuff.

So, I mean, I took it to a certain level. And, but now, James recently launched a Substack newsletter or blog called James's Newsletter. And one of his first articles is an article about the evolution of college football field.

So basically, he's what he did, and he's been doing this for quite some time. He's been creating, you know, graphics, images of the football field and all the markings at each point in time. So, going back to 1876.

And then, you know, each time that it changed, either the dimensions or the markings, location, this or that on the field, he basically created all these graphics to show this information. And then what he's done now is mirror it in a Substack article. So he's got kind of the description of what was happening, you know, why it changed what was happening, the game led to the change, and then just the detailed description of the change.

And, like, when I did mine, I stopped at 1960, but he carried on to really to the present. So all the different changes that, you know, we sometimes don't think about the things like the size of the coach's box, the size of the team, team's box, how far off the sideline to get back, you know, they get back coach has to get back, you know, all that kind of stuff. You know, he just he's outlined, outlined, he put in detail all this information.

So this is one of these where, you know, normally we talk about my tidbits or an article, but this, I just wanted to make sure there's some attention brought to him and the effort he's gone through. Because it's just, you know, it's a great resource. And I don't know anybody who has documented how the field has, has changed over, you know, 147 years of football history, like he has, you know, so it's just a really neat effort.

He's done a couple of other things as well. Yeah, that's. I know exactly what you're talking about. I did a piece similar to you, where I covered the football field probably two or three years ago. Actually, it was an adaptation of an article I wrote back in 2003.

And I had my son, you know, throw some graphics up there. And but James's article, you know, I had the grid field in the early 1900s, but I had it going, you know, goal line to goal line, which it did. But I had forgotten about the aspect of the back in, and I believe it was 1903.

And we were just talking about it. I ran across an article the other day in newspapers.com, where they went from a 25-yard line to a 25-yard line with the grid. And then it was the normal stripes, you know, outside the 25s or to the goal line. Anyway, so just the detail, he's doing that.

And I can tell you from officiating, you know, the 27 years I officiated at the high school level, there was a field change every single year, you know, as you said, the coaches box changing by the yard or, you know, the teams were allowed to the 20s. And it was a 25s or boundary lines or a hash mark is now, you know, instead of three inches, it's four inches wide or whatever, you know, so I can imagine what the collegiate field has been doing over those years. It's probably every year; there's something small.

So, this is really a Galathian chore that James is doing, and it's much appreciated. We'll have a link here in the show notes, folks, to James's site and Pigskin dispatch.

So you can appreciate his work. You know, that's really going to take a lot of effort on his part. And that's appreciated.

Yeah, you know, the thing about it is like there's so, you know, there's a bunch of times when, um, yeah, there's, well, you and I go on a particular site that sometimes they post a pic, you know, these unidentified, you know, people can't figure out where's this, you know, who's this team in this picture? You know, there's a game in a stadium. Where is this? Who's playing? What's the period? So, a lot of times, you can tell certain things just based on the uniforms or the formations, and you have a pretty good sense of what's going on. But there are other times where, you know, if depending on the angle of the shot, you can see the field markings, and that tells you a tremendous amount.

In some cases, like 1903, it tells you exactly what year the game was played. You know, if you have the right kind of angle or the right kind of shot. So, so anyway, so just anybody who enjoys doing that kind of thing, or sometimes finds themselves looking back at an old photo and trying to figure out, well, when, when was this thing from, you know, his site will be really a great reference, you know because it just collects all that kind of information in one place.

You know, the other, the other thing that, another thing that he does that is interesting is, and he, some of his posts on it, on the, on his newsletter reflect this, where he's a, he's a North Carolina, you know, UNC graduate and fan. One of the things he's done is go back and try to figure out where every North Carolina football game was played. And I don't mean that at a very casual level; I mean out of detail.

And so, you know, like, you can go back, and there are all kinds of sites where there's a site called jhowell.net that I use all the time to find the old scores and where games were played and that kind of stuff. And so it might say the game was played in Milwaukee or New Haven or wherever it was, but it doesn't necessarily tell you the exit or the field. Well, a lot of the old football, you know, especially going further back, you know, in the 1800s, you know, maybe up till 1920, sometimes these games were just played in some local park, you know, and they slapped up temporary stands or the games were played in a minor league baseball park that got torn down 80 years ago.

And now there's, you know, an expressway is sitting on top of it or, you know, a shopping mall or whatever it is. There are all kinds of these past stadiums that just are no longer there. And in a bunch of cases, kind of people have lost track of where they are.

So he goes in, and I don't really understand all the resources that he uses, but I know he uses like these old, there's a bunch of online through like Library of Congress, there's these online insurance maps that used to document, you know, the streets and major cities and all that kind of stuff and which buildings were where. And so I think he uses those kinds of things and all kinds of stuff from, you know, the newspapers telling you, well, it's at the intersection of 42nd and Western or wherever. And so then he finds where this game or where this field was and then plots the field atop, you know, what it looks like today, like in Google Maps.

So it's just really kind of fun. And then he's created some databases that, you know, dig into other information. You know, it's very UNC-specific.

So, I don't necessarily care about UNC, but I really appreciate his digging into it. It's just, you know, just getting the details of a particular topic. But just think about all the fields that it covers, you know, everybody that UNC traveled to play over the years, where their stadium is, you know, you're going to know where Duke played their games when they were, you know, Trinity College or whatever, you know, at the time. So that's some really interesting stuff.

I'll have to add that to my bookmarks and check that out because, you know, you have like the uniform sites, you know, the gridiron uniform database, and you have the helmets, you know, sites that you can go to and see where helmets are from here. Now that having a resource to look at fields of an era and where football stadiums were, you know, that's pretty cool too. So that's why I'm sure a lot of people will be interested in having that information too.

So good job, James. Yeah, no, it's just kind of fun stuff. And, you know, just the, you know, again, as I said, I don't know the method that he uses to get there, but, unfortunately, he couldn't join us tonight.

Otherwise, you know, he wouldn't would have done so. But so anyway, it's just interesting stuff. And, you know, if you're enough of a geek, like you and I are, you know, you can really, you just, you know, it's like you see somebody who's got an interest in this sport or this aspect of the sport, and they dig into it, or they collect, you know, certain things.

It's just one of those things. There's nothing I had thought of, but I just have a really deep devotion to the particular aspect of the game. Yeah. Well, let's use a little bit of James's information.

Okay. Now, you just recently saw this and appreciated it. What's something that jumped out at you that either you didn't realize, or maybe you forgot, and it brought a different light on what James did in his fieldwork?

Yeah. You know, I think the, I don't know that for me it's, it's any one thing. I know he just did it, just did an article.

I think maybe it was today or the other day where, you know, he's pointing out that North Carolina is going to play a game in Charlotte. You know, I think they're playing at the Panther stadium. And so he's, the articles about, Hey, they played, you know, it's the eighth most frequent city that they played, you know, but for them, it's kind of like, you know, they played, they played at a lot of intermediate cities, you know? So, I mean, teams used to do that all the time.

I've got an article that's my Saturday tidbit is about this, where, you know, teams traveling, you know, we've got this big thing about the West coast athletes are going to be traveling to get to the Big 10 schools and all that kind of stuff, you know, with the conference modifications. But back in the day, when people traveled by train, they spent a lot of time on the train, too. And so a lot of times, they find these cities halfway between one another, and both teams would meet there and be a bigger city, especially if they were kind of rural schools.

So they played in all kinds of locations, you know? And so, but in North Carolina in particular, it just seems like they played a lot. They played in a lot of places, you know, a lot of different intermediate towns. And maybe it's just the geography of, you know, where they were in the transportation network at the time. But yeah, it's just kind of interesting, all the different places that they played.

Oh, very cool. All right. Well, why don't you go ahead and if you have James's information, if you want to call it out now, so people can do it.

But again, you know, if you're driving or something, you can go to the show notes and get the link there. But Tim, go ahead and let us know where we can find James. Yeah.

As I said, he's on Substack, which is just a platform. You can find him at jameslegilbert.substack.com. And I checked beforehand, just Googled James Lee Gilbert Substack. And, you know, it's one of the first things that comes up.

Then you'll have the link, you know, the actual link in the show notes. But James Lee Gilbert, Substack, should get you there. All right.

And folks, the graphics are really splendid. You're going to be really pleased, I think, when you see these graphics, especially of the football field evolution that we started talking about. I got to go and check out all these coordinates of where the fields were. I have to go. I appreciate that here when we get done.

So I can't wait to do that. You just added another thing to my to-do list tonight. So, thanks, James.

So far, he doesn't have a lot of those on this site. But you know, he's done a bunch of them in the past. So, I hope you know that he recycles them and republishes them on Substack.

Well, Tim, wow, that is great stuff. Thanks for bringing this to our attention so we can appreciate his work and your work.

Why don't you tell us how folks can get your daily news? Yep, just go to footballarchaeology.com, and you can subscribe. You'll get an email every night at seven o'clock Eastern with today's article. Otherwise, you can follow me on Twitter, Threads, or the Substack app. All right, Timothy P. Brown, footballarchaeology.com. We thank you once again for joining us, and we will talk to you again next week.

Very good. Thanks.

-Frequently Asked Questions About an American Football Field:

-How long is a football field? A football field from goal line to goal line is 100 yards long with two ten yard deep end zones. Want to know more about the evolution of the playing field, you are in the right place as we covered it here:Field Size Evolution.

-How wide is a football field? Most levels of American football play on a field that is 53.3 yards wide.

-What are the hash marks for? The hash marks are used for a few different things during a game, but most importantly they are the inbounds spot for the ball to rest fo the next play adjacent to where it became dead on the previous play outside of the hash marks or out of bounds. Here is a great piece explaining the has marks and their history and evolution: The Fumble Fiasco Out-of-Bounds Oddities in Early Football.

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There are times throughout football history when things just didn't look right to our modern pigskin eyes. You might even say they appeared "ass-backward," and in the case of our subject matter formation today, that may be true.

Timothy Brown had a great piece awhile back in his tidbits titled: Innovation or Oddity? The Reverse Center

-Reverse Center With Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darren Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And we have a Tuesday.

And once again, we are going to go down the road of football archaeology with Timothy P. Brown of that website. Tim Brown, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Hey, Darren.

Thanks for having me back. Look forward to having a little chat. Yeah, I think it's going to be a pretty interesting chat.

And this is probably going to be one where folks are going to want to go to your website, footballarchaeology.com, and go to your tidbit from September 27th of 2022. And because there's a very interesting picture that's sort of the forefront of this discussion tonight, and that's on the reverse center. Yeah, well, so here's one thing about this reverse center: it's, you know, football coaches, just like, you know, any business, probably.

They're always looking for something new. They're always trying to find a way to, you know, just improve their process, do something more efficiently, or just trick somebody. And so, you know, one of the things that has been kind of a dynamic in football forever is the difference between, you know, an innovation or an oddity or exploiting a loophole, right? So when somebody does something new and, you know, almost no matter what it is in the game, if it fits within the rules, OK, then, you know, the football world adapts by either saying, hey, that's a great idea.

We're going to start doing it, too. And, you know, others take it on, or they look at it and go, no, that's not the way we're supposed to play this game. And then they they ban it.

They change the rules and get rid of it. So, you know, any time something new comes up, you don't know which one it's going to be. Right.

So you have stuff like huddling, which was new in the 20s. People didn't know before that, you know, a couple here and there to platoon football, icing the kicker, calling plays from the sideline. All those things were not part of the game at various points in time.

But, you know, somebody came up with a cool idea, and, you know, others bought into it. But you also have things like Bo Schembechler, whose Michigan teams kept getting beat in big games that were played on grass. So he decided he was going to. He had their equipment; people put washers on the bottoms of shoes because the rules said you couldn't have, you know, spikes longer than a half inch.

So he had him put washers on and then screw the spikes in so that they extended further. But they still were only half-inch spikes. Right.

So then the next year, you know, the rule makers got up and changed the rule. It said, you know, you can't. Your spikes can't, you know, be the end of the spike, which can't be more than half an inch from the bottom of the shoe. Right.

To get away, you know, to stop people like Bo from doing things like that. Anyway, you know, I've had a couple of different topics in the articles on the site. For example, we're going to talk about reverse center tonight. But, you know, I've done one in the past on the reverse quarterback, the tower play, the 12th man on the field, you know, who was a coach rather than a play.

It was a student coach rather than a player. You know, just all these kind of goofy little ideas. But so the reverse center, just to describe it to the listener, was, you know, if you just think about a center who's going up to snap the ball, just like normally approaches the line and, you know, facing the defense.

Well, that's the norm. But in the reverse center, the center turns around. And instead of facing the defense, he's facing he's facing his backfield.

And then he squats down, reaches between his legs. And grabs the ball. And then he snaps it double underhanded.

Right. And so, you know, you kind of go, well, that's stupid. But, you know, it first came up in, like, 1912.

And then, you know, mostly what I wrote about was 1941 when when Syracuse implemented the system and his the coaches thinking and it was, you know, Ozzie Solem, he he he wanted to be able to pitch the ball or snap the ball to running backs who were further spread out. He also used what he called the Y formation. So there was a quarterback immediately behind the center.

There was another, like a fullback type, immediately behind him. And then the two halfbacks were behind the tackle. So they were, you know, a little further spread.

And so by snapping in the reverse center mode, the center could swing his arms to the right or to the left and get it to a halfback who, you know, at the snap was already heading, you know, you know, starting to sweep. So just, you know, it enabled them to sweep to send the ball in a wider arc. But he could also just put it, you know, give it right back to the quarterback.

And then they thought at the time that the center facing away from the defense also gave the center the ability to pull, you know, more quickly. And so the funny, well, one of the interesting things about it is the line coach at Syracuse that year was a guy named Bud Wilkinson, who became a pretty famous, successful football coach. You know, so anyways, he had, you know, two pretty good football minds working on this thing.

And, you know, they came up with this tactic, the reverse center. So, you know, there was some contention about its legality early on in 1941. But, you know, then some folks on the football committee said, hey, it works.

It's it's within the rules. Nothing wrong with it. We may not like it, but, you know, here it is.

Syracuse had a pretty successful season. They upset they weren't, you know, they went to Wisconsin and beat them when they weren't expected to. I think they ended up like six and three, you know, something like that.

However, at the end of the year, the football gods decided that by the time they met in early January of 42, they had Pearl Harbor that occurred. And so they basically, you know, we're going to make virtually no changes in the football rules kind of for the duration. And we will adjust some things here and there.

One of their adjustments was they require they they modified the rule to say that the seven men on the line of scrimmage have to be facing their opponent. And so with that, the reverse center. Died never to be seen again.

You know, I'm sitting here thinking about when I first saw that. You know, first I laughed and said, oh, this can't be right. And then I read your post on it. Then, I started thinking from a defensive side.

And I'm sitting here thinking, OK, you're explaining that Y formation and a good portion of the snaps are either going to the quarterback or the fullback directly behind him. Well, I'm going to put somebody, you know, in a nose guard position, a zero technique will become today. And I'm going to blow that guy up from his rear end.

And is it easy to go ahead first and blow that play up into the quarterback and fullback? So they had better be pitching to the halfbacks every time they're doing their off-tackle plays or whatever they're doing. So, yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, I can't tell you exactly how they adjusted or how they, you know, how they managed that. But they did. And, you know, it proved to be successful.

And, you know, you know, they won. They won a couple of big games doing this reverse center. But, you know, again, the football god said this isn't football the way we intended it to be.

And so so it became an oddity rather than an innovation. Well, it's interesting when you were talking about some of these innovations that people haven't seen before. I know, at least in the high school rulebook, at least from six years ago when I was still officiating, they had a rule near the beginning that was kind of a catch-all rule, which I thought was probably one of the most brilliant things they put in a rulebook.

It said that if anything happens, that is not explained in this rulebook, it's at the referee's discretion to make a decision in the fairness of, you know, football, a fair and level playing field, which, you know, not exactly in those words, I forget how they are, but that's basically the gist of it. And I read that, you know, I remember as a young official coming on. I'm like, OK, where there's so much stuff in here.

Where are the people going to come up with stuff that that's not in the rulebook? Well, when I ended up getting a white hat, it seemed to happen quite often. And one thing that comes to mind, at least in our area, is that quarterbacks at the high school level were starting to go more and more in shotgun and spread formations. So they had what was called, you know, the foot kick or the stomp start, you know, to kick a man in motion where you see it's we don't even blink at it today because it happens all the time in the pro level where, you know, quarterbacks back there in shotgun, he kicks his foot, and the guy goes in motion.

Well, back when they were first doing that, there was a big discussion. I know in officiating circles, hey, is this a false start? Should this be considered a false start, or is this, you know, part of it? A false start is anything that simulates action at the snap, and the ball's not snapped. That's the basic definition of a false start.

So this is an odd occurrence. And but he's not really simulating action to snap. So there's a lot of discussion there.

And there were some inconsistencies in particular. One team we had in our area, from crew to crew, from referee to referee, how they were handling that. And we had to get our heads together real quick and decide what we were doing.

But yeah, just some things like that that happened. And, you know, the reverse center was probably something like that. Well, and that's one of the things when huddling first came in, you know, it was just like you're saying, there were some referees that said no.

You know, this is stalling and therefore we're going to penalize you. That was a it was a two yard penalty at the time. But but they, you know, they penalized him.

And others said, no, this is perfectly fine. As long as you get the ball, you know, snapped in a reasonable time, then we're good. So, you know, they had that same kind of discussion.

But just because it was new, you know. But, you know, that whole issue of the referee having that discretion is one of the. I remember, you know, coming across it, that is at least part of the conversation when, you know, there's been a couple of times where some guy's running down the field out ahead of everybody, and a fan or a player comes out on the field and tackles.

Right. And so then, what do you do? Is it that you award the touchdown? Do you do you give them the ball at that spot? You know, and so those kinds of just bizarre situations. They are one of the reasons that they've empowered the referee as they did.

And they should. Yeah, it's as an official, I learned, though, because those are judgment calls like what you just described, the kickstart, you know, things like that. The reverse center.

That's a judgment in whoever's officiating its view if that's legal or not. And giving a fair or unfair advantage to one team over another. And, you know, that's when you would call a foul.

But judgment is the toughest thing to call a judgment call because that's something where half of the people in the stands are going to like it, and half of them are not going to like it. At the same time, we have things that are cut and dried, like an offside or a false start or, you know, things like that. Those are just plain fouls.

It's, you know, it's penalized. There's there's usually no question about it. It's not. There's no judgment in it at all.

So, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.

Interesting. It's always interesting to get the kind of viewpoint of a referee, right? Because there are not that many. You know, there are a lot more people who've played the game and watched a lot of football out there.

Wearing a zebra shirt. Yeah. Well, they're always looking everywhere for officials.

So if somebody is interested, you'll contact your local high school chapter or, you know, your local school athletic directors, and they can for sure get you into a game of officiating because it's a great way to look at the game and you learn a lot of the game and see some things from the other side, so to speak. So it's very interesting, at least from a rule's take. So, Tim, why don't you take the time right now to share with listeners where they can find your tidbits and how they can get them in their email inbox or their Twitter each and every day? Yeah.

So, number one, if you just, you know, if you want to check out some of the articles and the things that I write about, just go to FootballArcheology.com and, you know, all the archives and everything's available on there. You know, I release it today's tidbit every day. And so if you want to make sure you get it every day, subscribe and you'll get an email with the content sent to you.

You know, that's seven o'clock Eastern every evening. And then you can also, you know, I post everything on Twitter as well. So, you know, I'm Football Archeology on Twitter.

So find me there if that's the way you'd prefer to consume. But you might miss some stories that way. So that's the problem.

That's the danger. Yeah, you don't want to do that. Don't want to subscribe.

It's easy. It's very painless. So, Tim, thank you very much.

Keep up the great work of preserving football history and enlightening us on some of these great antiquities of the game. And because we sure enjoy them and love to talk to you about them. And we love to talk to you again next week.

Very good. As always, thank you again, sir.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Story of the First Big 10 Conference Championship Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's great stuff, Tim.

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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