Football History

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Join us as we delve into the fascinating tradition of handing out game balls in Gridiron football. We'll explore its origins, how it's evolved over time, and why it's become such a coveted symbol of victory. From legendary quarterbacks to surprise heroes, this video will uncover the stories behind the pigskin. So, buckle up and get ready to learn the history behind the iconic game ball!

Football Archaeology.com's Timothy Brown explains as he tells us about one of his recent Tidbits titled: A History of Game Balls

Here is a full transcript of the conversation with Tim Brown

Darin Hayes
It is Tuesday and football archaeology is on my mind. And we have the founder of that great website, Timothy P. Brown with us. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Timothy Brown
Hey, Darin, this should be an awarding podcast to participate in.

Darin Hayes
An awarding podcast? You're, segueing into our subject nicely, I think. And we're going to find out a little bit more of that. Your title of your tidbit that you had just a few months ago, or maybe a few weeks ago, is a history of game balls and a pretty broad topic. But it sounds like you have some direction for us on that.

Timothy Brown
Yeah. Well, so I took a very narrow view in this case of game, game balls, you know, more in terms of the awarding of the game ball, you know, the, the game ball being, you know, trophy value, you know, kind of a game ball. But, you know, I kind of started that article talking about, you know, for an NFL game, at least nowadays, there are 36 balls prepared to be part of the game. So 12 submitted from each team. And then I think each team also submits six kicking balls. Right. And so, or no, no, I'm sorry. The kicking balls come directly from Wilson because the league, you know, too many people are manipulating the kicking balls. And so they, they get those directly from the league. The teams do get a chance to like massage them and whatever beforehand. And if Tom Brady's playing, then four of them have to be at eight pounds. That's right. Well, so, you know, the inflate gate thing is a whole other story. Um, but so, but the game ball, one of the, one of the coolest things about, I published that article on March 29th. And since then, I have uncovered a whole other slew of information that tells me that I was wrong, or at least, you know, that I didn't find as early information as I thought I had. So at the time, I was saying, look, you know, that game balls, you know, that whole awarding of game balls at the time that I wrote it, as far as I could trace it back to was like 1882. No, 1886. When, you know, just, it was mentioned in an article about a Princeton commencement, you know, ceremony. And they were mentioning that the game ball from the game that they had played when they had beaten Yale was on the, like, the rostrum or whatever, you know, for the commencement. So it kind of tells you how important, you know, what the football game was to those guys. But so, you know, through, because of another path of research that I'm doing, I was trying to, trying to dig into, you know, what all is, you know, what all is going on, or, you know, kind of the background of game balls. And, and, and part of it was that, you know, for, for a long time, like from when American football began, and, you know, to my liking, it began in 1876 with the IFA, you know, the funding of the IFA, when, when American football first got started, they only used one ball per game. You know, that was it, you know, rain, shine, snow, sleet, whatever, they played with one ball. And those balls weren't anywhere near as, you know, the leather wasn't as well protected, etc, as, as they are now. So, you know, these balls get water logged. And in the days of drop kicking, you know, you drop it on the ground, and thing was barely bounced off, you know, so, but then as a forward pass came in, you know, into favor, then in 1917, they allowed the referee to decide on a wet day, if he would allow a second ball to be used for the second half. And then eventually, you know, things spread. But you know, so there was this whole thing of, you know, you played with one ball. And so then, this whole tradition developed around awarding or presenting the game ball to the victor. So, you know, back in the day, the home team provided the ball. And then, if they lost, you know, the right thing to do was to award the ball to the visiting victorious team, for them to then go home, go back and paint the score on it, or whatever, put in the trophy case, whatever they were going to do with it. And so, so that was the tradition, you know, for some time. And So then, you know, since then, I found out a couple of new things. So one was that I, you know, recently acquired a copy of a book called The Gilbert Story, which is a story of the Gilbert Firm, which is one of the two main oblors and rugby ball makers in Rugby England, where the primary provider of rugby football, you know, rugby balls for like the World Cup and, you know, those kinds of things. So anyways, I got a, you know, copy of their ball, and it goes back through the history. And they talk about at the rugby school, there was a tradition of having two balls available for each game, and they got switched at half. But then I got ahold of Tony Collins, who, you know, has been on this podcast. And if anybody hasn't heard that one, that is you know, a fabulous podcast to listen to, because of Tony. But in any event, and he, you know, he basically confirmed that, you know, that that rugby never really had the tradition of multiple game balls. So it was a rugby school thing, but it didn't spread to rugby more generally. You know, they didn't really have a one ball or two balls, they didn't really have a standard. So somehow in the Americas, this one ball tradition came about. And then it turns out that there was an earlier awarding of a game ball came about when, you know, I think most people are aware that Harvard played McGill in 1874 in a rugby match. And that is really what led to Harvard playing rugby, and which is what led to American football developing from rugby. Well, in 1875, maybe the second and 1876, there was an all Canada team that played three games against Harvard. And in one of those games, all Canada, they lost all three, all Canada lost all three to Harvard. In at least one of those games, they awarded the ball to Harvard. So that then becomes at least best as I can tell, so far, the first awarding of a game ball in at least the football tradition. But the fun thing about that is that, you know, there just weren't a lot of rugby balls paying around the US, because people weren't playing it. But you know, they were starting to make that transition. So, you know, the IFA meets in November 1876, and they agree to play rugby instead of, you know, whatever soccer and other games they're playing. And, and so the, the weekend after that meeting, Princeton was the home. team for a game against Yale, but they didn't have a rugby ball, and yet they were supposed to play under rugby rules. So somewhere in that whole process, Harvard gave Princeton this ball that all Canada had given them, and then Princeton loses, so they give the ball to Yale, and that ball now sits in a trophy case at Yale in their gymnasium. So, you know, it's just kind of cool that it's literally probably the first game played under the IFA rules, IFA rugby rules. So in my mind, it's the first real football game, and yet that ball is still around sitting in a trophy case at Yale, because it was the game ball. You know, so I just think it's just kind of a cool... you know, kind of the way this whole story ends up that the game ball tradition preceded American football, you know, because the Canadians are the ones that, you know, gave it to the, you know, started it as far as we're concerned. And, and that and yet that first ball is still around sitting in a trophy case at Yale. I just think that's, for me, there's something magical about that. You know, now that you say that you make something a tour of, I took a veil probably about 10 years ago, makes some sense because I got the had the opportunity to with my wife's cousin was assistant coach at Yale.

Darin Hayes
And I got to got to tour the Yale Bowl and the locker rooms and just see all the tradition and, you know, the Walter camp, sort of, I guess not really, it's a monument, I guess, it's what looks more like a facade to the White House from the White House. But I got to see that. But we also got to go through the gymnasium you're talking about with all the the halls of trophy. And it's a very great place. And I there's one ball that really stood out that just didn't look like a football at all. And very tattered old, you can tell. And I wish now I wish I would have took a photograph of it because that's probably that ball that you're talking about. Yeah, so I mean, let me describe the ball to you.

Timothy Brown
I've not seen it myself, but you know, I've images of it. So it's it is a classic melon ball. I mean, it is almost round. And there's a big silver plaque embedded into the ball now, with, you know, what basically tells the story of, hey, this is awarded by the all Canada team, we gave, you know, it went from Harvard to Princeton, Princeton, Yale, and now it sits here. So it's there's, I think, I think I put the link in, you know, I've added a postscript to the story on the website. And I think I think I have a link to it. Cause I found it on a site called, is it College Antiques? But anyways, there's a, another guy kind of lays, went through this whole thing, which is where I kind of picked up on this story. And then I found other stuff on it. But anyways, I think it's just a cool, yeah, a cool story. And to my knowledge, the oldest, the oldest existing ball in, in American football. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's an awesome story. And I didn't realize, you know, it went back that far of exchanging that game ball. Now, wasn't there sort of a, in that era and all the way up into the, maybe early 20th century, where teams didn't have but one ball? Cause I can, I could recollect there's a story, I think of the big game, Stanford and Cal, like a 1901 or 1902 game, where they forgot to bring that one ball to the game. The home team, the visiting team didn't even bring a game ball. It was the only, the home team had that one game ball. Yeah, you know, and I don't remember the specifics, but I do remember the story. And I think you're right about, you know, Cal Stanford. And so it was one of those things where like they they sent people into town to go get one, you know, and they couldn't find one. And the same thing happened with when McGill visited Harvard in 1874. They didn't bring a rugby ball. I guess they thought, you know, Harvard would have one, but they didn't. Harvard just had a round ball, so they played. They played the first game under Boston rules, which is somewhat rugby ish, because you could carry the ball. And then they played the second game under rugby rules, but they used a round ball. So. Yeah, and there's a whole other thread that I'm working on about. There was a thing called the American ball, which best as I can tell, is actually developed by Charles Goodyear. He probably built created the first one because he created vulcanized rubber. It was like a canvas ball that was kind of covered with vulcanized rubber can canvas ball that was inflated. I don't think it had a separate bladder. But so a lot of the round balls that people used in America in the 1860s and 70s were these American balls. So it may be even that the Harvard Princeton or the Harvard McGill game, they could have played with an American ball or and then also even like the Princeton Rutgers game or games in 1869. Those were played with a round ball. It could have been an American ball. And that's that's what everybody called the American ball. As compared to an association or soccer ball or a rugby ball. No, no, that that ball that Charles Goodyear invented. Was it the color of a black, you know, I've seen descriptions of it being red and then and also black. So could I sit there and I know I have an old book on Walter camp and it starts off as him as a boy playing, you know, he had a black rubber ball that he just kicked around the yard and, you know, kicked over his mother's clothes line into the clothes and everything. And that's how he, you know, trained to get become a football player eventually. And I wonder if maybe that was one of those Charles Goodyear balls, because that would have been right around the time frame. I think his rubber was in the late 1830s. So probably, I think 40s and 50s is probably the ball. His stuff, maybe a little bit later than that. But anyways, yeah, I think so. Basically, if it was leather covered, it is probably an association sort of ball. But even their balls were like, you know, it wasn't real. you know, they didn't agree on a certain ball until 1872. So, you know, things are kind of, you know, it's kind of whatever you could get your hands on, frankly, you know, back in the day. And they had all kinds of different sizes, you know, I mean, rugby, American in and association balls all came in like multiple sizes in like three inch increments. And so like, size number five had a 27 inch circumference. And so if you think about one of the most popular balls in American football has been that the J5V or and proceeding that was a J5. Well, that J was the model, the Spalding model was a J. And before that it was a lily white rugby ball from England called a J. And the number five was the 27 inch circumference. So that J5 name goes all the way back to the beginning. Okay. So as you said, the number five, I was going to ask you if it will respond to the J5. So I'm glad you cleared that up. Yeah, yeah. So the letter was the model. And the number was the size because they were selling size two, size three, size four, five, and six. So like a 33 inch, 30 and 33 inch balls were, you know, whatever. And I know they don't do footballs anymore size and I was like junior and whatever pro and whatever, you know, an FHS, but soccer balls still have their sizes on them. I know you have like my daughter when she was playing, used a four. And then I think the pros in high school and colleges are number five. So well, so it's the same. It's the same sequence. And, you know, there's still junior footballs because, you know, my kids played with them, but I don't remember it being, you know, a number based system for identifying them.

Darin Hayes
I think they just called it a junior, but, you know, whatever. Yeah, maybe they still use a numbering system. And I have a junior ball right here and I don't see a number on it I have a Wilson TD and I don't see a number on it. So it's just the Wilson TD Junior Yeah, so I mean, it's just one of those cool cool things about the old balls that you know Here's something that carried out from literally from the beginning that we see every day and never think about Oh, I they call it a J5. Well, that's why you know, yeah fascinating Great stuff The Tim you have great stuff like this, you know a lot on your website and your posts And maybe you could introduce the listeners who haven't heard or read your before How they can you take part in what you're writing?

Timothy Brown
yeah, so best thing to do is just go to Football Archaeology.com and You know find the site just subscribe you can subscribe for free You can there's a paid version as well. You can also follow me on Twitter And on threads and on the substack app. So, you know, you can find me on any of those four methods or just Go out and search the site whenever you want to

Darin Hayes
Great stuff as always we really appreciate it and it's really enlightening About the the ball, you know and some of the history of it and we really thank you for that and Love to talk to you again next week about some more great football history

Timothy Brown
Very good. Look forward to it. Thanks

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Back in early football, there were a tremendous number of games that ended in a tie. It was frustrating for teams and players alike to put in all that effort just to have the scoreboard tallies knotted.

Timothy P. Brown tells us about the change of heart in considering tie games in the NFL standings, all due to the 1932 NFL Title.

-Transcription of Timothy Brown on the 1932 NFL Championship and Tied Games

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes, PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen. We are going to talk with Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. He'll talk about a great tidbit he had back on February 14th. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hi, Darin. Good to see you this evening, and I look forward to chatting about ties and the wonderful world of ties in football.

Yeah, and ties at the professional level. It's not something that we get to talk about quite often when we chat with you, but this is an NFL contest that we're going to be talking about today and a great, one of the most historic seasons, probably pre-Super Bowl that there was. And so I will let you set the stage and the story.

Well, so we're talking about the 1932 season and the great inequities of the world. And I say that because it was a season where, you know, you could argue that the wonderful Green Bay Packers got screwed a little bit. But so, you know, this is 1932.

So that's a year; it's the last year in which the NFL used the college rule book, right? Then, in 33, they changed a number of rules, created their own rule book, and changed the number of rules, but they were still using the college rule book in 32. And so the NFL back then was not quite the same kind of an organization that it is today, you know, where everything's buttoned-down and tied down and everybody, you know, follows the marching orders. And so it was back then, and colleges did the same thing.

Teams would just because you were in a league with somebody else or a conference with somebody else did not at all mean that you were going to play them. And, you know, Big Ten was one of them that hung onto that for years. And like Fritz Kreisler went wacko, you know, later in his career as the AD at Michigan, because he just, he viewed the conference as one that set eligibility records and things like, or standards, not, it wasn't a scheduling platform.

So basically, you had a situation where teams would play different numbers of games against teams in their league. And there are a number, you know, often teams didn't play, you know, they played unequal numbers or, you know, they might play good teams twice or three times. And then they, you know, the NFL still was playing; they were professional, but it would be like they were playing, you know, a triple-A baseball team or something like that.

You know, they were playing teams that were in a lower league. But, you know, it brought in fans and, you know, they made money and, you know, those kinds of things. So it turned out that both in college and in the NFL at the time, they determined that there weren't playoffs.

There wasn't even a championship game. The winner was like, it was, you know, at least it was when I was in high school, whoever won the, you know, you won the champ, you won your league title. And then, you know, whoever had the best record was named the league champion, you know, pretty simple stuff.

But, back then, you know, they calculated that based on the win percentage, and they did not include ties in that calculation. So you could have a team under that scenario; you could have a team that won one game, didn't lose any, and then tied nine times, which would win a championship over a nine-and-one team. Now, that would be the case even if the nine-and-one teams won the game head-to-head when they played.

So, actually, that last part is not true because otherwise, they wouldn't have been one, and oh. So, okay, forget that, edit that out. But anyway, so nevertheless, the point would be still that nine, oh, and one was not as, or yeah, one, oh, and nine was better than nine and one, at least the way that they calculated.

So, in 1932, that kind of a scenario was kind of, was what occurred. I mean, not quite, you know, not to that extreme, but the NFL season ended, there were two games left, and the Packers, you know, had like, they had ten wins, one loss, and like four ties, right? And then the Bears and Portsmouth Spartans, who later became the Detroit Lions, you know, they were both like, they'd won four games, and then they had a bunch of ties and like six ties and things like that. So at the end of the season, it turned out, you know, the back Packers kind of, you know, they screwed themselves, but they, they lost their final two games, and that left them with the 10, three, and four records while both Chicago and Portsmouth were 6-1 and either 6-1 and six or 6-1 and four, right? So, based on the way they calculated it, they tied with the same win percentage, those, you know, Portsmouth and Chicago.

So that was the first time that they said, okay, well, we need to name a champion because these two teams are tied. So they had a championship game. They scheduled the following week to be played in Chicago.

Chicago had terrible weather. So instead of playing outdoors, they moved the game inside Chicago stadium, you know, a basketball hockey arena. And so they played on a shortened field, a narrow field, et cetera.

And, you know, that's a famous game that led to or contributed anyway to the move the next year to introduce hash marks because they had moved the ball away from the boards, you know, in the Chicago stadium. There was a famous jump pass during that game. And so that led to some changes in, you know, the rule about whether or not you, like the NFL, dropped the rule that you had to be, you know, five yards back from the center in order from the line of scrimmage, I should say, to throw a forward pass.

But, you know, and then they also then started playing a championship game, you know, the following year. But even, even than that, that percentage, you know, the keeping ties out of the win percentage thing, that stayed in place until 1932 because Halas opposed it time and time again. You know, it's almost like anyone has 1932, you know, thing to have, you know, ill light, you know, shined upon it.

So it's just one of those crazy rules. And then, you know, a couple of weeks later, I wrote a similar tidbit about using the University of Minnesota as an example because, you know, the Big Ten back then, you know, you know, we don't think about Minnesota being far away from Ohio State, or, you know, the other Big Ten teams at the time, but it was very common for, you know, teams, even, you know, like a Purdue, it wasn't a distance issue, but they would only play two, three, maybe four Big Ten teams in a season. For the rest of the time, they played, you know, at the local small college; maybe they played somebody from another section of the country.

But Minnesota, to this day, claims 12 Big Ten championships before 1935. And in not a single one of those championships did they win more than three Big Ten games? Right? I mean, they would be three, and a lot of times, they were two and oh, or two and one or two. So all those big championships they claim, and other teams do the same, you know, other schools do the same thing.

You know, they've got a championship based on just a couple of wins. You know, it seems just totally bizarre now. But that's the way it was, you know.

And the only other thing that came out of that, that whole scenario, I mean, nobody liked it, but they just kept doing it. You know, they couldn't possibly, you know, look at a sport like hockey and say, oh, geez, maybe they've got a better idea there. But so one of the things that these kinds of mismatches, well, mismatches isn't the right word.

But anyways, one of the things that these inequitable scheduling led to is some of the early rating systems were built around trying to use mathematical formulas to say, well, Illinois is the best team this year because they won six games against power teams. And, you know, there were some very basic calculations that they employed back then. However, the Dickinson system was started in 1925 to try to address that.

And it's one of the systems that's recognized today. If you look at who the NCAA recognizes as naming national champions, Dickinson is one of them. And so is our buddy.

Park Davis and Holgate and yes. So it's just, you know, an interesting, yeah, just things that, I mean, we still, because conferences have gotten bigger, you still have kind of unequal matching, not everybody's playing around Robin, right. But nevertheless, I mean, back then it was just like nuts.

You didn't even have to play a minimum number of games to be considered a conference champion. Yeah. Going back to that 1932, I guess, impromptu championship game, there's some speculation that the NFL, because the NFL wouldn't declare a champion until their off-season meeting, which usually was after the first of the year.

So people pretty much knew who the champion was because they never had anything be a tie like that. Well, there's speculation that they were going to be co-champions and that Halas, you know, would have no part of that. He wanted to be, you know, the bears were it, and he wanted the title.

So it's rumored that he bent, and I'm not sure if it was a Joe Carr. I think it was Joe Carr at the time, was probably the NFL commissioner, uh, bent his ear a little bit and said, Hey, you know, we got to have this game, and you know, we'll host it in Chicago, and you know, everything's going to be really great. And, but he also knew that sports mouse star player, their quarterback, Dutch Clark, was the head basketball coach at the University of Colorado, I believe.

And that their first game was that weekend that they scheduled the game. So there's no way that he could be there. And this is the Chicago Bears team that had, you know, not only Red Grange but Bronco Nagurski.

And, you know, they were that jump pass play that you talked about. There were two of them that had that. And that's what ended up winning the game.

So the Spartans, without their best player, you know, held this powerful Chicago bears team right till the end until this controversial jump pass was thrown by, I believe by Bronko Nagurski to Grange. And so that, that was, that was pretty weird. And I believe it's the first indoor professional championship ever played too.

I'm pretty. I know what it is for an NFL title, definitely, but this is the first. Yeah. I mean, there were some of those really early games indoors in, like, 1892 and whatever it was, the East Coast Football Union.

I forget exactly what they called it, but guys like Amos Alonzo Stagg and Pop Warner played in some of those games, you know, but yeah, for sure. I mean, other, you know, that was definitely, well, I guess, I guess you could count the world series of football in 1902, 1903, those were sort of professional, and they said they were the world champions for us. So I guess those were indoors, but yeah, there was some good stuff there.

The that's a very interesting period in time, but I had George Hallas always always definitely, you knew he was on the side of the bears. He would do anything he could to, to, you know, win a swaggle or whatever, barter into a NFL title, get the bears in there somehow. But that's good stuff.

As a, you know, growing up Packer fan, he was not my favorite human being, but, but yeah, I mean, he, you know, I ended up getting to like him when I did all the research on my first book, cause he played for Great Lakes Naval, you know, and so anyways. Yeah. I think he didn't play for a Canton Bulldogs or something too early on.

I think. I don't think he played for Canton. He liked it when he played. In 1919, he played some games, I believe, with the Hammond pros.

Okay. That maybe that's what it was. Okay.

You know, Patty Driscoll and a couple of the other Great Lakes guys played, played for them. And it was after that season that he moved out to, you know, Big Tate or Staley's and Staley's program. Yeah.

And that's a whole nother interesting story in itself, how we got the bears from old man Staley. So it's good stuff. Well, Tim, I appreciate you spending this time and, you know, getting these tidbits to us every night.

And, you know, for those out there in the listening land that would love to get ahold of their hands on your tidbits and read them each night. How can they go about that? Yeah. So you can check out my website, footballarchaeology.com. It's on the Substack platform.

You can enroll. That means you'll get an email with that day's story sent to your inbox every night. You can either do that or follow me on Twitter because I post shortly after seven o'clock each night on Twitter as well.

And so I'm, you know, I go under the name Football Archaeology there as well. Okay. Timothy P. Brown, footballarchaeology.com. Thank you very much for sharing the story tonight and each and every night on your tidbits.

And we'll talk to you again next week. Very good. Thank you, sir.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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

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

-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.

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

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

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

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

Tcf Bank College Football Stadium Minnesota Golden Gophers Sunset Panorama Panoramio is courtesy of mjdemay via Wikimedia Commons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very good. Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

---

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

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

This conversation is based on Tim's original Tidbit titled: Warner and the Inexperienced Cornell Eleven.

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

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

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

Football History Rewind: A glance at how football developed in stages especially in post Civil War America