Football Daily

Born May 7, 1881, in Alpena, Michigan, was the big tackle from the Army teams of 1899 to 1902, Paul Bunker.  The National Football Foundation lends the thought that when you are receiving high praise from an opponent you know you truly have a great player. Navy's star back of the 1900 era, Ralph Strassburger, who also  played defense. Approached Bunker several years after when the two met up on the gridiron, this time it was in the Philippines. "Bunker," Strassburger said, "I hate you. Let's have a drink."

As you can see back in 1902 Bunker had ended his playing career with that season's Army-Navy game, running wild against the Middies and leading the Cadets to a 22-8 victory. He had scored two touchdowns on offense and had spent much of the afternoon punishing Navy's star back which was Strassburger. Walter Camp described Bunker as a battering ram who outclassed all other backs and was a first class defensive tackle. Bunker is one of just a handful of athletes to win All-America mention at two different positions. He won All-America honors as a tackle in 1901 and in 1902 at both halfback and tackle. The College Football Hall of Fame proudly placed a display in honor of Paul Bunker into their legendary museum in 1969.    Bunker continued to be a hero off the field as he died for his country in 1943 as a Prisoner of War.

Being inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame is a mark of unparalleled prestige and accomplishment. It signifies that a player has not only excelled on the field but has also left a lasting legacy that transcends generations. This honor is reserved for those who have demonstrated exceptional skill, leadership, and impact in collegiate football, shaping the sport’s history and inspiring future players. Remembering these inductees is not just a tribute to their remarkable careers but also a celebration of their enduring influence on the game. Their stories and achievements serve as a beacon of excellence and a testament to the profound role they’ve played in elevating college football to new heights.

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Born May 4, 1938, Hampton, Arkansas, was Wayne Harris who played center for Arkansas from 1958 to 1960. The NFF states that Wayne was  an excellent blocker on offense and a fierce tackler on defense keeping his on the field most of the game as a two-way player. A First Team All-America selection, Harris set an Arkansas single-season record for tackles with 174 in 1960.

A two-time First Team All-Conference selection, he was named Southwest Conference Player of the Year in 1960.  Harris was nicknamed "Thumper" for his hard hits, and the Arkansas coaches now honor the best defensive player with the Thumper Award. A true scholar-athlete, Harris was named First Team Academic All-America in 1959 and twice earned First Team Academic All-Conference honors.

Wayne Harris was honored with induction into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2004 after the National Football Foundation tabulated their votes. He was further honored in 1976 when the Canadian Football Hall of Fame inducted him for his play with the Calgary Stampeders.

The general respect that Coach Yost paid to his players made them love him. His teams were ready as Dr,. Behe points out that there were four main reasons for his and his football teams' successes: Curiosity; Risk Taking; Preparation; and Charisma.

This book, Coach Yost: Michigan's Tradition Maker, has so much football history in it, and you can tell the passion by which its author speaks that you are in for one great football history lesson from this Pigskin Professor, Dr. John Behee.

His latest, after over 50 years of research is titled Coach Yost: Michigan's Tradition Maker. Dr. Behee achieved a degree in History and then furthered his education at the University of Michigan and even got to spend some time as a graduate assistant coach for the Wolverines during his stay there.

Fielding Yost and his later years in coaching and administration with biographer Dr. John Behee. Here is our transcript of this portion of our conversation:

We are going to learn more from Dr. Behee in just a moment. This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatches, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history on a daily basis.

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hays of pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to the pigpen, your portal to positive football history. And we're going to go into our recent conversation with Dr.

John Behee on his excellent book Coach Yost Michigan's Tradition Maker. You can find that book at behee.com. It's B-e-h-e-e .com. Dr. John has some great lines of communication to get you through some vendors that are selling this book.

That's outstanding. I read it is a must-read for football historians out there, especially lovers of early football and some of the brilliant minds of football, like coach Fielding Yost. So make sure you get that. In our conversation, we listened to the first parts of one and two, and if you haven't listened to either one of them yet or maybe one or the other, go back and listen to them because Dr.

Behee has such exciting insight into Coach Yost. Fielding Yost is a fascinating subject to discuss and read about, so ensure you do that. Earlier, we discussed part one of his early life and how he became a football lover, player, and early coach. Some of his early assignments as a coach, and then we got into part two, a little bit about his winning ways. He caught on and was winning right away. You got Stanford Michigan and just dominating teams that his team that Michigan played, and Stanford played, and he was really developing a good routine.

Well, now we're going to get into Dr. Behee's conversation on how Coach Yost motivated his players and made them truly one of the best teams in football history. And we'll get into that here. Here's Dr Beehe.

As I went through this research, I could see Coach Yost and his trainer, Keen Fitzpatrick, who was a world-class track coach. I could see them building the mental side of it as they went along.

When Yost started teaching skills, they were not going to be doing them correctly or perfectly at all, and they might get discouraged. You know how people can be their own worst enemies. They said to find their mistakes and beat themselves up for them.

And he would never let that happen. Never let it happen, and continue the belief that you are not only going to get it, you're going to get a form of better than anyone you play against. You will demonstrate to them how smart a guy you are and how tough you are.

I mean, eventually, he continually built that self-confidence trilogy. It was easy for people who played this game. There's a lot of point scoring here. I just gave you what they did in 1901 and 1905; they had swagger.

They were so dominating that they could see the opponents as they began to crack and collapse, even in the really big games. But they they knew eventually, they would break the will of the opponents. They were so bright because they were conditioned mentally by Yost and by Team Fitzpatrick.

Now, here's another one. I'm going to get to the one you asked about here. But anyway, rules knowledge. Rules knowledge! Now, you did some officiating for about 27 years. Yes, sir. And did you witness any examples of students or athletes who did not seem to know the rules and, therefore, suffered a penalty because of it?

No, absolutely. There's a lot of – I found it very interesting that Coach Yost taught them the rule because it probably would help almost every team out there at the high school and collegiate level, with the players knowing as well as the officials.

And it definitely helps the game go much smoother, and they can find advantages within the rules to gain over their opponents. Yeah, and so they never lost games because of a lack of knowledge of the rules.

I had a good battle that they got into the Big 10. You undoubtedly read that Michigan got bumped down to the Big 10 because they didn't want to buy some of the rules that have been put in place by the faculty.

So they've got to the east to find their opponents, and they play the pin, and the Yost is up on the rule and pin is not, and he tells the officials, and officials say, you know, Yos is correct, and then the pins say, then we're not going to play.

You can take the team and go home, but I can play, okay? And so the officials return to the ocean and say that's a big problem here. They are just not; they refused. If you say they cannot run that play that way, and I know you're right, they won't play.

Let's figure out a way to get the game going. And, so, Jospy Lynch. And they wanted to plan the games. But the point is that he knew the rules better than the officials, for God's sake. He talked to the players, and there's a fascinating photo of Coach Yosh, where they're meeting at the boarding house.

They're getting their food there. They have something there on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, five days. And I've got the page. I forgot what page it is. Anyway, I have all of the agenda.

One night, it was rules. So they had to come in with the written rules and quiz each other. And it had to be fast-paced. We move quickly, and the game moves quickly, so you have to make quick decisions correctly.

That's innovative coaching. When you know the rules quickly because you've rehearsed them, you're not going to make mistakes and give games away. And they didn't. Here's another one.

Cross-training. Now, that one got me. No player would know what position he was going to be playing. Because Joost said, you will play the position where you can help our team the most. I'm going to play quarterback. I'll do this and that because I will get a lot of ink.

They won't tell you that, but that's what they think. I'll feel a lot of pressure over that. No, that's not true. I'm a receiver. No, you are where you can help our team the most. We are, first and foremost, teams.

And the other thing that did was that you couldn't hurt them with an injury, and they were rarely injured. They were in outstanding physical condition, excellent in terms of training and mechanics, and they could play almost anywhere.

So if you hit, somebody went down, somebody else was in. And the other thing too, now this is not, one of the articles that I've read in the Michigan Daily that impressed me was talking about eligibility, and sometimes when I know that this was true with Stag at Chicago, he had some outstanding players, but he also had some players who refused to go to class.

They weren't dumbbells, they were just lazy guys, and they could get by with it because Stagg would go to the professors, and of course he had a president who would back him up on anything he wanted to do, including getting faculty members to give people grades.

It's because we gotta have a football team that represents Chicago well. When that whole thing was coming up and being discussed in papers and in admission, The faculty athletic representative at Michigan said, I can't remember once when Yos had a player who had conditions and had to work them off before he got back to play.

I cannot remember when he came and said you got to give him a better grade. He took the players that were available and played with them every single time. and the guys who were not academically eligible set out until they got their conditions worked off and get back into play.

That's remarkable. That is quite a testament to the coach, that's for sure. Yeah. Now you've got game participation. He was a perfectionist, my God. He knew more about what you wanted to do than you did if you were the opposing coach.

He knew your players better than you knew them, and he taught his players to analyze the opponents. Now, the coach is the only one who can make decisions around here. You guys have to know how tough it is for your guy to get over that.

What can we do? Do you need to double up on one guy? What do you do? What does he need to make them think and continue things? Of course, you received tremendous support from the paper and student paper at the rally.

4 ,000 students would come for a rally on a Friday night. It was a university hall at first and then became Hill Auditorium after that, when that structure was built. But they've run songs, cheers, and he would say all the right things to them.

He could hold that crowd of 4,000 students in the palm of his hand. If he were quiet, taking a measured speech, they would sit on the edge of their seats, waiting for the next word. I mean, he was a master of psychology.

Doctor, can I interject in here? You have a couple of things where you show where Yost is in some uncomfortable positions, and he makes some statements that are really quite remarkable. The one you were saying with the point-of-minute teams when they were on that great winning streak that they had, and this isn't verbatim what he said, but he basically said it wasn't his job to stop his team from performing at their peak, that was his opponent's job to do.

I found that to be interesting. I guess he was running up the score he was being questioned on. Yeah, and his whole point was that all this is good. It almost sounds like all I ask of you is everything. You know, you loved me for a lot of my life. You know, that sort of thing.

That's all I ask of you. That beautiful music from Phantom of the Opera. All I ask you, man, is that you give me 100% for every single play and practice in the game. That is all that I asked. So, the concept is that you cannot take the day off.

You can't take a playoff; I need you every single play. He started telling them this at the start of the season, during spring training and fall workouts. He started to tell them, we run people off the field.

In the Iowa game, let's see, this is 1901, 1902 I think it is, yeah, in December. Now they like to play the Michigan does, the final game in Chicago because you get a good crowd. So they're going to play Iowa there.

Iowa is going be the final games of the season. I think Chicago is about game number eight in that year. So, they are going to play in Iowa. Iowa has an excellent team. Michigan runs against Iowa in 217 plays.

I mean, it is just when you talk to me all if I'm going to if we're going to be the kind of team that I want you to be, he says we do not stop for people we call the play while we were unscrambling from the previous play so we know and I and the center have got to get right back where he can set the ball and anybody who's late getting back there is going to hold the whole team up you have to get back and get in the position we're going to go and go. It doesn't take very much for a team to; he's got them all stuck in the air on defense, and his team is going wild.

That whole concept of being able to play any position, being to play fast. What was your comment that brought this on that sparked me to go in this direction? What were you just saying about this?

Yeah, he says it wasn't his job to stop his team from performing at their peak and running up the score against somebody. That's his opponent's job, to start his teams from scoring. And yeah, because all I can do is coach my team, and you see how I'm coaching my team, we are going to go, go go.

And he's in practice at Michigan. He's got them going up and down the field doing single drills, and he is shouting, hurry up, come on. Hurry up. The students nicknamed him Fielding "Hurry Up" Yost.

They found a new initial for the H—a new word for the "h" in his little name. Yeah, and so then he loved it. He just, oh, it brings a smile from ear to ear for it to be called Hurry Up Yoast. And see, I'm trying to think where I was going to go next.

Anyway, see the concept of fast, fast play. Go ahead. Well, I wanted to mention another statement that he made sort of on the other end of things when he was sort -of in a sticky situation, uncomfortable situation.

You have in the rare cases that his Michigan team suffered a loss, you have them quoted as saying, if you lose, don't find excuses; just congratulate the winners and move on. That was a powerful message to his players.

And, yeah, and I've got a page in here where I just, there are so many hurry-ups, I didn't want to put them all in the book, but I set ones that were a pretty choice, and you read those, if you're a coach or if your person who's working with youth sports, you look at that and say, I want to use that.

My goodness, one of them was that we didn't have time to get even. So if there's been an unfair situation like the last play, forget that because the next play might be the one that wins the game for us. You hear that enough.

You learn to be thick-skinned. Words of wisdom, that is, too. We could all probably use that in all walks of life, not just football. Yeah, and then back to the coaching about the officiating, one of his career officers said, you have not been assigned to referee this game.

That's in someone else's hands. We have given you other assignments. You focus on yours. I'm thinking; I've seen so many people, the teams out there where they're trying to show the official East Holding Michigan, you know it said all that gets you is some of the disappointment of the officiating crew that you have to beg and beg for God's sakes play the game pal learn to play in the games.

No, I think I bet you that's probably where coach Bill Belichick and in our modern times gets it where he just tells his players to do their job. That is all you have to just do your job. Don't worry about anything else.

Just do your job." Yeah, and the other thing, too, that I feel this is a part of Coach Joe's success formula is that the respect he had for officials, I can tell because I've watched enough sports events, I can tell when a coach has an official who will not hurt him with his calls.

You can just tell it. And you can when they're homers. Sometimes, if it's blatant, you can't tell. When they are hovering for the basketball, they call it that. There's a guy who's got four on him, and out he goes, and the game goes to the other team.

I mean, I can see that stuff. He had such great rapport with the officials that they were proud to cook to officiate his games. And he had enormous respect for the game. Did you see some examples and the coach's book where he kind of got hosed at the time by people?

They go so fast. His team does. The only way we can stop him is to fake injury. So we do that. And so then he stuck. But there are a couple of really good examples of that that I show in the book. And what did he do?

Okay, all right. Iowa went back when he was in Kansas. And so they're fending injury, and then finally, they show up late for the game. It's an afternoon game, so you're out of daylight, and they know they are going to go fast, so he has to argue every play to coach this for Iowa, has to argue every play, and delay, delay, and finally comes out at the end of the game, they all says it's too dark, Kansas is going to go back ahead, or not Kansas, I forgot, maybe Nebraska, they're going have a chance to go ahead in the games, so he comes up and says, it was too dark we've got to quit, quit.

The Yost team got the short end of a stick there in several ways throughout the game. He shakes hands and goes home. He is not going to do anything that would bring discredit to the game; he is going to preach clean football, and when it's over, it is over.

That is a lesson that we can all learn from, I think. And I think it's a good time to bring up another point that you make; you say multiple times in the book that in all those years of coaching, he never once said a curse word at a game or practice.

And that's unbelievable for what he was teaching and these men that are aggressive and doing aggressive actions and probably did some things that he didn't like and never to have a poor choice of words that would offend anybody.

I thought that was a remarkable attribute of Coach Yost. He's really a classy guy. A braggart, my God, yes, and he just beat you to death because he's so much better than you are. You don't even get a chance to lick your wounds; he is already getting press releases.

So there are a lot of reasons to not like the guy, but no cuss words. In the 26 years I've been on coaching programs where, I don't think the guys could go 26 minutes without coaching. And their feeling is that this is a part of the way you inspire athletes to do something difficult.

Well, I know some coaches who can't go 26 words without saying a curse word. Jared, you got it right. So that's a remarkable, remarkable record. No one keeps records like that. And then also drinking.

He was a teetotaler without questions the whole time. Interesting guy and very remarkable. Okay, now before I let you go, I want you to tell me in your own words you've written a biography on this man twice, so you were the foremost expert, I think, on Fielding Yost that is around, that's ever been probably, besides Field in Yos himself.

So what is maybe the one quality? Could you just say one thing about Coach to somebody to sort of sum him up? What would that be? Or one story, you know, however, you want to sum it up? First of all, he was a perfectionist.

He left nothing to chance that he could influence in a positive way. He was remarkably flexible in his approach to the game while people would come up with an offense that someone was doing really, especially some of the East, Harvard, and Yale, that they were doing very well.

And then they just copied that. He didn't copy anybody. He was as innovative as they come. Looking back over 29 years of coaching, four major traits, calm strengths that we will can be seen in Coach Yost.

They seem to be replicated in most high achievers in many different occupations. First, curiosity. Yost had an insatiable desire to learn. It drove him from a country schoolhouse to a law degree. From the East Coast to the far West, a trip he would eventually take 20 times from his father's outfitting supply store to a deep understanding of mineral exploration.

From preparing a young team for a football game to building a program that would produce national champions. He never stopped thinking and learning. Second, risk-taking. As a college athlete, Yost chose to test his athletic and mental skills against the best.

He made mistakes, learned from them. And incidentally, that's why risk -taking is so important to high achievers. because you then learn how to handle defeat and come back in a different way, learning, having learned more, and overcome the the loss.

He chose an occupation, the hunt for veins of minerals, a business fraught with risk. Then he said about to learn enough to turn risk into profit. And setting a schedule at Michigan, he loved the high stakes big games.

Third, preparation. He learned that his success was coarsely aligned with the thoroughness of his preparation. Fourth is charisma. Back in 1970, when Vinnie Ustrand, Michigan's great, great all-American, read my manuscript of the Oost, the host and his coach.

I asked him, what was it about Coach Yost that you were most impressed with? He did not hesitate. He said when Coach Yost entered the room, he had a commanding presence. He had charisma. When he put pen to paper, he made his ideas clear and convincing.

His self-assurance moved our teams from We should do it; we can do it in practice to We will do it by game time. Looking back on Coach Yost, he gave evidence of that leadership quality even in those early coaching years.

I don't think I'm reading this now correctly. I am getting a little bit of an error here. And then, of course, well, I think that's it: curiosity, risk-taking, preparation, charisma. Wow. That is really some great wisdom for coaching in any sport in an era that could be very valuable to anybody out there.

And I thank Coach Yost for sort of learning that on the fly in from some great people that he was around, and you know his great networking ability, and I'm going to get on my soapbox here for a little bit because you doctor your book is so filled with information about Coach Yost, but at the same time it preserves such a great period in football history, and there there are so many little stories and tangents that we could have gone on in this conversation, and I think I'll save that for your readers to get a copy of the book and get this and once again you can get that it's called Coach Yost Michigan's tradition maker behe .com and he's got some information here where you can go to, and you'll learn all these little stories and the ins and outs not only about Coach Jost but some of the other aspects of football it goes into a lot with you know like Coach Amos Alonzo's stag and some rivalry he had with there.

There are so many little stories that I'm going to treasure and probably read again here real soon because it's just such a fascinating book, and the readers will find that excessively satisfying to their football appetite as I have.

And just one of those books is great. And Dr. Behee, I appreciate you coming on here and sharing with us this incredible story of Dr. Jocelyn for sharing and writing this second book to give us this information on this great man in football history and preserving the football industry.

So thank you, sir. You're welcome, and Darin, thank you for having me. And if we get some conversations going later on, you and I, there were some exciting things we need to discuss. First of all, in that 1903 game, We had one of our students in Michigan who was really good at telegraphy; the telephone company built him a 40-foot tower near the 55-yard line, which was Midfield, and he sent back information to the students gathered at the university in the hall, so they had ten telephones.

Well, anyway, it was very interesting how they got some play-by-play in 1903. And then we got sophisticated enough. One of the Ohio State faculty fellows in the 1910s and 15s came up with a grid grab.

It was a big football clock. It had all kinds of information on it, like the game, you know, the scoreboards today. And that thing—we didn't have about 4,000 students sitting there watching that game.

They couldn't get up to Minneapolis, Minnesota, to play, to see the game, so there were a number of things there that I think were really interesting that would surprise people who did not know what those innovations were.

We will have you on again. And we can do some other things for your listeners. Okay, I find that they gotta get your book. That's for sure. That's for Sure, Dr.

Thank you again, and we will talk to you again soon. I'll get you on another podcast here. Thanks.

Thanks, Darren. That was a great conversation.

We have Dr. John Behee, a great biographer, writing about Coach Yost, Michigan's tradition makers, the book's name for the second time. You can get it at behe .com, B -E -H- E -DOT -COM. You could look for the links here in the show notes or go to pigskindispatch.com for any one of the three parts that we've had with Dr. John Behee talking about his Coach Yost book. A great coach, part of football history, and some of the traditions that Michigan has been carried on through all, even to this day, some a hundred-odd years later. So, it was a great book and a great conversation. Thank you Dr. Behee.

Yost grew up in West Virginia, and his family had a store where equipment for the mining industry was sold. Yost participated in hard work as a youngster at the urging of his mother; he attended Ohio Wesleyan to become a teacher. He taught school for about a year and then decided he needed more out of a career to satisfy him, so he returned to school at West Virginia University. There, he was introduced to playing football as his rugged build and strong stature made him a perfect candidate to play tackle in single platoon football of the era. He soaked it up like a sponge and enjoyed the game.

Fielding Yost the early years of his football journey with biographer Dr. John Behee. Join us in this exciting discussion with the biographer and expert on this important person in the development of the game.

A young NFL scout named Bill Nunn revolutionized pro football talent scouting by exploring options in the historically black colleges and universities to bring talented players, the Steelers, such as John Stallworth, Donnie Shell, and others, to the team to help build a 1970s dynasty. Learn how they built the 1970s Steeler dynasty.

We had the honor of having a few conversations with University of Michigan Alum and biographer of a famous Wolverine football coach Fielding Yost, Dr. John Behee.

Here is a transcript of a conversation Darin had with Dr. Randall Balmer and his book Passion Plays which unveils the history of the influence of religion on football and the other North American Sports.

Darin Hayes
Welcome once again to the Pigpen, your portal to positive football history. We had a very interesting discussion that I think will commence here. We have a gentleman writing a book on a topic I don't think we've ever had here in the Pigpen: football history. His name is Dr. Randall Balmer, and he has written a book called Passion Plays. It's got a very interesting subject and a very interesting theme. I think we'll bring him in right now. Dr. Randall Balmer, welcome to the Pigpen.

Dr. Randall Balmer
Thank you, Darin. I'm happy to be here.

Darin Hayes
Well, we are sure glad to have you here, sir. Before we get into the subject of your book and its title, maybe you could tell us a little about yourself and your background, especially regarding football history.

Dr. Randall Balmer
Okay, well, I grew up as a kid loving sports, trying to play sports, and not doing all that well, I suppose, but I did my best. And so I'm a sports fan; I wouldn't say I'm one of those diehard fans I keep hearing about, but I follow it fairly regularly. And I have my sports allegiances and so forth. And that was part of my background. The immediate catalyst for this book was discovering talk radio sports talk radio in the early 1990s. I taught at Columbia University in New York when W NBC transitioned to W F A N and became a sports talk station. And I was just riveted. I was just fascinated that these hosts could sustain conversations and debates for hours and hours over whether or not Joe Torrey should have lifted the starting picture with two outs in the bottom of the sixth inning. And I became hooked. I loved it. The book attempts to understand why Americans have a peculiar passion for sports. I'm aware that there are sports fans elsewhere in the world, especially when the World Cup runs, comes around, and so forth. But it seems to me that we Americans are unusually dedicated to sports. And I wanted to try to understand why that is.

Darin Hayes
Well, that is a lot of truth to that. I can just raise my hand right now and say, you know, I'm, uh, I'm guilty of, of that pleasure. And, uh, you know, of course, having a podcast, you're talking about sports daily. And it is very addictive to listen to or to talk it, or just, even if you're not on the radio, just to have, have, uh, some of your friends or cohorts that you're sitting around, uh, at work or on a cup of coffee, just talking, and the subject always comes up about the latest game where some sports topic. And it's very intriguing to get into this and talk about that. First of all, I guess before we get going here, uh, maybe you could again tell us the full title of your book and where maybe people could purchase it, and we'll talk about it again at the end of the program as well.

Dr. Randall Balmer
Sure, the book is Passion Plays, How Religion Shaped Sports in North America. And it's available, I guess, wherever books are sold. Bookshop .org is a good place to buy books because it supports local booksellers, but also a local bookseller's storefront brick-and-mortar store is a good place. Amazon, of course, has it, as does Barnes and Noble, so it's widely available.

Darin Hayes
Okay, well, let's get into the topic of your book. I guess you sort of gave us your background, and I'm assuming that's probably some of the gist of why it motivated you to write this book as well.

Dr. Randall Balmer
That's right. Yes, in a way, I want to try to understand myself. Why was I so passionate about some of these sports, even though I'm maybe not quite as passionate as those who call into these programs all the time? But yes, I'm fascinated by the fact that in my field, actually my academic field, I probably should say that as well. My academic field is American religious history. So, I have studied religion in North America for a long time. What's distinctive about religion in North America is that historically, we Americans have been off the charts in terms of religious devotion and religious adherence. And I think that's begun to change. I'm one; the polling data suggests that it has begun to change over the last couple of decades. That is, religious devotion adherence and affiliation have been going down over the last several decades. And there are a lot of reasons for that. But at the same time, I think that passion for sports and devotion to sports has been rising. And I think there's probably a correlation between the two.

Darin Hayes
Well, that, you know, you've caught my ear, especially with the title. And I, when I saw this a few weeks back and, you know, cause I'm, I'm a man of faith, and I'm passionate about my faith, but I'm also passionate about my sports. So you have my, my world's colliding two things that I've always sort of considered separate and, you know, don't, don't, uh, cross the streams, uh, you hear to say, but, uh, you know that you are sort of bringing those worlds together and we're very interested in hearing how, how those two merge.

Dr. Randall Balmer
Yeah, what happens? First, I will focus on North America's four major team sports: baseball, football, hockey, and basketball. All four of those sports developed, for the most part, roughly from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. By the middle of the 20th century, those sports had more or less assumed their current form. However, as these sports developed in the 19th century, they developed against the background of the Industrial Revolution. And what's happening in America, North America, more generally, is that men, in particular, are beginning to work outside the home and the farm. They're no longer engaging in subsistence living. They're beginning to work in factories, textile mills, etc. Many of them also work in sedentary office jobs. So, there's a great deal of concern in the Anglo-American world, both in North America and Britain, that men are becoming too passive. That is, they're becoming, they're not getting outside enough. They're not engaging in athletics. They're becoming weak and even "sisified." And several religious leaders are noticing that. And they, very cleverly, I think, try to combine religion, Protestantism, with athleticism. They came up with a movement known to historians as muscular Christianity. That is to say that we want to appeal to men to be athletes, virile, and in the churches. One of the complaints is that the women have been in charge of the church work for a long time. And we must find a way to lure men back to the faith and the churches. Part of the strategy for doing that was to combine religion with sports or athletic endeavors. Probably the best example of that institutionally would be the YMCA, the Young Men's Christian Association, which provided both religion and YMCA were quite religious. They're not less so today, but in the beginning, that was at the core of the YMCA, to combine religion with recreation. For example, it's no accident that basketball was invented by a Presbyterian minister at the YMCA training school in Springfield, Massachusetts, today, of course, Springfield College. His instructor charged him with inventing a game that would occupy young men between baseball and football seasons. So it had to be played indoors, in a very confined space. And, of course, I argue in the book that basketball is a symbolic metaphor for urban life. That is when Americans were flocking to the cities in large numbers in the 1890s when basketball was invented; James Naismith came up with a game that, in many ways, replicates urban life. That is, it is the challenge of maneuvering in a very constricted space without impeding the progress of others, much like walking down Fifth Avenue at lunchtime, Michigan Avenue at rush hour, or Times Square in the evening. And so basketball becomes a metaphor for urban life. As African Americans began to move into northern cities, including Manhattan, including New York City, after the turn of the 20th century, they began to gravitate to YMCAs, which is when they learned basketball and then played it and began to excel at it. So again, I'm not sure where your question got me to this point. So, I need to retrace my steps a little bit.

Darin Hayes
No, you know, you're you're you're laying out the groundwork and telling it very well. So the YMCA sort of that catalyst or that meeting place of religion and sports, that's their vehicle, I guess, to portray what you're saying, you know, during the Industrial Revolution to bring men into getting a little bit fitter. We probably need some revival to this day with the video games going on with our children, everything, too. But, interestingly, you talked about Dr. Smith in Springfield YMCA and, you know, because also one of his students and also want to believe one of the first participants in his basketball game was a young man named Amos Alonzo Stagg, who had quite a bit of the foundation of early football. So it's interesting that you are bringing those two. You have two major sports that are sort of sprouting from that one YMCA building.

Dr. Randall Balmer
Yes, Nate Smith and Ayman Solonzo Staggs were teammates on the football team at the YMCA training school. They were undersized compared to the other football powerhouses at that time, which were Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and the Ivy League schools. The football team at the Springfield School came to be known as Staggs Stubby Christians.

Darin Hayes
Well, I'm sure they could have been called worse, I'm sure. So, well, I expect they probably were very interesting. Okay. So, I mean, I liked the metaphor, how you say that with a basketball sort of being that, you know, going through without getting each other's way and avoiding each other, and that's a very interesting insight.

Dr. Randall Balmer
Well, I want to talk about football in particular. So, let me talk about that as well. Sure. Football, of course, evolved from really two games, rugby and what we know today as soccer. These are also, in their early days, known as mob games. And in fact, all of these games are mob games in that you have a lot of participants. Sometimes, you don't even have delimited fields. And so everybody is just kind of crowding on this onto the field. However, one of the common characteristics in the evolution of these four major team sports is moving from mob games to a more regulated field and rules that govern behaviors. So for example, with football, one of the major points in the evolution of football is when Walter Camp, who's usually called the father of American football, finally persuaded other schools, meaning Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, and others, to reduce the number of players on a team from 15 to 11. He also disliked the rugby scrum. So he got rid of that in favor of a line of scrimmage. And so that's why we have a line of scrimmage in football. And he did that in part to try to mitigate some of the violence associated with rugby. However, I'm not sure that worked all that well because, with the line of scrimmage, the lineman can get a head of steam before they run into the other players. But in particular, he wanted to introduce strategy into the football game.
What's important to remember about the game of football in terms of its history is that football is more or less the current form in which we know it was developed by the sons, brothers, and nephews of Union Army soldiers in the Civil War. So, it developed at Northeastern schools, such as Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and so forth, as well as Penn, in the years after the Civil War. Football is the quintessential war game because it involves the conquest and the defense of territory, much like the battle at Gettysburg, Antietam in the Civil War, or Manassas or Bull Run. These are all battlefields. Again, this is how you determine the winner or survivor in these battlefields who could take the most territory from the opponent. So football is a war game. In the early years, there are all sorts of quotes in the book about this; the war imagery and language used to describe football are just all over the place.
Another characteristic of football, as we know very well, is violence. You have violence in hockey, of course, when you have the fights. But violence in football is scripted into the game itself. So you have a lot of violence, which is part of the reason it's attractive to a lot of Americans. We are a violent society; I think we have to come to terms with that. And football, in many ways, is the quintessential Central American game because because of its violence. So football is war, and we see that to get today. You're watching a football game, and the announcer refers to the quarterback as the field general or the quarterback is launching long bombs or bullet passes. They talk about trench warfare, that is, between the offensive line and the defensive line, much like you would use in military language and other terminology in football, training camp, and scouting. These are all military terms that apply to the game of football.

Darin Hayes
That's, I've never really thought about that way, but you are right. And we, you know, often we hear announced or saying, you know, the, the battle of these two teams on the field or, you know, and it's the strategy, a lot of it, you know, you're trying to outflank your opponent just as you would a platoon in, in battle in a war. So that's a very, very interesting insight.

Dr. Randall Balmer
The other thing is that as the strategies on the battlefield have changed over the 20th century, so have football strategies. That is to say, in the early years of football, it was a running game for the most part. And, you know, you had trench warfare just like you would have in World War I. Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s with the Korean War and the Vietnam War, that's also the time that you had much more passing in professional and college football. So, as warfare strategies changed over the 20th century, football strategies changed in the same direction.

Darin Hayes
We are going more to an aerial game, with aerial attacks in both instances. That is a very, very, very good insight.

Dr. Randall Balmer
And you used the term aerial attack again just now, which is military language.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, you're right. Wow. I guess I've never thought too much about the correlations between them, but I think you definitely are on to something. Doctor, so you, religious part, you said, you know, it started at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Now, how does religion still affect the games of sports, particularly football, to this day?

Dr. Randall Balmer
Yeah, I think it is in many ways. And I wanted to go into the book, I wanted to go deeper into this, but you have these kinds of surface similarities. For example, you have sacred space, right? For religion, it's the holy city of Mecca, or a cathedral or a synagogue. In sports, you've got Fenway Park, or Wrigley Field, or Lambeau Field, or the Big House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, particularly places that have more historical meaning, more history to them; you have this sort of sense of sacrality in those places. You have rituals, you know; as a football fan, there are certain rituals, such as the national anthem, for example, the players running onto the field amidst all sorts of pyrotechnics with fire and smoke and so forth. Well, in religion, you've got a liturgical procession that begins worship with the bishops and the acolytes and the priests processing, along with the choir, and very often with incense, smoke coming along with them, very similar to what you have in a football game. You have authority, you have a sacred text, you have the Bible or the Quran or whatever it might be. For sports, it's a rule book. And everybody agrees on these premises that this is how the game is supposed to be played. You have authorities: head coach, bishop, cardinal, and priest, and ultimate authority would be the Pope, for example, or the commissioner in baseball. And you even have saints. Certainly, you have saints within religion. But for sports, the saints are the members of the halls of fame because they're the ones who are exemplary and have excelled over the rest of us. So you have those kind of commonalities as well. But again, as I, in the book, I wanted to go a little bit deeper than that and say, look, there are instances in the development of these sports where people with religious convictions were part of the evolution of these sports but also brought those values to each sport.

Darin Hayes
Okay. So, if you take that further, the crowds, fans, and stands would be the congregations. Is that the correct correlation?

Dr. Randall Balmer
Yeah, absolutely. One of the best examples of that is hockey. I think it is because hockey is Canada's game, as we know it. What's interesting about hockey is that it emerges out of lacrosse. Lacrosse is the immediate predecessor to hockey. In lacrosse, there was a big effort in 1867, the year of the Canadian Confederation. That's when Canada became a country rather than a British part of the Commonwealth. There was an attempt in 1867 to designate lacrosse as the real national game of Canada. So you have that connection, and I was going to make another point, but I forgot whatever it was about that, so maybe I'll circle back to it. I apologize.

Darin Hayes
Oh, that's not a problem at all. Okay. So you, you, I mean, you got my wheels spinning here. So you've got, uh, you know, the fans that are, are, are passionate about their teams, just like, uh, you know, parishioners are, are passionate about theirs, their faith and practicing their faith and talking about their faith and, uh, you know, spreading they're, trying to spread their faith onto others and, uh, join the congregation. So I guess that would be like bandwagoning, uh, you know, that we have in sports, so very interesting.

Dr. Randall Balmer
Yeah, and I did remember your comment; it reminded me of the point I was trying to make. So, hockey being Canada's game, the real congregation nationally is telecast every Saturday night during the hockey season, called hockey night in Canada. And you know, it's a kind of call to worship work for Canadians to gather around their television and watch two hockey games as part of their coming together. And that, again, speaks to the need for community. That is, we're looking for some sort of attachment to others. At one time, and it still does for a lot of people, religion was that place of congregation or place of attachment. I think now, more and more, it's tribal loyalties to teams. I mentioned in the book I have a friend here in town who said, in our conversation, that if I'm filling my car with gas at the station, gas station, and a pickup truck comes up alongside me with a New England Patriots bumper sticker, we immediately have something to talk about. Even though we might be very different regarding our socioeconomic background or class, we may have politics utterly opposed to one another. But being Patriots fans, we have that commonality; we have that bond that eludes us, I think, in many other areas of American life.

Darin Hayes
You're right. I guess even if you're the opposition, after this past Sunday and last evening, I'm a Steelers fan, apologetically. And after that, even if I saw a Patriots fan or a Browns fan right now after losing to him, there's still a commonality of discussion that you could have about the game. Maybe it's the opposing sides of an opinion, but you know, you still have a bond between that game and the ritual of the game. Yes, exactly.

Dr. Randall Balmer
you do

Darin Hayes
Well, very interesting. Now, how about, I guess, if we stay in the realm of professional football, you know, Sundays sort of being that holy day where most of the games are played and, you know, it's football Sunday. Is that another one of the correlations that you make?

Dr. Randall Balmer
Yeah, it is. And I think that also provides a way of understanding how we've moved away from organized faith to athletics. Of course, in the early days of each of these sports, there were strict Sabbatarian laws, that is to say, that these games could not be played on Sundays because this was the day for church. You know what happens, of course, is that the owners, in particular, push for the repeal of those laws for their own economic interest and well-being. I use an example in the book of East Lake Community Church, which is in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington. Seattle is in the Pacific time zone, and Sunday morning worship was at ten o'clock, as it is for many other religious groups in America. Well, when the Seahawks were playing in the Eastern time zone against the Bills, the Steelers, the Giants, or whomever, the Dolphins, for that matter. The game time, one o ''o'clock Eastern, is exactly ten o 'o'clock Pacific time. So what are you going to do? And what they did, as is true of many religious groups, was they canceled their ten o ''o'clock Sunday morning worship service and rescheduled it for five o ''o'clock on Sunday afternoon after the games were over. So that's an indication of who is determining or dictating the schedule. And these days, athletic events seem to be taking precedence over religious gatherings.

Darin Hayes
It's interesting, and I'm sure that when they developed Sunday night football, it put another angst into their schedule.

Dr. Randall Balmer
I expected it. I hadn't thought about that, yes, but I expect so.

Darin Hayes
Well, very interesting. Now, how does, with all this going on, and you know, I know they're working around schedules for worship services. Now, is there anything else that religion is doing to embrace or to repel, you know, some of their parishioners and the faithful from going, you know, over the edge and being a total fanatic, and be, you know, stay a fanatic towards their religion. Are there some measures being taken?

Dr. Randall Balmer
That's a good question. I'm not aware of anything. I think many religious leaders are just kind of throwing up their hands and saying, we can't compete. We can't compete with this. It's a major cultural force for so many people that if we try to stand against or denounce it, we'll lose credibility with our followers. And we simply can't compete. Again, like this church out in Washington. And again, that's not an unusual story. A lot of places of worship have made those sorts of concessions. And I think the other way you see this sort of accommodating is that the muscular Christianity movement, which I mentioned earlier, but you also have, for example, among Roman Catholics, the CYO, the Catholic Youth Organization that begins, I believe in the 1920s, don't hold me to that, in Chicago. Again, it provides athletics for young Catholics to participate in this muscular Christian movement. Even among Jews, the young men's Hebrew associations were trying to, in effect, replicate the YMCAs, also offering recreation along with religious instruction. And by the way, this goes way back, and I don't spend much time with this in the book. Still, I do mention it: way back to the ancient Greeks, the ancient gymnasiums that were founded in ancient Greece were a place of athletic pursuits and competition, but also a place where people came to discuss ideas, whether religious or philosophical. It was a place where both the mind and the spirit, as well as the body, were exercised. So this has a long history, even dating back long before muscular Christianity emerged.

Darin Hayes
Okay, now you just brought the, I'm picturing like the Roman Colosseum and I believe I've seen photographs or maybe I've read it where they had statues of the gods that they believed in incorporated into the design or maybe in the arches or something of the Colosseum. Is that what you're also talking about with the Greek arenas?

Dr. Randall Balmer
Yes, I think that would be an example of that sort of thing, but you know that, and the Greeks had this idea. I don't want to get philosophical here because I'm not a philosopher, but Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics argued that individuals can develop virtues within themselves by practicing being virtuous. So, similarly to an athlete, a placekicker becomes a good place kicker by kicking the ball by being a placekicker over and over again. You're building this muscle memory and so forth. And so, the cultivation of virtues was intertwined with athletic development in ancient Greece.

Darin Hayes
Okay, I guess it may be the epitome that comes to my mind today. I think it's probably accidental that this happened, but at the University of Notre Dame, you know, the football field, I believe the one end zone looks at a building with a picture of Jesus with his hands up. They've deemed him touchdown Jesus, who affectionately called around them.

Dr. Randall Balmer
Exactly. And it looks right over the football stadium. Yes, I've been there. It's quite remarkable.

Darin Hayes
Like I said, it might be somewhat accidental, but I'm not sure how exactly that whole thing came about. It's a fact of life in the world of football today. Well, Doctor, I appreciate you coming. This is very intriguing. Now, I guess you said something early on in our discussion about how the mid-century, the 1950s, culminated in where we got to modern athletics and modern sports with the big four. Now, I'm assuming this was a gradual, I guess, competition, maybe for lack of a better word, between, you know, religion and athleticism leading up to that. So, there was some point where they were probably fairly equal. Would that be like the World War II era between World War I and World War II?

Dr. Randall Balmer
Yeah, it probably would be the zenith for American religious affiliation. Religious life was probably in the 1950s in the Cold War era. And I think it's only really been in the last several decades that that's begun, again, to shift more in the direction of athleticism. And again, I, you know, I, I'm not suggesting that the two are mutually exclusive. I mean, a lot of people attend church and then head off to the stadium for force for a Sunday afternoon, watching a baseball game, or whatever, whatever it might be. But it is striking me that the level of religious adherence has dropped rather dramatically over the last several decades, and at the same time, athletic passion, I think, has increased.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, I definitely agree with you. I'm not saying it on an individual basis, but if you're looking at it from 50,000 feet and, you know, studying everything, you're absolutely right. The trends are sort of going in opposite directions, but the similarities are uncanny. I'm glad that you pointed those out and let us know about them. Why don't you let us know again what title your book is and where people can find it again?

Dr. Randall Balmer
It's called Passion Plays, How Religion Shapes Sports in North America. It's available, should be available in local bookstores, but also bookshop .com, I'm sorry, bookshop.org, Amazon.com, of course, Barnes and Noble, and other places as well. I should say that we've been talking about a lot of the elements of this book, but I also try to look into the symbolism surrounding each book. I'm sorry, each team sports. We also already talked about basketball as an urban game. We talked about football as a military game. Hockey is Canada's game for all sorts of very interesting reasons. Baseball is the quintessential immigrant game because it's the only game where the defense controls the ball. And it's the object of the offensive player, the batter, to disrupt the defense's control of the ball. He's outnumbered nine to one, just like the immigrant coming into the country at that time, who was very much outnumbered in his attempts to make a place in American society. And as he looked out into that hostile territory from the batter's box, he saw three islands of safety out there in that hostile territory. And the greatest triumph for the immigrant, as for the batter, is to return home. Therefore, homecoming is a very important part of baseball. And it's also true that immigrants and outsiders have always excelled at the game of baseball. In the 19th century, it would be immigrants from Germany, Italy, or from Scandinavia. Later on, of course, it's African -Americans who finally broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson in 1947. And more recently, of course, as you know, a lot of players are coming from the Caribbean, particularly the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, and now Asia. So it's immigrants who have always excelled in this game of baseball, and the game of baseball itself really replicates the immigrant experience.

Darin Hayes
Well, Doctor, you have a very interesting lens and are very philosophical. It's very, very intriguing. So, folks, I greatly suggest that you get a copy of Doctor Randall's book. Randall Balmer's book is here. Make sure you read this. It's a very compelling and interesting subject matter indeed. Doctor, do you have any before we let you go? Do you have any social media or websites or anything that you'd like people to know about so they can follow what you have going on?

Dr. Randall Balmer
Yes, I do. I have a website. It's www.randlebalmer. I'll try to keep it up. I'm not really good at keeping up on this sort of thing, but I'll try to do that. But the book is listed there.

Darin Hayes
Okay. And folks, if you're driving the car or don't have a pencil or pen, don't worry about it; we're going to put it in the show notes of this podcast. You can also find it on pigskindispatch.com for later reference so you can get connected to Dr. Balmer's information and to his book. And Dr. Rainer Balmer, thank you very much for joining us today and telling us about this very interesting discussion and for recording it in your very interesting book.

Dr. Randall Balmer 
Thank you, Darin. It's been my pleasure.

---

Ever wondered why quarterbacks wear the number 12 and running backs rock the digit 28? Today's episode dives into the fascinating origin story of American football jersey numbers. We'll travel back in time, uncovering the surprising reasons these numbers were first stitched onto jerseys, and how they evolved into the iconic system we know today. Get ready for a journey through gridiron history, filled with unexpected twists, forgotten rules, and the stories of the legendary players who cemented the tradition of numbered jerseys in the game we love. So, buckle up, grab your favorite jersey (with its number!), and join us as we unveil the fascinating tale behind football jersey numbers!

The early beginnings and origins of the uniform numbers on players are explored in this Football Archaeology feature.

-Transcribed Conversation on Player Number Origins with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to Tuesday. You know what it is. It's footballarchaeology.com day. And Timothy P. Brown of footballarchaeology.com is here to talk about another interesting tidbit he's had out recently. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Darin, how are you? Good to see you. I hope I've got your number tonight.

Well, you got my number. I don't know what the origin of that number is, but I think we're going to find out some of the origins of some player numbers. You had a recent tidbit on that very subject.

And it's something, you know, again, we've talked about this before in other episodes that we've talked about. Some things that we just don't appreciate all the time. You know, what the player number does on the jersey, you know, it's it's identifies the player.

It's almost like their name, you know, for a lot of places. For example, when you see the number 12 out there on a New England jersey, you're probably thinking of Tom Brady. First thing, you know, just but we associate that number with the player.

But it goes back into some things that are beyond that even. And I'd sure like to know the origins of these player numbers. Yeah.

So so some of this this one, you know, I've written about the origins of player numbers a bunch of times in the past. And but I was trying. Well, I was I did an article recently about the the hidden ball trick that the Carlisle executed against Harvard in 1903.

And just in doing that research, reading an article, there was a comment made. And so just to kind of reset the stage on that, you know, what happened is that the. Carlisle.

So, you know, brown patches on the front of their jerseys that match the color of the ball. And so that they could, you know, have their back, who didn't get the ball or whomever else kind of hunched over, act like they're carrying the ball. And, you know, the defense would be confused.

So and so, then they did that. But then they also, in that game, you know, they basically executed this play where there was a. On the kickoff, they were receiving a second-half kickoff, but anyway, they're receiving the kickoff. The Carlisle players go back to form a wedge, and the guy who gets the ball or, you know, who caught the ball.

You know, he kind of gathers the wedge in that web and stuffs the ball in the back under the shirt in the back of one of his teammates who had this elastic band at the bottom of his jersey. So the ball would stay there, you know, under the shirt. And so then they then they boom, they all scatter in different directions.

And this guy who's a was a guard or a tackle who doesn't look like a guy who you would give the ball to starts running upfield, acting like he's going to block, you know, for one of his teammates. And so because he's acting like he's blocking, all the Harvard guys are avoiding him. And he just takes off, runs down the field, and scores a touchdown.

So, you know, that's kind of everybody, you know, I'd been aware of that story and all that kind of thing. And he probably looked like Quasimodo running down the field, too. That's right.

The guy had no idea what to do. But there was a comment made in one of the articles about the game where the guy said, you know, the reporter said it would be great if all the players had numbers; we would have known who this guy was as he was running down the field. And so I thought, OK, I'd never come across that before.

And this is a 1903 game. So it's just got me to go back one more time to look at, OK, when, when did, as I had previously come across Amos Alonzo Stagg calling for numbers in 1901. So, two years before this Harvard-Carlisle game, I just figured, OK, I'll go again.

Can I find anybody else mentioning player numbers? And so then I ended up finding a 1904 reference. And I'm sorry, an 1894 reference from the Harvard-Yale game where some guy along the sidelines must have been some influential alum who said that you know, the players should be numbered. His comment was that the average observer finds as many differences in individuals as in a flock of blackbirds.

So, the first time I heard that reference. But, you know, but the point was that you know, you couldn't tell players apart half the time back then because they didn't have numbers. You know, they, they all kind of, the nature of the game, everybody bunched together.

It's hard to tell who was who, you know, who got the ball, who advanced it, who made the tackle. So, you know, people then, you know, people like Stagg started promoting using numbers. But the challenge and the pushback that they got was people saying, you know, there were basically three main challenges.

One was that they said if you number the players, which they'd started to do in baseball, and I think at first, it actually occurred in rugby in New Zealand. But if you number the players, then that promotes individualism. Football is a team sport.

And so we don't want to promote individuals. So it's this idealistic argument. There was also, from a coaching standpoint, a lot of coaches said, I don't want to number my players because that makes it easier for scouts or for the opposing player to identify who was who.

And to quickly figure out, OK, this is Smith's best running back. You have to watch out for Smith, and you have to make sure you know where Smith is lining up in the playoffs. Now, that all seems kind of dumb. I mean, I get it, but especially from the opposing player's standpoint, no one was wearing numbers on the front of their jerseys; it was only on their backs.

So the opposing players couldn't see them when they lined up anyways, you know, so, so that, you know, but that was, you know, that was the main challenge. And then there was also, you know, people also would say, well, football is for these college players, it's a college sport, you know, there's none of this pro stuff yet or very little of it. And so it's not for the fans.

We don't want to change the game, we don't want to do things in the game to make fans happy; everything should be to make the players happy. Now, you know, as money increasingly got involved in things, and the fans were paying for the players, there are professional marketers of the gridiron just running off the podcast right now.

But, you know, that was a very common sentiment. So anyways, so then it. You know that, as far as I've been able to research, the earliest game in which players have war numbers, and it was a picture in the newspaper, and I published the picture a bunch of times, was a 1905 Iowa State at Drake game on Thanksgiving Day, and both teams were numbers and then, you know, over the next four or five years pit.

As far as I know, Pitt was the second team. They like to claim they were the first because they ignore the night, the Iowa State v. Drake game. Wichita State in 1908. Pitt was the first team in 1909. As far as I can tell, they were the first team to wear them for all games because a lot of times, the team would say I'll wear them, but only if the opponent wears the pit was like no, we're wearing them.

Part of their motivation was that they loved selling scorecards. So there's money involved, right?

Right. And then, in 1909, Michigan and Marquette formed, and then the same year, Cincinnati was too late for them, so those were, as far as I know, the whatever six or seven earliest examples of teams and/or games were. You know, players were numbers.

Yeah, you've done a great job of telling us that, and as you said, you've had a bunch of other fascinating posts on the numbers and some of their intricacies. We'll try to throw some of those links into the pigskin dispatch for this episode. So people can go back and enjoy some of that work with the alphanumerical and all the other crazy Roman numeral numbers. Yeah, four-digit numbers, and we'll put some of those up to so people can enjoy because there's a lot to do with the numbers on jerseys, and it's a lot of fun, so we appreciate that you're doing that and doing the research on it.

You do research on some aspects of football, like every day. It's what you have: plucking things out of the air all over the place and taking us on a wild ride. Sometimes, you have themes like these numbers, but they usually spare my part. Where can people enjoy your tidbits each day? Just go to football archaeology calm.

You can subscribe there. If you subscribe, you'll get an email every night at seven o'clock Eastern with that, you know, that day's episode, and you know there are people who read them five minutes after I publish them, there are other people who, you know, I can just tell by, you know, certain patterns that I can see in the data. Some people like storm up, and they read them on the weekend, so at least you know you have them. If you get the email, you have them. Otherwise, you can follow me on Twitter, Threads, or the subject platform.

All right, Timothy Brown of footballarchaeology.com we thank you very much, sir, for joining us here and we will talk to you again next Tuesday. Very good. Thanks as always.

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

-Football Jersey Frequently Asked Questions

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

-What are some of the unique football jerseys in history? Gridiron jerseys with logos on the front were some what of fad once upon a time. Check this story titled Football Jerseys with Emblems.

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

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

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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.

-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.

Ever wonder what it’s like to be a champion? To have nerves of steel and a winning arm?Then buckle up, because we’re diving into the incredible story of Otto... — www.youtube.com

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Ever wonder what it's like to be a champion? To have nerves of steel and a winning arm?

Then buckle up, because we're diving into the incredible story of Otto Graham... not just as a football legend, but as a comic book hero! That's right! Today, we're tackling touchdowns and thought bubbles as we explore this rare piece of football history. Was Otto Graham just a great quarterback, or did he have the moves to conquer the comics too?

Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology joins us to tell of these rare football funnies, the player they were about, and why they were made. Tim's original Tidbitis titled, "Otto Graham and the Championship Football Comic Book."

You can also enjoy our podcast version of the conversation, Otto Graham Comics.

-[b]Transcribed Conversation of Timothy Brown on the Otto Graham Comics

Darin Hayes:
Friends, this is Darin Hayes of pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pigpen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to another day where we get to go down that road of football history with our friend, Timothy Brown, of footballarchaeology.com. Tim, welcome back to the Pigpen.

Timothy Brown:
Hey, Darin, I'm looking forward to chatting again, and hopefully, this will be a comical segment.

Darin Hayes:
I think it will be, and that's a nice segue into the subject matter we're going to be talking about. It's one of your recent tidbits titled Otto Graham in a Championship Football Comic Book. But as a kid, I loved comic books. I still have my comic book collection, and I love football, so these are two of my favorite things all combined into one, so this is great.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, well, so I'm old enough to remember going to, like, especially when I had a paper out, and I had, you know, more spending money than I have now, um, you know, I could, you know, we still had corner drug stores back then. And I had one, you know, five, six blocks away, and, uh, you know, it could go in there, and they had a rack of comic books. And I was more of a Sergeant Rock, you know, kind of a war hero, you know, kind of a comic book rather than a fantasy superhero. So, um, so I, I went through the comic book stage and, um, but I never had an auto Graham comic book. I know that. So, so this one is, um, this is an item, you know, so now a day, I've, I've, I've collected different things over the years, but now the three main things that I collect are all focused on things that I can use for football archeology. You know, if I don't think I can use it for football archeology with very few exceptions, I don't buy it. And so my three things now are RPPCs or real photo postcards, you know, which were like the kind of function like the, you know, Twitter message or the, you know, whatever of the day, um, sporting goods catalogs, you know, those with football sections and then advertising premiums, which were, you know, giveaways that, you know, they're still around today, mostly today. They're just a single card with a football scheduler and a baseball schedule. You throw it in your pocket; it's in your wallet. Um, but you know, back in the day, a lot of retailers of all kinds of sorts, but mostly those that attracted men because I was kind of their target audience, they produced these booklets that, uh, would have like summaries of the season, previous seasons and schedules of all the different teams. And so I liked those because, well, all three of them provide visuals that I use in my tidbits, but these premiums also, they're just like point-in-time summaries of what were people thinking going into the 1952 season, you know, who did they project were going to be some of the top stars, some of whom you've heard of some of whom you've never heard of. Right. Um, just like, you know, today, somebody, you know, somebody makes predictions. So in 1954, the Pennsylvania athletic company or like products company, whatever it was, you know, they're still around, and they're best known for the tennis balls. You know, you'll see tennis balls with a pen on them. That's the company. And this company made just all kinds of different balls. You know, you name the sport, they probably made a ball for it. They especially made a lot of rubber balls, which I'll get back to in a little bit. So they, um, they put out this comic book, and I think, you know, 25 to 30 pages. It was like a normal comic book, with beautiful drawings, nicely printed, and the whole shebang. It was about Auto Graham and a kid named Jimmy Farrell. And we've all known a Jimmy Farrell in our lives. Um, it was kind of, basically, leaving it to Beaver. It's kind of a Leave It to Beaver story three years before Leave, Leave It to Beaver premiered. Um, not that he was a goofball, but he was a little bit of a goofball, not like he was like a Beaver. He's probably more, more of a Wally, you know, as it turned out, he's more like a Wally than a Beaver. But, um, so anyways, it's kind of that, that being that all American, you know, happy family, you know, mom and dad and mom looks good and dad's, you know, hardworking guy and dah, dah, dah. So, Jimmy, you know, the story opens with Jimmy. He's a fan of Fairview High School, which is in Ohio, and you know, he just, you know, they win a big game. And so he, they're driving home, and he tells his mom and dad that he's going to play for Fairview someday. Right. And so then, like a year or two later, um, you know, Jimmy's practicing, and he's just not a natural athlete, at least not at that stage. And so he's trying to kick, and he's doing all these things, and he basically just doesn't; he's not very good. So, the time comes for him to try out for the high school football team. He tries out, but he gets cut. And so poor Jimmy, you know, he just, he's just not good enough. And so then he's got his side. Okay, am I just going to fold up? Or am I gonna, you know, bite the bullet and pull myself up by my boots, bootstraps, and all those good things and start a football?

Darin Hayes:
a football history podcast. Yeah, he could have done that. But he did. You sound like you're smart. You're smarter. You're smarter than that.

Timothy Brown:
So, Jimmy, his dad, buys him a really good ball to practice with. And it turns out, we'll find out later, that it's a pin football and probably a rubber football, which was kind of innovative at the time. And so he's taking it to the park, and he's kicking it around. And he's not very good. And one time, he kicks it over near this car that's parked, you know, and there's this one man, a single man sitting in the car watching him kick the ball around. Now, in certain neighborhoods, that might be considered, you know, maybe a guy you don't want to go talk to. But, you know, the guy gets out of the car and starts talking to Jimmy and patting him on the back and giving them pointers on how to play football. And then, you know, he eventually tells Jimmy, well, you know, if you want to, if you want to get better, I'll be here every Saturday morning, and I'm willing to work with you. Again, it sounds sketchy, but he mentions that Jimmy and his parents live in Fairview. So that's why he comes there every Saturday. So Jimmy tells his parents that at dinner, and his dad says, well, that's probably Otto Graham that, you know, we spoke to. So then the whole thing, you know, starts happening with Jimmy shows up every Saturday, he's got his pen, you know, his Pennsylvania, you know, product ball, and Otto Graham's given him pointers, and he gives him so much enough pointers, where he kind of reaches a point where he says, you know, you got to get you can't keep practicing, you got to start playing. So bring your friends, and we'll let you know, they'll start playing too. So then Otto's, you know, drilling all those kids and giving them pointers on here's how you kick the ball. Here's how you punch the ball. Here's how you pass the ball. Here's how you handle handing it off. Here's how you tackle it. And, so all the boys are having fun, they build their own goalposts, you know, in the park, which I think is just a normal thing to do. And so then eventually, you know, the year passes, and Jimmy tries out for the team the next year. And he is so impressive that the coach names him the quarterback. And so before the first game of the season, Otto Graham comes over and has dinner with Mom and Dad, you know, on Friday night, they play the game on Saturday. Sure enough, Jimmy throws the touchdown pass to win the game. And, you know, they all live merely, they're happily ever after. So, it's just kind of a cool thing. You know, here's this guy who was an absolute stud: Otto Graham. And so he's in this comic book, and then he ends up retiring after that 54 season, though Paul Brown convinced them to come back the next year. And then that he was finally done. But it was like, you know, one of these succession stories where Jimmy Farrell is gonna, you know, yeah, we're gonna miss Otto Graham, but there's this whole line of new young stud quarterbacks who are going to be coming up through the system. And Jimmy Farrell is one of them. So it's just kind of a Horatio Alger, you know, rags to riches, an American story; I mean, it's just fabulous. And beautifully, you know, artworks are just great. So

Darin Hayes:
It's a great story, definitely a great feel-good story, unless you're like me and you live in Western Pennsylvania. And we had our mutual friend Jeff Payne on not too long ago, and he was showing me some cards that were made by Penn and that of the Cleveland Browns and those great Browns teams who thought, you know, the autogram was on, autogram was one of the trading cards that he had and he sheets. And like I told him, Jeff's from Western Pennsylvania as well. And I'm sort of thinking, okay, in that timeframe, you know, if only Penn would have invested a little bit in some Pittsburgh Steelers memorabilia, maybe guys like Johnny Unitas and Len Dawson and Jack Kemp, maybe one of those quarterbacks would have stayed in Pittsburgh if they would have been ordered like autogram was and Steelers would have done better back then. But they helped an Ohio team, you know, what are you gonna do?

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, yeah, well.

Darin Hayes:
And it's interesting, Fairview. Pennsylvania is probably about five miles from me. So it's, it's less than 20 miles from the Ohio line. So, uh, you know, that, that resonates a little bit there, too. And there, there was always a football powerhouse, too. So it's a, maybe it's just a name Fairview, uh, makes that.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, so I don't know. For me, it was just like I came across that thing. And it's one of those things where, you know, most of these items that I'm buying, you know, they're not worth a whole lot of money. This one's worth a little bit more, but I think I paid $5 for, you know, but it's just such an entertaining piece of little, you know, football history, and advertising history that, you know, it's just really fun.

Darin Hayes:
You just took me back. You are telling that story. It just takes me back. Like you were reading me a nighttime story. I'm, I'm ready to hit the hay now. So I thank you for that, too. Good stuff. Sweet Dreams by Chris. Tim, you have a lot of different interesting things, whether it be comic books or, you know, these RPPCs or just an interesting story about the great game that we all love and enjoy. That's why we're all here tonight listening to and viewing this. Maybe you could tell us how folks can read some of the items that you have in football archeology.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, so, you know, it's all sitting there on-site called football, football, archaeology .com. There are about 1000 articles out there now. So you can just go in there. There are search functions, so you can search topics and see if there's something out there on it. So, and if you're once you're out there, you can subscribe, you'll get an email whenever I, I send out a, you know, whenever I publish a new story. Alternatively, you can follow me on Twitter, on threads, or on the Substack app. So whatever suits your fancy.

Darin Hayes:
Well, Tim, we, we appreciate it once again for the great story and a great look at football back some 70, some years ago, and, uh, just enjoyable story and feel good story, you know, whether you're not a bronze fan or you are a bronze fan or, or not. I still feel good about it. So that's a great thing with a football legend. And indeed, you know, the guy that, uh, won seven championships in the ten years that he played, that's better than Tom Brady. And so that's, that's pretty good.

Timothy Brown:
You know, there's something else, there's something else.

Darin Hayes:
Absolutely. And so we thank you and we'd love to talk to you about some more great football history next week.

Timothy Brown:
Very good and sleep well.