Timothy P Brown

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One item that almost all in attendance look at when attending a football game is the stadium scoreboard. They come in different shapes and sizes and can be as simple or as high-tech as a supercomputer, but they all provide basic game information.

One thing they all do is keep the score of the contest but it is interesting to know the story of the verbiage on these information centers.

The story of how the word "Visitors" and or "guests" first appeared on scoreboards from FootballArchaeology.com.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on Opponents Visitor Scoreboard

Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to another Tuesday where we get to welcome in our guest, Timothy Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin, thank you. Always good to be here chatting with you about old football stuff.

Yes, old football stuff, and we're definitely going to be talking about that today. And since you are a guest here on Pigskin Dispatch, I guess you're my visitor, not my opponent. So I think that'll maybe lead to some of the topics you're going to talk about today from one of your recent tidbits.

Yeah, so that is a beautiful segue. Not very imaginative. Yes, yes.

Yeah, so I just think this one is really fun. I mean, part of what I like about football is the evolution of words and terminology. And my most recent book was basically about that topic.

And so this is one, it got started with, I had come across a story probably three or four years ago about Harvard. There was a professor at Harvard who, when they built Harvard Stadium and they put up the scoreboard, it said Harvard and then opponent. And he just didn't like the term opponent.

He just felt like these are our guests. And so he wanted them to change the terminology. And he was like, by then, he was a Dean.

So kind of what he said happened. And so they changed the terminology to guest or visitor. So even now, I went out and searched a bunch of different, scoreboard manufacturers, and there, unless it's a digital one where they can put in whatever name of the visiting team is, the typical scoreboard will be like home and away, or it's the home team's name and then visitor or guest.

And so opponent just isn't there anymore. So this guy, and this is back in 1905 or something like that, that he finally got the thing changed, but he is this one guy's opinion. And basically it's kind of proliferated throughout football and probably all kinds of other.

I think all sports because I could, I can remember when I was a kid in grade school, we had an old scoreboard, the old dial clock type, our scoreboard and had, but it had, I'm pretty sure it had a home, and it had guests on it. I guess I never really thought about it, you know, cause now today you always see, you know, visitors or away is probably the common thing, but, but those are, those are actually kind of polite and welcoming things, I guess, I guess the opponents or, you know, the, you know, the idiots from across town or whatever else you're going to put on there. And those were the days when, oftentimes after the game, the two teams would sit down and have dinner together. You know, so, you know, they were supposed to be treated as guests. And so, yeah, it's just, you know, it was kind of a different time.

And especially like in the Ivies, it was more of a gentleman's sort of thing than perhaps even it is there today, but yeah. So, you know, it takes us back to a bygone era. Right.

But the other thing about that then was, you know, so I'd had this story sitting in my head for four years, and then it was like, well, this isn't enough to do a tidbit. I mean, you know, I've got connected to something else. And so then I came across the story of Lehigh and Lafayette, who are, you know, bitter rivals.

And in the 1959 game, then, it was at Lehigh. Both teams were four and four coming in though Lehigh was favored. However, as the game progressed, Lehigh did not treat Lafayette as a guest.

They treated them as something beneath an opponent. And, you know, because Lehigh was unexpectedly losing them, some of their fans, you know, apparently got ahold of pears and apples and had them in their pockets or whatever. They're out there in a very cold, you know, last game of the season, cold weather.

And they started flinging them up into the Lafayette stands. Later on, lettuce and cabbages and apparently a few bottles went Lafayette's way as well. And as that was happening, Lehigh was falling further and further behind on the field.

And so then the last thing was that you know, Lehigh ends up, or Lafayette wins the game 28 to six, and they end up, the Lehigh fans went out onto the field to protect the goalposts so that Lafayette could not tear them down. Because, you know, back then, fans toured on the goalposts all the time, you know, they were wooden. They weren't as secured into the ground as they are now.

Plus, you know, enough teams hadn't been sued yet for people being injured by falling goalposts. So the home team didn't protect them as well as they do nowadays. But anyway, you know, so that was kind of a riot, and a bunch of fights ensued.

And, you know, so there was a time where there were tensions between the Lehigh and Lafayette fans. But one of the cool things about that story then was that a day or two after I published it, I got an email from a guy who played in the game. And so he and I are, you know, we'll be connecting and chatting in the near term, but he sent me some information.

And I did another. One of the tidbits of late was about the era of using rubber footballs. There was talk about rubber footballs replacing the leather. And so this guy, Mike, became a Big East official.

And so, you know, he ended up part of the story that I tell. And that is one of the stories that he sent me, you know, in a document that he had produced. So anyway, we're going to get together and chat a little bit.

But it's one of the fun things about reading these things is, you know, I, oftentimes I hear from the children or the grandchildren of people, you know, that I write about, but in this case, it's, you know, somebody who's out there playing on the field that day, so, which is pretty cool. Yeah.

Very cool. Now, isn't Lehigh and Lafayette the longest? They played the most times of any two opponents in college football history. Is that my thinking? Right. Okay.

Yeah. They played most often back in the 1890s; they played twice a year. So that's part of why they went ahead of everybody else.

But, otherwise, I think they've, I think they've played every, every year, but you know, perhaps there was a gap somewhere. Yeah. Yeah.

Very interesting. Great story. And it's great that you're getting some great feedback from folks like that, too, especially somebody who played in the game.

That's, that's really cool. So yeah, very, very nicely done. Well-researched, just like everything that you do is, and you have such interesting things that come out each and every night in your tidbits, Tim.

And, you know, folks, I'm sure, well, we know they appreciate you're, you're getting some responses back, and maybe if you could share with the listeners here, how they too can partake in reading some of your tidbits, that'd be a great thing. Yeah. So, you know, the best thing or the easiest thing is to just go to my site, footballarchaeology.com, and just subscribe.

And then, every night, you'll get an email at seven Eastern, and it shows up in your inbox. And then, you know, you know, I have some people clearly, you know, the best majority of people read it that night, or at least they open it that night, decide if they want to read it or not. But, you know, there are others, they let them pile up to the weekend and then, you know, you know, they'll go through them because I can just, you know, the number of hits that I get or email opens, you know, I can tell, you know, that the system tracks that for me.

So anyway, that's the best thing. I post on threads now, I post on the Substack app, and I'm still posting on Twitter. It has now been named X, so we'll see how long that lasts.

All right, Tim. Thank you very much, and we will talk to you again next Tuesday.

Very good. Thank you.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

A walk into any American football stadium reveals a familiar sight: towering scoreboards displaying team names, scores, and the enigmatic word "VISITORS" beside one of them. But have you ever wondered how this seemingly mundane term became an ingrained part of the gridiron lexicon? Surprisingly, its origins hold a fascinating window into the evolution of American football and the shifting dynamics of competition.

Here the story is told best Visitors on the Scoreboard Football Archaeology Tidbit.

-Frequently Asked Questions About Football Field Equipment

-Who invented the scoreboard? A man named Arthur Irwin came up with the concept of the modern scoreboard for baseball and then created a modified version for other sports like football. Learn more about Irwin and his design in this conversation Arthur Irwin's Scoreboard.

-How was time kept in a football game before the scoreboard clocks existed? Officials would use hand held and later wristwatches to time the events. Check out this article on the Evolution of the game clock or Timing of Games As the Sun Sets

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Every once in a while, a coach will come up with a surprise formation in a game that will make us all pay attention and, many times, scratch our heads. The VOlunteers at Tennessee once had a pre-snap line up that befuddled opponents.

In this episode, we talk with Football Archaeology founder Timothy P. Brown and a recent Tidbit he wrote that examines an extremely odd offensive formation used once by the University of Tennessee long ago.

The subject originates from Tim's Tidbit post titled:The Sidesaddle Quarterback and Tennessee Formation.

-Transcribed Conversation of the Side-Saddle QB with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pig Pen and welcome to another edition of Tuesdays where we go and visit Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com, and he shares one of his most recent tidbits on some great football history with some great insight. And we really enjoy this. And Tim, tonight you have a great subject to talk to us about and welcome back, by the way.

You wrote a tidbit about side saddle quarterback formation, and we're anxious to hear about it and what you have to say about its history. Yeah, so this is one of those where, and thank you for your gracious welcome, by the way, that this sort of got thrown in there. Sorry about that.

Yeah, so, you know, this is one where, you know, I enjoy it, and I think, you know, people who are into football enjoy some oddities that came along the way. Right. And, you know, the game did not show up the way it's packaged today.

So, there are some things that were done by some of the top coaches that just seem a bit odd. So this one, the side saddle quarterback, you know, in order to kind of understand it, I got to go back another, you know, maybe even 60 years because side saddle was kind of 30s and 40s. And Tennessee, especially, is used a lot.

But, you know, in the so if you think about even rugby today. The guy that we might consider the quarterback is the guy who gets the ball. You know, they're having the scrum, and they're using their feet to kick the ball back to that person.

Then he picks it up and tosses it to somebody else. Well, when football began, they did exactly the same thing because they were playing rugby. And then even as they started, you know, going with the rule of possession and downs and all of that, they still were doing fundamentally the same thing.

The center snapped the ball. With his foot and, you know, the ball was laying on its side. He put his foot on top of it or put his foot in front of it, and he healed it back or rolled it, you know, put it either way.

He rolled the thing back. And so the ball was coming back unpredictably. And so the quarterback, just like the guy in rugby, was kind of squatting behind a foot or two behind the center.

And he picked the ball up and tossed it to somebody else to run with it. So then, in football, you know, in the late 1890s, they started snapping with their hands. Initially, there was a great photo of Henry Lewis, who was an All-American center at Harvard.

You see him snapping with his hand, but he's got the ball on its side. So when they first started snapping the hand, they were still doing just like they did with the feet. They rolled it on its side back to the quarterback.

So the quarterback stayed in more or less the same position as that rugby guy and, you know, grabbed the ball and then tossed it. So then a little bit later on, then they started what we really now think of as snapping, where they were lifting the ball up and tossing it, either lifting it and putting it between their legs where the quarterback had his hands, not up on the butt, but down low. And he'd grab it, or they just roll it back, or they toss it back to him.

So a lot of times, that quarterback sometimes is directly behind the center and other times is off to the side, so kind of between the guard center gap. And, you know, and I'm not sure exactly what the rationale was for that back in the day, but that all pretty much mostly went away. You know, in the early 19 teens, when the Notre Dame box was getting big, there was a rule change regarding who could run with the ball.

The first guy receiving the center, the snap from the center, could now run with the ball. And so they started snapping back to. The fullback or halfback in the backfield.

And so the whole single wing offense and, you know, the Carlisle formation and all that kind of stuff was coming into play. So, a lot of times at that point, the quarterback never even touched the ball. But a lot of times, you stay in that same position.

Sometimes you move over a position or two. But there were times that he'd still he'd still get the ball. You know, it's more of a fake, you know, or a change up for them.

But then in, in the 30s, Tennessee developed the side saddle QB formation. And it got it, you know, it got him to the Rose Bowl. So, I mean, they were they were a heck of a team, you know, back then.

They were, you know, there were a lot of good things going on. But the side saddle quarterback, you know, like this earlier guy, he'd align in kind of the guard center gap. And he would, but he'd be perpendicular to the line of scrimmage.

Right. And he was fake. He was in the guard center gap on the strong side, but he was facing the weak side.

And then from there, he could he could get the snap, though, that he was more of a faker and blocker than, you know, a runner. But he could get the snap. Most of these still snapped it back to the to the deep backs.

And, you know, it was just, you know, I think they had the belief that this could be something that aligned him that way, confusing the offense or, I'm sorry, confusing the defense. And it allowed him to do, you know, spin moves and reverse out and lead, you know, lead blocking to the weak side more effectively because they used to run, you know, dives to the weak side. He'd head over to the weak side and, you know, smash up in there.

So it's just one of those goofy things that it's like, you know, I don't know how they figured out that they thought, you know, why exactly why they thought this was better than other approaches, but it worked. And so then there were, you know, after that, guys from Tennessee, you know, guys who played there like Bowden Wyatt. He ended up being the coach at Wyoming after the war.

Or, yeah, in forty-seven. He was in Arkansas, and then he ended up being the coach in Tennessee. But they, you know, he continued using it, though he converted to the side saddle running a tee rather than a single wing.

And there were other guys, you know, place another guy used it at Wyoming. It was used at Amherst, Brown, and BYU, BYU, even in the early 60s. And then the one that, you know, maybe surprises most people is that of the guy named Bede. I believe his last name is Bede.

I'm not sure if it's Bede or Bede, but Dick Bede from Youngstown State. He's the guy who invented the penalty flag. But he ran the side saddle in the late 60s and early 70s.

One of his last quarterbacks was Ron Jaworski. So, you know, Jaworski, I mean, it's new enough that if you're old enough to remember Ron Jaworski as a player, then this side saddle thing is a little bit closer than you might expect. You know, it's not that far back in the game's history.

So it's just one of those little oddities. It's just kind of fun to think about and how they ended up coming up with this thing. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely interesting.

It's very unique. And I think these coaches, you know, they're what makes football so interesting. It's all these games within a game and a strategy.

And how can you put the defense under duress to gain an advantage in changing formation, having something they're not used to seeing? I'm sure that gains an advantage real quick if a defense isn't ready for it. So, somebody like Bill Belichick or somebody else will probably bring this out. One of these upcoming seasons, and we'll all sit down and say, hey, Tim talked about that back last year.

Well, yeah, Belichick's a big old time football scholar. So he's he's I'm sure he's very familiar with with this thing. But yeah, if anybody would pull it, pull it out, it'd probably be Belichick.

Well, look at the NFL basically brought the single wing back. What, 10 years ago when they they call it the wildcat. But they're running single single-wing principles.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what a lot of that stuff is.

Even, you know, some of the things like the counter tray. And, you know, I mean, that goes back a little bit further. But that's just wing T-type stuff as far as I'm concerned, you know.

And so, yeah, it's what's old and new again. And, you know, it's sometimes what we think of as new, sometimes just somebody under comparable. You know, situations came up with the same thing all on their own.

Right. And other times they were just watching an old film or came across some concept and, you know, they borrowed from the old guys. But either way, hey, if it reinvigorates the game and and brings in something what what looks to be new.

You know, that's great. Yeah, most definitely. Well, Tim, speaking of something new, you have something new that comes out each and every day in your tidbits, something new to us that's actually old and a game of football.

And we really appreciate the wide array of things that you present to us each week. Now, there's people out there that are always wondering how they can be enjoying it on these tidbits each and every day. And if you could share that secret with them, they'd be much obliged.

Yeah. So it's no secret at all. If you're if you're interested in it and you're reading the articles every day, just go to Football Archeology, Football Archeology dot com.

Subscribe. It's free. So and you'll just get an email every day with the you know, with the information in your inbox.

I mean, you can still go to the site and read, read the past, read the archives, etc. The other alternative is, you know, I post each tidbit on Twitter, so you can follow me on Twitter at Football Archeology. And that's it.

But hopefully either way, you get it and you read it and you have fun with it. Yeah. And the beauty of it is football history is evergreen.

So whether you look at it tonight or you look at it 10 years from now, it's still going to be the same as this history. So still be refreshing. So, Tim, I really appreciate you sharing your time and your knowledge with us and this great football history.

And we will talk to you again next Tuesday. Very good. Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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One of the top experts in early football rules history Timothy P. Brown joins us in the discussion to explain how travel for the teams and fans was so much different than what we are used to going to far away games..

This conversation is based on Tim's original Tidbit titled: All Aboard for Loyola Chicago Football.

-Transcribed Loyola Chicago Train Ride Team with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigSkinDispatch.com. Welcome to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to Tuesday. It's Football Archaeology Day, and we have Timothy P. Brown from FootballArchaeology.com to join us to talk about another one of his tidbits.

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Hey, Darin, good to see you again. Appreciate you having me on.

I always look forward to it. Happy time every week. Yeah, this is something that we all look forward to.

I know the listeners are; we've got a lot of feedback on it. It's sort of a Tuesday tradition to hear from Mr. Brown on some great football history. And you have a real gem tonight to talk about.

You have a tidbit that you put out on November 1st called All Aboard for Loyola Chicago Football. Yeah, so this is one. For me, it's kind of a fun item from a couple of different directions. One is just that I have, over the past, you know, ten years, I've probably owned a couple of these itineraries.

So itineraries of like a team taking a trip across the country, and they get this little booklet that tells them you're on this train, you're on that train, da-da-da, your meal's served this time, that time. Lately, I've come across a couple of these like this one for Loyola. So it's a 1930. Call it a leaflet, you know, for basically advertising a trip that was being organized when Loyola Chicago, you know, they're playing football all the time.

They were heading down to play St. Louis U, you know, in St. Louis. And so, you know, this is a time Route 66 existed by then, but, you know, that probably took a pretty fair chunk of time to, you know, to go by car. And they probably didn't have the largest ball of twine or statues of dinosaurs at that point in time.

Probably not yet. Let's hope they didn't. But so, you know, what happened was two guys who were the captains of the basketball and football teams the previous year, they organized a trip through, you know, whatever the, I think it was Illinois Central, but anyways, you know, one of the major railroads.

So they basically set up a package where you could take real transportation down there for a night at one of St. Louis's finest hotels and then a ticket to the game. And then you, it was a Friday night game. So you'd take off, you know, Friday morning, watch the game, stay overnight Saturday, then jump on the train, you know, come back on Saturday.

So, you know, it's just kind of an interesting thing. Like the, you know, the one guy who was the basketball captain, you know, he would have been in the NBA had it been, you know, 20, 30 years later, because he was, you know, an All-American, he was a stud, but there just weren't, there wasn't much in the way of pro basketball. You know, he played semi-pro and stuff like that.

But anyway, the guy who was a football captain the previous year was the freshman coach at Loyola. So they put this package together. And, you know, it cost $10.50, which seems really cheap, but it was, you know, 186 bucks in 2020.

So yeah, you know, you had to lay out some money. But, you know, so they go down, and then, you know, they play a game. St. Louis has a brand new stadium, Walsh Stadium, that they opened that year.

They'd had, you know, played one or two games there before. St. Louis U was favored. And, you know, that was back when Newt Rockme would make his prediction.

So he's, you know, he's playing against these teams, so he's predicting what's happening, you know, across the country. So he predicted St. Louis U to win. And, sure enough, it turns out that Loyola, you know, wins the game.

I think they scored a touchdown, you know, fairly early in the first half and then just kind of hung on. But the odd thing then was that they built a stadium in 29, meaning they Loyola. But after the 30 season, they dropped football.

So the guys, the fans who took the train down to St. Louis, saw Loyola win a game, and then they lost the last two games in the season. So if you were fortunate enough to go to St. Louis, you saw Loyola Chicago's last football win ever, you know, because they were done after that. You know, so anyways, it's just kind of a neat little, you know, side note.

But, you know, they were really, I mean, I'm sure there were other schools that dropped football before that. But, you know, they were playing at a reasonable level, you know, kind of a G5 level today, something like that. But, you know, they just ended up dropping it.

St. Louis kept playing. They played until the 49 season before they finally dropped it. And then, the coach, the guy who was St. Louis' coach at the time, continued on.

He ended up, he was GM of the Cleveland Rams when they won the 45 NFL championship. And then they moved out to LA. And he was the guy who signed Kenny Washington, who was the really the first modern, you know, post-World War II African-American player in the NFL.

So he's, you know, a little bit of, you know, hey, if you win the NFL championship and you're the guy that signed Kenny Washington, well, you made your mark, you know, so. Yeah. He's got some definite football history there in many aspects.

Great, great story. I love these little gems you dig up. These are great.

Well, yeah. I mean, it's just kind of interesting for me because when my boys were little, they were on a wrestling team. And I mean, they were little.

And part of we did an annual trip where you jumped on a train and, you know, took the train to this other city for a tournament, and you stayed there for the weekend. And, you know, but I think that was the last time I was on a train. Maybe I was probably on a train, I'm sure.

I was in Europe, but here in the States, I think that was the last time I was on a train. Yeah. Well, there's still a lot of travel to cover for it.

I know a company I work for, we make components for the trains. Of course, we have a big locomotive plant here in Erie, formerly GE, which Wabtec now owns. And so, for a lot of locomotives, you see, we build components for that company.

So yeah, train travel is still really big. Yeah. I wish it was bigger, but you know, maybe if we get some of these high-speed things at some point, that'd be pretty sweet.

Yeah. We never know. It could be more economical someday than flying and some of the other forms of transportation.

So yeah, good stuff. But speaking of these little gems, you have a book out, and I know we've talked about it a couple of times, but maybe you could just say a few words about it and where people can get ahold of their hands on one of those copies. Yeah.

So the new book is called Hut Hut Hike. It's a history of football terminology. So it's basically, you know, I just kind of sat down and brainstormed what I thought were key football terms.

And then, I solicited input from a handful of other folks and basically ended up with about 420 terms. And I basically went through and identified when that term first arrived in football. So a word like handoff or blitz or, you know, even things as basically as a punt, you know, when did those words first come into football? Now, somewhere there from the beginning, you know, straight out of rugby, but others came, you know, all along.

And I think the newest one I have is a medical tent. So, you know, it's because of the guys down in Alabama that, you know, created those things. And so they're, you know, I've got a picture of their, you know, medical tent in the book.

Yeah. And so, you know, there's lots of pictures too. So, you know, pictures, drawings, you know- For simple people like me that like the pictures.

Yeah. Well, I love the pictures, but, you know, because sometimes it's just a lot easier to get across a point if you've got a picture to look at, you know? So- Words are getting in the way of my pictures. Well, this one, I've tried to cut down on the number of words.

So that's not easy for me. So you made it for just for somebody like me is what you're saying. That's right.

You can be a speed reader and get through this one, certainly in a day. Yeah. It's like we said before, you know, this is just a great book.

You could basically, you know, open up the book to any page and pick right up at it, close the book, and open up another page, and you'll still be learning something. You're not missing something. It's a part of a bigger story, but it's not really connected in a story format like some of the other books.

So it's a great reader to do like that. So, folks, I think it's really, really good investment to check it out. And I think you'll learn something.

You'll have some memories and probably a couple of aha moments, just like I did. Yeah. And maybe win a few bets.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe win some trivia at your local watering hole when they have those going on trivia nights. All right, Tim.

And where can folks get it? So it's on Amazon. Yeah. So if you're, you know, in paperback, it's Kindle.

And if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, then you'll have access to it for free. So. Nice.

All right. It's called Hut, Hut, Hike. And make sure you get a copy of it and then check it out because it's some pretty cool stuff.

So, Tim, we thank you again for joining us here tonight. And you want to maybe give folks an idea where they can get a hold of the tidbits that you have coming out each and every day? Yeah. Just find me at footballarchaeology.com and you can subscribe there.

And then, you know, I posted to Twitter, but basically, if you want to make sure you get it every day, whether you read it every day is no story. But if you want to get it every day, sign up, and you'll get an email essentially at seven o'clock every night, Eastern time. And it'll start your evening the right way.

All right. We could all use a little bit of that. So, Tim Brown, footballarchaeology.com. Thank you very much for joining us.

And we'll talk to you again next Tuesday. Okay. Very good.

Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. Thanks Dutch.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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

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

-Arthur Irwin and the First Football Scoreboards

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

-Transcribed Conversation on Arthur Irwin Scoreboard with Timothy Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. Yeah. From a representation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay. Thanks, Darin. All right.

Bye.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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

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

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown Jerseys with Emblems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. Yeah. A hundred years ago.

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

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

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

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

Right. Right. And other sports did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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

-Football Jersey Frequently Asked Questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Timothy Brown:
Okay, good.

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

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

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

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

Timothy Brown:
What?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Transcription of One Coach with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigSkinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. We're going to look in that portal today and go back and do some football archaeological work with Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Timothy Brown: 
Okay, good. 

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

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

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

-Football and early pay-per-view television

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

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

Timothy Brown: 
What? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK. All right. OK.

FCS. Yeah. OK.

OK. Not a problem. No problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.