Football History

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Imagine getting all of your equipment at the beginning of the long football season. Shoulder pads, pants and pads, and of course a helmet. You look and the head piece looks a bit funny... it has no chinstrap. This is how it was in one era of football, and FootballArchaeology.com's Timothy Brown explains.

From Tim's original TidBit article: Football Helmets Without Chin Straps .

Timothy Brown, who runs the website footballarchaeology.org. The two discuss how early football helmets did not have chin straps. Instead, they had laces in the back to tighten around the noggin. These devices were not very effective in keeping the helmet on the player's head.

A company called Goldsmith, which was a major sporting goods manufacturer at the time, tried to fix this problem by creating a helmet with an adjustable back. However, this design did not work well and was soon abandoned.

In the 1970s, helmets with inflatable bladders were introduced. These helmets were more effective in conforming to the player's head, but they were still not as safe as today's helmets with chin straps.

The video concludes by mentioning that Timothy Brown's website, footballarchaeology.com, has more information about the history of football equipment.

-Full Transcript of the Episode on Helmets Without Chinstraps

Darin Hayes:
Welcome to Tuesday. Timothy P. Brown of FootballArchaeology.com is here to tell us a little bit about one of his recent tidbits. Uh, Tim, welcome back to the pig pen.

Timothy Brown:
Darin, thank you. Oh, it was a pleasure to be here and join you as we talk about old stuff, old football stuff.

Darin Hayes:
Yeah, most definitely, you had a recent tidbit that really caught my eye when it came out. I actually reread it a few days ago because it's just so fascinating. It's called the football helmet without chin straps, And it's, you know, something kind of peculiar that when we think of the football helmet, the chin straps are almost like an automatic part Of it in our day and age, and so it's very interesting what you wrote about, and I'd love to hear about it here in the podcast.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah. Well, so, you know, it's one of those funny things. Yeah, sometimes I've wondered, you know, how the name came about, like chin strap? I mean, now, chin straps are covering the chin, right? And then they connect up to the helmet with the two points on either side, but back, you know, that's really a post-1940 kind of look. Before that, that headgear, the wrestling-type headgear, and then, after that, you know, what we think of as leather helmets. For a long time, the strap kind of went from the ears and then looped under the jaw, not over the chin. Right? So, but I think they, I think, I think chin straps originated, I believe, on military helmets, and you know, so a lot of times they had them in military hats. So a lot of times they had those little straps, like kind of on the chin, a little bit below the mouth, that kind of thing. That's probably where that where the term came from. But anyway, so, you know, they had those original straps that were kind of elastic or cloth, they weren't, and they could tighten them. But, you know, they certainly weren't as good about, you know, keeping the helmet on the head as today's, you know, two or four-point, you know, chin straps do. Plus, the helmets are just tighter. So, you know, if you've got a leather helmet, you know, it can only conform to the head so much, right? I mean, if it's a little bit bigger, you've got it, you know, just nobody's had it shaped the same way, or no two people's are shaped the same way. So, you know, there's probably some little extra space here, little extra space there, in any given leather helmet. And so, you know, they used to come off. And so, so Goldsmith was, which was, you know, one of the original manufacturers of baseballs. They started back in 1875, and they were a big sporting goods manufacturer, at least till 1940. That's the last catalog I have of theirs. So, I'm not sure exactly how much longer they lasted. But so Goldsmith was trying to fix this problem. How do we keep helmets on? Because these little chin straps don't always work. So what they did was they got rid of the chin strap, which seems kind of dumb. They could have kept him, but they tried to make the size of the helmet adjustable. So they did that by putting it together like a drawstring system at the back of the helmet. And if you think about it, like, you know, we've all seen movies of like a Victorian woman who's getting her corset, you know, adjusted where they're pulling those straps and they're, you know, making her stomach, you know, look or make it look like she's got an 18-inch waist, you know, that kind of thing. So I mean, they basically had a system like that, or at least functionally, that was what it was supposed to do supposed to tighten the base of the helmet around the head. And so, but, you know, the fact of the matter is, it didn't work very well.

Darin Hayes:
You probably needed help getting your helmet on and off every time, I would assume.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, you know, I hadn't even thought about that. Yeah, it could be that. Yeah, you had to, you know, so it's what's funny that you mentioned that it's like, you know, back at that time, players, the front of their football pants, also had those like leather patches, the thighs and well, probably typically twice on the thighs on each thigh. They basically had drawstrings to tighten the thigh or tighten the pants so that they didn't move all around, and then they'd get protected by the thigh pads or the pants. So, you know, they didn't have really good elastic back then. So it's a matter of, you know, pulling laces of one form or another to try to get things to fit. So, you know, somehow, you know, they tried to do that with the helmet. But, you know, it was they were gone from the catalogs in about a year or two. So it tells me the thing just didn't work. The concept made sense. And in fact, you know, in the 70s, when people started, like, I think it was, I believe it was right now that did it first, but you know, they had the bladder helmets, where you pump air into it, and it conforms to your head, whatever the shape of it may be, you know, so they were trying to do that same thing. They just didn't have the means to do it at the time. And so, you know, good idea, bad execution. And so then that just disappeared. But I, you know, I still haven't figured out why you would get rid of the chin strap. So, even if you have this other cool thing going on, why get rid of the chin strap? Because I've never read anything about people being bothered by it, you know, like the nose guards. Yeah, that was big, you know, everybody, nobody liked wearing the nose guard because they had difficulty breathing and that kind of stuff. But chin strap, you know,

Darin Hayes:
Yeah, I mean, it's a natural place to secure because you sort of got that hook shape under your chin. You know, it's a good anchor point to tie it down to your head and get a little tension on there. That's that's weird. Thank you.

Timothy Brown:
So sometimes, you know, some of the stories, I mean, again, I like the stories where, you know, as football evolved, there were all these dead-end paths, right? Just like in, you know, animal species, right? And, you know, so for some of them, the thinking behind the path made sense; they just didn't have the tools, technology, or the right materials to make it happen at the time.

Darin Hayes:
Yeah, you, uh, very, very interesting story, but just you describing the back of that helmet and the core whole corset idea, it took me back to some time playing like a junior high ball, you know, we got sort of leftover pants and one year I had drawstring pants for football where you had to tie them up. Like you tie your shoe. What a pain in the ass that was every, every day for practice for game day. It just, especially when you're like, you know, 11, 12 years old, you know, you don't want to take your time to snap pants even, let alone, you know, sit on time and take them up and, and if you didn't tighten them up, then you had, you know, your, your jock and everything else was, you know, flopping, falling all over the place. And it was just a bad, bad design. Whoever designed those pants. I didn't enjoy those.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, well, and again, it's one of those things that, depending on your age, you may not have as much experience with. But, you know, back in the day, there were a lot of people on the football field with, you know, white athletic tape wrapped around their thighs or around their knees to keep things in place. Right. And so I, you know, I've spotted that kind of thing going on back to the 20s and 30s. So people, you know, even back then, they were tapping the same problem.

Darin Hayes:
Oh, I didn't. I never thought about that. Yeah, I guess I guess you wouldn't be able to do it, too. Then I'm always sitting, sort of thinking like athletic tape and duct tape. You know, the fabric tape is more of a modern invention, but I guess they would have had that back then.

Timothy Brown:
And they had, if you look at the old catalogs, I can't tell you it was the exact same kind of tape, but they had athletic tape and illustrations like Walter Camp, the football guides, they had illustrations of how to tape an ankle, that kind of stuff going back pretty far.

Darin Hayes:
So, yeah, very interesting. Thank God that they have the chin straps, but even with chin straps, and I don't know about you, but when I played early on, I don't even think I saw a four-point chin strap until maybe I was in high school or something, I think it was sort of a, you know, the late seventies type innovation, I think, or at least became popular at the levels I played at then. But you see so many people with the four-point head strap chin straps, and they still come, their helmets still come flying off, especially the NFL level and big-time big-time college; it's unbelievable that those can come off. Cause once you have those helmets on, if they're done rubbery, I mean, it's hard to unsnap them when you do want to take it off, let alone have it come flying off in the middle of the game.

Timothy Brown:
I hate to tell you this, but some of those guys are stronger than you and your buddies were.

Darin Hayes:
I realize I'm still a

Timothy Brown:
has a little bit more force. Yes.

Darin Hayes:
Still, that's a lot of stuff to pop a helmet on us. It's amazing, Tim. That is a great story and a great piece of football history that we, you know, seldom get to appreciate something like that and what the sort of forefathers of football had to go through to do that, and you talk a lot about this kind of items on your website football archaeology calm and want you to tell people a little bit about it and how they can enjoy footballarchaeology.com

Timothy Brown:
So it's footballarchaeology.com. It's a sub-stack website. So, if you're familiar with sub-stack, you can find me there. I also post on Twitter and on threads, but the site itself is a subscription site. If you subscribe for free, you get access now to about a third of the stuff, and with paid subscriptions, which are basically five bucks a month or $50 a year, you have full access to everything, including the archives. So, if that's what you're into, then subscribe away.

Darin Hayes:
Well, excellent job as always, Tim, and if folks, make sure you take advantage of what Tim's saying because there is really a plethora of information on football history. We get to talk a little bit about it, you know, each week, but Tim has so much more in there. I think, what did you say? Do you have over a thousand articles in there right now?

Timothy Brown:
Not quite a thousand, but it's getting close.

Darin Hayes:
Yeah, wow. That's uh, you know, four digits there, guys. That's, uh, that's some good stuff to look at football history from different angles. So Tim, we really appreciate you coming on, and we would love to talk to you about more great football history next week. Thank you

Timothy Brown:
Pretty good; look forward to it. Thanks, Darin.

-Frequently Asked Questions

-Who was the first player to wear a football helmet? We have your answer in our in-depth study ofthe first to wear a helmet.

-What is the history of each college team and their helmet designs? Check out many of them with our series College Football helmet history of schools.

-How come some teams have player numbers on their helmets? We asked this question too and had a college football expert historian help divulge helmet numbers history.

-Why do some teams like Michigan and Delaware look so odd and similar? It's really uncanny isn't it that the Wolverines and Blue Hens look the same, check this out for a reason when helmets had wings.

-What do stickers on college football helmets mean? Some of them look really crazy but there is some goos reason for the extra adornments and we have the scoop Why all the stickers on some football helmets?.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Timothy Brown: 
Okay, good. 

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

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

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

-Football and early pay-per-view television

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

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

Timothy Brown: 
What? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK. All right. OK.

FCS. Yeah. OK.

OK. Not a problem. No problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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College football jerseys are more than just fabric; they symbolize school pride, individual achievement, and moments etched in memory. But did you know some jerseys transcend even that, becoming so iconic they're permanently retired, hanging, and preserved for all to honor, forever out of reach?

Join us in this visit with FootballArchaeology.com's Timothy Brown as we delve into the fascinating stories behind the first three college football jerseys ever retired, uncovering the legends who wore them, the moments they immortalized, and the legacy they left behind.

Prepare to be transported back to a time when gridiron giants walked the Earth, their jerseys becoming more than just numbers but testaments to their enduring impact on the game we love. Buckle up, college football fans, and let's embark on a journey through history, one retired jersey at a time!

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on the 1st 3 retired jersey numbers

Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to Tuesday. And it's FootballArcheology.com day with Timothy P. Brown, the founder and host of that website.

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Good to see you.

I was trying to adjust my little white light here. I've tried a bunch of things to brighten up this room, but I'm down in, you know, I've got a basement office, and it's always kind of yellow. But you're not here to look at me.

You're here to listen to that. That's right. And nobody wants to look at me either.

And I have too much light, and it washes me out. And I look like I'm, you know, a marshmallow man or something. So, hey, that's the way it goes.

But, you know, we're not technology people. We're football people. And we're here to talk a little bit about football and some football of ancient times here for at least, you know, a while back.

And you have a really interesting tidbit I'd love to discuss today. You talk about the first three retired jersey numbers in a recent tidbit. And gosh, that piques the interest.

Just hearing that. Maybe you could tell us about that story, who these three jerseys were, and who wore them. Yeah, so, you know, so first of all, before numbers could get retired, people had to wear numbers and, you know, when football was first when numbers were first being used to identify players, it they were like on the scorecards.

The players didn't wear them, but they wouldn't wear a number necessarily. But the school would publish a scorecard that, if somebody did a certain thing, they made a tackle, scored a touchdown, or came into the game as a substitute, they would post that player's number on the scoreboard in a particular spot. And then that is what, you know, you'd have to OK, number five.

And then that was, you'd find the corresponding number on the scorecard. So then, you know who the player was. But that was kind of a thing people don't realize, and it is a goofy little thing that occurred.

But one of the other things when that process was going on was that, you know, the numbers could change from week to week. I mean, normally, it came up with one order at the beginning of the year, and then they just numbered the guys one through twenty-five. Right?

And then whoever the visiting team was, they'd number them to, you know, assign them a number. So, you know, the numbers didn't mean it to the players. But then they, you know, so starting 1905 is the first time, numbers were in a football game.

But it didn't really until mid-teens when, you know, a lot more teams started wearing them. And so it wasn't until, you know, 1925, there's this fellow named Red Grange, who turned out to be a pretty good running back at Illinois. And he happened to wear number 77, you know, not a number we associate with running backs nowadays, but, you know, that's what he wore.

And he had such a fabulous career that Illinois decided, you know, once he, you know, played his last game, that they would never allow anyone else to wear number 77 for the Illinois football team. So he became the first player to have a number retired, as far as I know, that's across all sports. And so, so, you know, range number 77, boom.

So he's the first guy. Then the next guy was a similarly talented running back out at Stanford, Ernie Nevers. And so the funny thing about his story is that he wore number one.

And when they retired, you know, this at the time, on the Pacific Coast, a lot of the student organizations kind of ran sports much more than they, I mean, eventually that got professionalized. But the student organization voted and said, we won't allow anybody else to wear number one at Stanford. And so, somehow, they slipped up in the next year, and a running back got issued the number one for one of the games.

And what's just kind of kind of cool about it? It's just that, you know, it was kind of a big thing. It got caught, you know, in the newspapers and everything.

But then there's a picture in Stanford yearbook for that year that shows this guy wearing number one in a game, you know, and, you know, it's just at that time, they didn't have a lot of pictures in the yearbook. But anyway, that's what, and then I've got that in the tidbit that we're talking about, you know. Nevers was probably a little bit ticked.

He was playing pro ball next year for the Duluth program. I'm assuming that point, but he's probably, hey, I thought you retired my number. Why is this guy wearing it? What the hell? Yeah, well, I tell you, he wasn't and didn't see it on TV.

So he wouldn't have seen it at the time. But yeah, it's kind of a story. And then, you know, they stopped it after that first time.

So then the third guy should have his number retired. That came in 1927, so two years later. And it's a guy that kind of everybody, you know, it's like today, you know, there's certain players that everybody knows.

And so, at the time, he would have been, you know, certainly known by anybody on the West Coast, probably, you know, other parts of the country because he was all American. But he was the captain of St. Mary's football team in 1927, named Larry Betancourt. And unlike the first two guys who were running backs, Betancourt was a center.

So, you know, apparently he was talented enough and just an honorable guy, all that kind of stuff. So then they ended up retiring his name. And then he ended up instead of signing with the.

He signed a major league contract with the NFL and played for three years with the St. Louis Browns, the same organization Ernie Nevers played baseball for. He played for parts of three seasons in the majors and then retired at age 32.

And then he played for the Packers in 1933. So, six years after getting out of college, he went and picked up one season anyway with the Packers. So anyway, Larry Betancourt.

Interesting trivia answer to a trivia question for you. Yeah, it is. Now, Tim, maybe you can answer this question.

Now we know today, when players' numbers get retired, you know, it is definitely in a professional sport. Even college football is usually like at their final home game. I've seen it happen many times, or they'll say, hey, this is the last time this number will be worn on a field.

So people appreciate that player a little bit more. In the 1920s, when Grange and Betancourt and Ernie Nevers were together, was it the same kind of thing at their last game, or did they have a separate photo shoot or ceremony or something? Yeah, I don't think it was all that formalized. To my knowledge, certainly, nothing occurred at a game.

So, like Illinois, a picture was taken at the time with Grange holding his jersey and his hands after a game. So, I mean, it was it was a staged photo. So, you know, they knew they were doing this, but to my knowledge, I don't think they did any kind of ceremony, you know, as part of his last game.

And then, you know, the others, Nevers and Betancourt, I think with Nevers, they kind of heard, hey, this is what happened with Grange, we should do the same thing with Nevers. So, I think that came a little bit after the fact. And then Betancourt, too, I mean, as far as I could tell, you know, looking at their yearbooks and things like that, I didn't see anything about this happening to him during the time he was, you know, still playing for them.

And then, you know, he played baseball for them the following spring, too. I'm trying to think that was Nevers, like a year ahead of Grange, because I know Nevers played, and Stanford played Notre Dame in that 1925 Rose Bowl. And Grange, I think, was a junior in the 1925 or 1924 season.

So 1925 would have been his final season with Thanksgiving. I think they were both seniors in their 25s. OK, OK.

If I'm not mistaken, Nevers was a junior when he played in that Rose Bowl. OK, that's why I was a little bit confused.

And I thought the Rose Bowl was his last game. OK, that makes sense. Yeah.

So yeah, anyway, I mean, it's just one of those things that we take for granted now, but, you know, it's like everything else. Somebody had to think this up. Right.

Somebody thought, hey, we're going to not let anybody else wear Red Green's number. I think it's lost the time, you know, who that was. But it's, yeah, it's just one of those things.

Somebody made it up, and now it's a tradition and a tremendous honor, regardless of sport and whether it's your high school or anything. You must have done some pretty good things if they return your number. Right.

It's also caused some interesting situations. I said to him that a couple of years ago when J.J. Watt went to the Cardinals, he wanted to wear 99 like he wore at Houston. But that was Marshall Goldberg's number for the Chicago Cardinals.

He also had to ask permission from the Marshall Goldberg family. They, of course, allowed it. I think about Joe Montana, you know, when he was 16 with the 49ers, when he went to the Chiefs, of course, 16 was retired from Len Dawson.

So he had ended up wearing, I think, 15 when he was with the Chiefs. But just some interesting things with these legends going to another team. And, hey, you can't have your old team number because we have our own legend here by that number.

It's kind of a neat thing there, too. Well, and it's just, you know, like at the professional level, you get into merchandising and all that kind of stuff. But it's just kind of funny how attached people become to a number, you know, that is often just randomly assigned somewhere along the line.

They got that number, and then, you know, it becomes part of their identity. And so, anyway, I think the whole thing is amusing in some respects. Yeah, it is.

And it's amazing how we do become attached to the numbers. I know I was a being a Steelers fan even to this day. When I think of number 10, I think of Roy Jarella, the kicker from the 70s, because that's who I grew up number 10.

And, you know, you have Santonio Holmes catching, you know, Super Bowl-winning catches wearing that number. And you've had many other players wearing that number 10, not Roy Jarella, the kicker. They're much more athletic and doing some better things than kick and field goals and things like that, too.

It's just amazing how we associate that. It was a good chat and a great discussion. You point out some really cool aspects of football that are sometimes so obvious and staring us right in the face.

But you bring up some history and some stories to it. Maybe you could share with the listeners how they can read you. Yeah.

So, the best way is to just go to football archaeology dot com and subscribe. It's free. And otherwise, if you don't want to do that, then you can follow me on Twitter on threads or subscribe to the Substack app, and you can follow me there and not necessarily get emails, you know, kind of whatever works for you.

Yeah, most definitely. And Tim, we appreciate you coming on here, folks. The link to the tidbit Tim spoke about today is in the podcast show notes.

It'll also take you to football archaeology dot com. Once you're there, you can check out some of these great tidbits he has there. And, you know, hit him up on Twitter and some of these other social media as he's on and message him on threads.

I or on Substack, I'm sorry, as I quite often do reading these and putting my two cents worth. We have a little banter a couple of times a week on this, along with some others. And it's good, good fun reading a tidbit.

The comments section is good fun, too. So, Tim, we appreciate you. We would love to talk to you again next week about some more great football.

Very good. I'm sure we'll find something to chat about.

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.

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

---

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

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

-Transcription of One Coach with Timothy Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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

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

-Transcription of the Other Warner Brother with Timothy Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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The draw play – a staple of football offenses, a play that keeps defenses guessing. But where did it come from? Who first thought of faking a pass and then handing the ball off? Today, we're joined by renowned football historian Timothy Brown to crack open the dusty playbook and uncover the surprising origins of the draw play.

The story originates from a recent Tidbit of Tim's titled: The Origins of the Draw Play.

The Draw Play in football is still used as an element of surprise at all levels of football. It is also quite a common play choice when a team is in the unenviable position of third and really long as a way to garner some cheap, safe, and easy field position to set up the punting unit,

Timothy Brown joins us to talk about the origins and the purpose of the draw play in this episode.


-Transcript of the Origins of the Draw Play with Timothy Brown

Darin Hayes
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 visit with our friend Timothy Brown of football archaeology dot com. Tim, welcome back to the pig pen.

Timothy Brown
Hey, Darin, I am looking forward to chatting, and hopefully, this discussion will not get too drawn out, if you know what I mean.

Darin Hayes
Oh, you are just the master of the Segway, and folks, these are not pre-rehearsed, So these are just as much a surprise to me as they are to you when they come out, but

Timothy Brown
They got it. Dad jokes are what make the world around.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, we are both dads and grandfathers, and we have the jokes coming at us. So, you know, so pardon our humor. But Tim is segueing into a title that his tidbit he's going to talk about tonight, which he had titled The Origins of the Draw Play, which is a very famous play. And when it's still common today in football. So, Tim, what do you get to tell us about the origins of the draw play?

Timothy Brown
Yeah, so well, I think part of what's fun about the draw play, like a lot of things in football, is kind of, you know, people always talk about, you know, the game, you know, football repeats itself that, you know, that there's this whole thing about, you know, well, we've seen and done that before. And, you know, in a lot of cases, that has been the case, but it always kind of comes back to, well, what do you mean, you know, so what is it about like today's draw play that you can see and spot in earlier versions of that play. And so that's kind of what this tidbit was about. And so, so, you know, like a lot of things, you know, I recently did a tidbit on homecoming. And the first homecoming, so in order to talk about that, you have to define, OK, well, what a homecoming is and what the elements of a homecoming are. So with the draw play, it's like, well, what's a draw play? And, you know, for me, it comes down to the draw play is a play in which it is a, it's a fake pass with a, with a, with a run that is, you know, a predetermined run. So it's not, you know, back in the day they used to, out of the, you know, single wing, double wing, and probably, you know, out of the Notre Dame, you know, and Minnesota boxes and all those kinds of things. You know they, they'd send a back out wide on a run-pass option, not the RPO we know today, but a run-pass option, where it was like, OK, you either run the ball, but if the guys open, throw at home. So that's an option that was still an option play whereas, you know, draw it's predetermined you call it, call it in the huddle, you're going to fake a pass, and then run it, you know, and it's an attempt to kind of take advantage of the pass rushers coming at you.

Darin Hayes
And what you're saying is that you're basically having your lineman pass block instead of the traditional run block where they're trying to go beyond the line of scrimmage. They're trying to stay on their side of the line of scrimmage and just protect but open a hole.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, I mean, back in the day, there wasn't that restriction on the linemen, you know, they could go downfield. Right. So I mean, some of that stuff gets a little bit mixed up. And even, you know, as far as I can tell, there wasn't a heck of a lot of difference between past blocking and around blocking back in the day. But you know, now in today's world, yes, 100%, right. But that's, you know, that's our, you know, 21st-century mind, defining, you know, what a draw play is. But back then, so the first, you know, I wrote this about Fritz Chrysler when he was coaching at Michigan. And he had drawn up a play for, you know, postseason or preseason guide that Grant let Rice was doing. And he basically had his single-wing tailback get the deep snap. And then he rolled out as it's drawn up anyways, he rolled out left, you know, kind of stood there for a second. And he had like, you know, the whole backside of the line, and the backs were out there starting to block for him. But a couple of them leaked out into the, you know, downfield. And then, you know, I mean, everything appeared that he was going to pass it, and then boom, he takes off. Right. So now that, you know, in my definition, it would be a draw play. Right. I mean, it's not what we think of today as a draw play because this is 1939. And then modern tee with a quarterback under center and then dropping, you know, kind of straight back, you know, backpedaling or, you know, turning and kind of carioca, but, you know, peddling back that first showed up in 1940, you know, a year later. So anyways, you know, it's one of those things where there's a lot of football references that say that that the draw play that we now think of, you know, tee quarterback, you know, backing out and then giving it to a fullback or a halfback. A lot of people say that that was, you know, one of the Chicago Bears plays. But it's not in the 1946 Chicago Bears playbook that, you know, Hallis and Shaughnessy and those guys wrote. So, you know, so then I'm going, OK, well, I don't believe it then. Right. Because they've got 80 plays there. So the first place that I saw the term draw play in newspapers anyway came in the 1950 Rose, not Rose Bowl, but Cotton Bowl. And so that was a game with, you know, two games or two teams you wouldn't expect to be in the Cotton Bowl today necessarily. But TCU, which, OK, you can believe TCU is in the Cotton Bowl, then Carnegie Tech. So, it's not a team that is going to show up in the cotton today. But you know, TCU had three top 10 NFL, you know, first-round picks the next year. One of them was an All-American quarterback, Davey O 'Brien, you know, who was a stud. I'm sorry, I'm messing that up. They had Tobin Roat, and Rice beat UNC. I'm mixing up which story I'm talking about. So Tobin Roat was a quarterback, and he, you know, operated out of the dropback tee. And then, you know, the other thing. So it was a low-scoring game, and he ends up, you know, basically, they won the game as a result of, you know, running a draw play, you know, and a draw play the way that we think of it today. But still, at the time, they didn't call it a draw play, or at least if they called it a draw play on the field or in practice, that didn't get communicated out to the wider world. Because the first time I found the term draw play in the newspapers, you know, came a few years later. And so it was a guy by the name was Dick Cullen, who was a Minneapolis sports writer. And he must have been a guy who was, well, I know for sure he was because I've read enough of the stuff. He was one of these sports writers who kind of got into the play, and the terminology is more of a technical sort of guy, you know, so if you think now about the like the color analysts that are on TV or radio, he was like, maybe a little bit more of a football expert who could provide that kind of, you know, input into the game. And because he's, you know, so draw play, you know, that shows up in his writing, you know, not too long, you know, after the Cotton Bowl. And then he's also, ironically, the first guy to use the term dropback quarterback, which isn't, you know, T formation play or T formation term, but that didn't show up until 1964. So it was, yep. You know, so the T was there in 1940, the modern T. And it's 24 years later before it shows up in print. Wow. And then, two years later, he's the first guy to use the term skill positions. So, you know, it's just one of those things. It's kind of cool that, you know, I started noticing, like, you know, when I wrote, I wrote a book called Hut Hut Hike about the origins of football terminology, and so he kept showing up, and it's like, OK, well, this guy, you know, I mean, he obviously is one of those guys who kind of liked that side of the game and wanted to educate his, his, uh, his audience, you know, his readers on what was happening and what was different about the game today than it had been the previous year.

Darin Hayes
OK. Well, I'm glad you mentioned Hutt Hutt Hike. Cause I was going to go right into that a little bit. With your Hutt Hutt Hike, uh, storytelling and your research on there, where, what does the draw play, where, where does the draw come from? Is it from drawing the defenders in to fool them?

Timothy Brown
You know, sometimes it's hard to tell that's my assumption. OK, it's that you're drawing, you know, you're drawing them into your trap.

Darin Hayes
OK.

Timothy Brown
Yeah. And that's even another like a trap, you know, that comes from originally that was it was called a mousetrap. You know, that you were the trap lady on somebody and then and, you know, hitting them from the side. But it was it was called a mousetrap, not a trap. And then they just shortened it because it took too long to see the mousetrap.

Darin Hayes
Oh, thank, thank God that our football forefathers were simple people like us and the naming, you know, you can like to dropback quarterback. OK. We can figure out where that came from. Uh, but yeah, but some of those things, like the trap play and the draw play, were our explanation. So, thank you for that. So.

Timothy Brown
Now, so sometimes, it's just fun. For example, dropback quarterback is one of those where you'd think, well, what did they call it in those 24 years? Like if you were teaching somebody, here's what I want you to do. I want you to backpedal. And a lot of times, they were just, you know, straight backpedaling back then. You know, so how did coaches describe it? Yeah, you know, I don't have. I've only got a handful of playbooks from the old days. Most of all, I'm dealing with newspaper articles to try to figure it out.

Darin Hayes
But think about that the first time a player's told to do that. You know, football is a game of moving forward. You know, when you're on offense, you're, you're, you're trying to go forward. And now you're, you have a coach telling you to retreat a little bit, to give up ground, uh, to make something happen. So that had to be kind of a wide, wide, eyes wide open type of situation.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, well, you mentioned the pass blocking. So, you know, the whole, you know, cup blocking, you know, that was, you know, you had to teach somebody to give ground, you know, and before that, what they used to do a lot of times is, you know, the center and tackles would meet the, you know, meet their guys, you know, straight up, and the guards would if they were covered, but if they weren't covered, you know, then they'd loop back and pick up the ends, you know, coming off the edges. And yeah, you can see the plate drawings from back then. And I mean, it's very clear what they're doing. But you just don't see that anymore. You know, that's just not, you know, the cup was a really interesting innovation because it was basically zone blocking, only you're doing it passively, you know, so it was really a, you know, kind of a revolutionary way to think about, you know, blocking.

Darin Hayes
Until the defense of coordinators was countered with stunts and all kinds of craziness.

Timothy Brown
But actually, it was because of the stunts that they started doing it, you know, because they were stunting and like what we now call blitzing, they called Red Dog back then, you know, they'd send somebody, you know. And, you know, for so long, it was just, you know, seven guys on the line of scrimmage, and they just come at you. So you had the man who was over you. But then once they started dropping backers, then they start, you know, they start doing twists, and they start, you know, there are all kinds of things that happened, but really, pass blocking is zone blocking, you know, but you're doing it passively. Whereas, you know, zone blocking on the run, you know, you're picking up an area, it's area blocking, you know, you're, and then there's more to it than that. But nevertheless, I mean, so it's really, I don't know, it's just one of those things that it's just this kind of a revolutionary way of thinking about it. And so sometimes, sometimes it's like it happens right away. Somebody devises a new scheme, and other times, they, you know, football, just took baby steps to get there, but it's fun. You know, to me, that's the fun thing: the whole evolution of the game and how it got from here to there.

Darin Hayes
And, as you said at the very beginning, it's sort of a cyclical thing. So you've seen, you know, in the last ten years, uh, elements of the single wing coming back with, uh, you know, what they're, you're calling the, um, uh, what are the pros calling it out the wildcat offenses that are coming out, which is really single wing concepts to it.

Timothy Brown
You know, I've seen a number of plays in the US field games. You know, they're running, and they're running the modern T, a straight T in the backfield. So it's just a change-up its way to, you know, challenge the, you know,

Darin Hayes
You sit there and think about some of these younger defensive coordinators and players. You know, they've never seen anything like the single wing. So it's a whole new offense to them and they got to figure out how to defend it. So I'm sure there are coaches going back through some old books and film and trying to figure out, hey, how'd they do this in the 1940s?

Timothy Brown
Yeah. And part of it is just, you know, so the game has gotten to be so much of a speed, speed game, spread them out the game, that, you know, you want to come at me with, you know, 11 men in the box, then that changes, you know, the kind of people I need on the defense, right? So, you know, I mean, it's just total, you know,

Darin Hayes
That even I'll skip them.

Timothy Brown
It's a lot of fun stuff.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, definitely. Well, Tim, since we talked about it a couple of times, so what do we give the opportunity to help people get their hands on a copy of Hike? Because it's really an interesting book.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, thank you. So, you know, it's out on Amazon. You know, my three books will be on Amazon soon. My fourth one will be on Amazon, but Yeah, so just you know, look for me, look at my name or look up Hut Hut Hike or how football became a football, and You know, If you can find my name, then all three of them are gonna be available, and worst case go to go to football archaeology calm, and you know that I've got you to know, the books list in different places on the site.

Darin Hayes
OK, excellent. Well, Tim, we really appreciate you bringing back this concept of the draw play, explaining it to us a little bit, telling us some of the history and the origins of it. And we'd love to talk to you again next week about another early football concept.

Timothy Brown
Very good. I look forward to it. Thanks.

---

The timing of a football game has changed with the technologies available to fields of different eras. Timothy P. Brown takes us to early football before artificial light was used to illuminate the Gridiron. How did this affect the timing of the games? Tim lays it out for us in this podcast episode.

Here is the link for Tim's original TidBit House of the Setting Sun.

-Transcription of House of Setting Sun with Timothy Brown

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

Darin, good to see you, see your smiling face. It is about time.

About time. Yeah, great segue. Your segue-isms are getting better and better each and every time.

I am upping segue game. The dad jokes are a-flying, that's for sure. But Tim, now that you set it up, you have an interesting article from back in September that maybe back in September didn't mean as much as it does this time of year as we're getting closer to the winter season.

Sun going down and how it affected the timing of games. And I'll let you take it from there and tell us all about your tidbit. Yeah, so actually, the interesting thing is there is a, I will just say, an unidentified reader.

I can't say who that is unless the reader gives permission. The reader gives you permission, Tim. Go ahead.

Oh, OK. So, one time, Darin asked me. Why is it always me? So, yeah, so just, you know, it's like anything else.

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

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

And so, you know, when I wrote it, I kind of used the, you know, the old terminology of de jure versus de facto. So de jure means, you know, by the rule or by the law, whereas de facto is in practice. Right.

And so when football first started, when we first brought it in, you know, when we were playing rugby. Football was just one of those stew of games that came out of, you know, 18th-century England and the norm was to play 45-minute halves. And so soccer still plays 45-minute halves, and rugby still plays 45-minute halves.

And when football got started here, we were playing 45-minute halves even though there was nothing in the rules that said that's how long it was. You know, the original football rules don't mention how long a game is supposed to last, but everybody knew it was 45 minutes. So that's what you did.

When football kind of, you know, as partly safety measures, you know, they were trying to give people rest and just reduce the amount of time that they're on the field. You know, football started, it went to 45 minutes and then 35 and then 30. And it's perhaps so.

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

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

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

And, you know, eventually the the rule makers, you know, it was kind of a it was kind of an understood thing. It wasn't. Again, it's one of those traditions.

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

So then we end up in a situation where, you know, during World War One, the government instituted light savings time, daylight saving, no S on that, daylight saving time. And so that came into effect in 1918. And so that was the first time that anybody had experienced that, at least, you know, in the US.

So you just kind of put yourself. I mean, we know what happens when daylight saving kicks in. But they just didn't anticipate it.

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

But, you know, and in the tidbit, there's a discussion of like. And the USC and somebody, you know, playing in a game, and it's just like nobody could see by the end of the game; it was just so dark. And it's it's one of those things, you know, we take for granted that everybody's going to have lights.

Well, guess what? Very few places had lights. And if they did, it was jerry-rigged like the Navy used naval searchlights to light up the field for practice, you know. And, you know, so you have examples like that.

And that's that's one. I mean, some people had used them earlier, but they were painted white balls and yellow balls that came in right around. Yeah, that really became popular around that time.

That's when you start seeing them showing up in sporting goods catalogs. And it's really, you know, like. I know it's one of these things depending on where you have lived in the US; if you have not moved around a fair amount, you don't realize how much where you are in the time zone from an east, west, and north-south standpoint.

You don't realize how much impact that can have on how dark it gets early. So Chicago is right on the east side of the central island. So it's like it's getting dark where it's like I'm in Detroit.

So, you know, still across the state, but if you're on the west side of Michigan, you know, it's light in the summer. It's like until.

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

So anyway, it's just one of those things you don't think about, but like. Daylight saving was a big story in 1918. So then, because of that, in 1922, they formalized the rule that said at halftime, the referee could approach the the two team captains and ask if they wanted to shorten the halves.

And then then they they'll do so as needed. And whether whether that's because of the lighting or the one team getting blown out or whatever. Basically, they had they had the chance to do that.

Yeah, it's just thank God that the football didn't adopt what soccer does now with, you know, you have the two 45-minute halves, and then we're going to just kind of arbitrarily throw some time on at the end, you know, just and not tell anybody, you know, how much time is left. Just, you know, whatever that drives me crazy. Drives me nuts, you know, that they don't have that public with how much time is going on there.

But yeah, very interesting stuff, Tim. And I'm glad you mean you really cleared up mine because I kept seeing this, you know, you'd have like a 25-minute first half and, you know, something like 10 minutes for the second half. I'm like, why are they doing that? You know, you have a 13-to-nothing game.

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

So that's that's great. So, yeah, again, it's just one of those things you just don't even think about because, you know, basically, there are very few people living today if there's anybody, you know, that that's that, you know when Daylight Savings first showed up. So.

Yeah, crazy. And there are probably more people who see live games under the lights, you know, at your local high school than you do in the daytime anyway nowadays. So we're so used to the lights.

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

So maybe you could help them out with some information. Yeah, so the easiest and best thing is just to hit my website, footballarchaeology.com. In order to find it, you have to put the WWW in front of it. And then, you know, you can every, you know, every story gives you the opportunity to subscribe.

You can subscribe for free. And then, as a result, you'll get an email every night in your inbox. And, you know, some people let them pile up, and they'll send it to you.

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

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

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

Very good. Thank you, Darin.

-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.

-Where did the term "Visitors" come from on the scoreboard? A Harvard professor was observing the scoreboard in the newly built Harvard Stadium shortly after its construction in 1903, when it bothered him that the word "Opponents" was on the score column to identify the guests of the Crimson. He found it offensive so he asked for a revision. Learn more about this story in this conversation Opponents Versus Visitors on the 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.

---

The tradition of wearing the varsity letter, a letterman jacket, or a varsity sweater is one that, in many places, still carries on to this modern day. It is so common in Americana we may take it for granted, but this badge of honor has a long and storied tradition. Our friend Timothy P Brown digs through the archives to find out where and why this exchange started and by whom in this weekly visit by the Football Archaeologist.

This piece originated with an article Tidbit that Tim wrote titled: Honoring Letter Sweaters and Jackets.

-Transcribed Tribute to Sweaters and Letterman Jackets 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 we are at that mark of the week.

It's Tuesday. It's footballarchaeology.com day. And we have the author and the creator of footballarchaeology.com, Timothy P. Brown, here to talk about another great tidbit he had coming from January. And Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Good to see you again and chat and looking forward to, you can't see, but I'm wearing a sweater and a jacket with my, you know, with my letter, letter sweater, and letter jacket from back in the day.

I've got those on right now and am wearing them proudly because I used to throw the ball over the mountain, if you weren't aware of that before. Okay, Uncle Rico. I'll get you that Napoleon Dynamite reference there.

But Tim, that's a good segue into your tidbit we're going to talk about today and it's titled Sweaters and Jackets. So this is a lot to do with the attire of the, of people playing football back in the day. So we're interested to hear what you have to say.

Yeah. You know, so I think some of the most fascinating things about football are the equipment and the gear. And part of what's fun about it is just that, in many cases, there are images that exist.

These are images of games or the team pictures that were posed in some photographer's office. And one of the things I really enjoy are, are the old catalogs. You know, one of the things I collect are old sporting catalogs.

And so you see those peppered, you know, maybe once a week, once every two weeks, I've got something in my tidbits that includes an image from a catalog. So, so, you know, I think most people are aware that the, you know, if you're a fan of football history, that football, that in the early days, players often wore fairly heavy sweater, you know, pretty significant, you know, big, big yarn, big threads, big yarn, heavy sweater. And oftentimes, it had the school letter on the front.

So if you were, you had a big Y in front, if you were Harvard, you had a H in front. And, you know, so whatever else, you know, whatever other letters that are out there. So that's very common.

And so one of the traditions that began, and this is, you know, 18, late 1880s, early 1890s was, you know, back then, if you look at most teams schedules, like Harvard and Yale, they kind of like, similar to what happens now, but they kind of filled their early schedule by playing what they would have thought of as minor opponents. And then they kind of saved their best game and their best plays and their best players for the big games at the end of the season. So if you were on the team and you played, and if you played for Harvard, you played against Yale, or you played against Princeton, and at the end of the year, got to keep the sweater that you wore in the game, which had the big H on the front of it.

And so that became a tradition. So, you know, I mean, I'm old enough to remember the days when there were no, you know, you couldn't go to the local mall and buy athletic gear. And there was no internet either.

So, you know, you couldn't, you couldn't. So athletic gear and team gear simply were not available. And so if you were able to get your hands on team-issued clothing from a college team, whether you played on the damn thing or not, that was pretty cool stuff, you know, because, you know, you could strut your stuff, you were, you had this pretty neat team gear walking around.

And people who knew that you had this, that you had gotten that gear. So it was the same thing with these guys. You know, they walked around campus, and everybody knew that if you wore this particular sweater, you would have played in one of the games. And in fact, early on, a lot of the team, a lot of the colleges would, if the, if the Y was a certain shape, or had certain flushes for football, the basketball team, or the crew team, or who, whatever else, especially the teams that considered minor sports, they didn't get to wear exactly the same Y or the same H, they had to wear some, they got something else, or these smaller letters.

And so, you know, it was just this whole thing. The football guys got to wear the football sweaters, so anyway, that all worked fine for, you know, maybe a decade or two.

And then it got, and then it became a thing where, obviously, football gear started changing. But also, you know, it's like nobody wanted to, you know, you couldn't wear the big heavy wool sweater all year round. So they started wearing, they started modifying the letter sweaters to become something that you might wear at an appropriate, you know, appropriately in some kind of social occasion.

So it was lighter, it was cotton, it had pockets, it had buttons, it was a cardigan, whatever, right? So it was just that they started making these sweaters be more into a true award in a separate piece of gear or apparel than the actual piece that you'd worn on the field. And then, you know, they also started doing charms and blankets and all kinds of stuff.

But, you know, basically, by the 1920s, they moved to a lot of the sweaters that had an emblem. So, if you were the Tigers, you might have a patch near one of the pockets. There was a type that had the head of a tiger. If you were the Lions or whatever, you know, whatever team you were, the Trojans, you had some kind of patch in addition to, you know, the letter sweater or the letters.

And then they also, it was in that kind of time period where they also had numerals, you know, so like by 1905, I think it was Harvard that had the first numerals. But that was if you were if you played as a freshman, you were on the freshman team, and you were on the night, you know, the team that was going to graduate in 1908, then you got, you could get a sweater and wear just your numerals on the sweater, right? No letter yet, just the numerals, which I think everybody, you know, is familiar with from the high school days. But so anyways, that kind of stuff just went on.

And then eventually, in the 1930s, we got to the point where, really, I don't think for any particular reason, but then the sporting manufacturers who were very happy to sell as many damn sweaters as they could, they started selling jackets as well. So they designed these jackets. And the early ones didn't really look like the, you know, kind of leather-sleeved.

And I don't even know what wool, I guess was, you know, the, you know, kind of the, I don't know, you know, well, the traditional leather jacket, right? Right. I think it's wool on the mid part and the midsection. Yeah, yeah.

And so, so anyways, I mean, they started selling those in the, well, they started marketing them in the early 30s. And then they became popular. And for a while, they were satin.

And, you know, so anyways, it's just one of those things where the jackets basically kind of replace a sweater. Now, when I was in high school, there were still guys who would, who had, you know, we had this thing called the Cardinal Club. So it was like the Letterman Society or whatever.

And so there were still guys who would buy the Letterman sweaters and wear them periodically. But it was pretty very much, you know, I don't think of it in my classroom, but there were, you know, some of the older guys who did. So, I mean, it was just one of those things that faded out.

But almost everybody wore a leather jacket, you know. And then it became a thing where, you know, the marching band has them. And, you know, it's become this much more democratic sort of thing instead of being this elite award only for the football players.

And everybody else has something less than that. Now, it's become much more of a widespread award, which I just, I just find, you know, whatever, I find that kind of interesting. Yeah, that makes me think of a story I heard with Amos Alonzo Stagg, the great coach at the University of Chicago.

And he would give out the blanket as you talked about earlier, that had, I guess, a C on it for Chicago to the seniors that played in whatever the big game was. One of the things that he would tell them, and I guess he practiced this, was if somebody would go professional, which he was dead set against professional football. If one of his former players would go and play professional football, he would ask them for the blanket back. That was sort of their punishment.

And, you know, I was reading it somewhere, there are people that like dreaded it, didn't want to lose their damn blanket, because it was just such a discrediting, dishonorable thing to do to coach Stagg that they wouldn't play pro football and, you know, first probably made more money at being a banker or something than playing football back then anyway. But it's amazing how those live on their own. So I think he established blank, and in most schools, there are still schools that award blankets today.

And that was a separate kind of an award because anybody, any fool, could win a letter for one season. The blanket was for somebody who earned three letters, or, you know, he had won the award three or four times. And yeah, so I mean, he started that in like 1902 or something.

I've got the program from the 1911 Order of the Sea ceremony at UChicago. So that was, I think, the eighth one at the time. So it's, yeah, I mean, it's funny. There are just as many things as a guy like Stagg came up with and innovated on the field.

He also did some things off the field like, you know, blankets and the first Letterman Society, which effectively was what the Order of the Sea was. Hmm. Fascinating stuff.

It's a great part of the game that that's off the field. But it's, you know, very interesting, indeed, to look at. And very, have you seen any of these like old sweaters, like in anybody's collections or anything that some of these from 100 years ago, or like this 1910 when you get pictured? So, you know, there are some folks that I, you know, our friends correspond with, and we train information.

And yeah, so some have those old items. And it's, I mean, they are very rare. They're different, especially since it's one thing to have an old sweater and not to make fun of an Otterbein or somebody like that.

But, you know, there are lots of small liberal arts schools all over the country, so that's cool. And a lot of people would love to have an old sweater like that in their collection. But if you have a Harvard or Yale or somebody like that, you know, that's a big-time deal.

Those are thousands of dollars for items like that. You know, so easy. So it just depends on the condition and, you know, provenance, all those kinds of things.

So it's, they can be very, very valuable. Hmm. I bet they are.

Especially if you keep them away from the moss for over a century, that's a, that's always a good thing too. To keep the value. I only have them in pictures.

I do not. The closest thing I've ever come to is like going to the pro football hall of fame and seeing, you know, the 1920s, you know, like Red Grange or somebody from the Canton Bulldogs, sweaters there, you know, so that you're talking 10, 20 years earlier and what you're talking about. So, I can't even imagine that.

So, hey, great, great stuff as always, Tim. You know, the listeners would probably love to enjoy these tidbits every day as well. Maybe you could give them some information to share the tidbits with them as well.

Yeah, sure. So the best way to, to get the tidbit every day is to follow me on or subscribe to my, to footballarchaeology.com. If you do, you'll get a tidbit at seven o'clock East every day by email. So it'll have the contents of the, of the, the story there.

So, you know, send out two to three times a month, send out kind of longer form articles as well as each week I send out a link to this, to our podcast. And then, you know, alternatively, you can follow me on, on Twitter. Football Archaeology is my, is my name or at F-O-F Strife.

So either way, whatever works for you. But if you subscribe, at least you know that you're going to get it and you can pile them up, read them on the weekend when you, when you've got more time. Good, good deal.

Multiple ways to get the tidbits and hopefully everybody will take advantage of that and read Tim's work each and every day. Cause it's very interesting stuff. And the pictures are just out of this world.

Some of these images, like the one from this catalog from 1910 that we talked about today with the sweaters pictured in it, are pictures worth a thousand words and definitely are, in these cases, with the tidbits. So Tim, thank you very much for joining us, and we will talk to you again next week. Thank you, sir.

And we'll look forward to next Tuesday.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

---

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

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

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

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

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

Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal for positive football history. And welcome to another Tuesday where we visit with FootballArcheology.com's Timothy P. Brown, the master historian, who's going to tell us about another one of his great tidbits. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

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

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

This episode, what makes it special?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We'll do 101 next week.

101. Thanks, Tim.

All right.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.