Football History

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The Washington Huskies, a powerhouse in college football, have proudly displayed their iconic purple and gold colors for over a century. But beyond the striking uniform, the evolution of their logo reflects the program's rich history and evolving identity.

-From Sun Dodgers to Huskies (1900s)
In the early days, the Huskies' athletic teams went by the name "Sun Dodgers." Reflecting this, the first recorded logo in 1919 depicted a man standing under an umbrella, facing away from the sun. This historically significant logo lacked the ferocity and spirit that would later define the Huskies.

The shift to "Huskies" as the official mascot in 1922 ushered in a new era of visual representation. The iconic "W" logo was introduced in 1924, featuring a bold serif font and a classic block design. This simple yet powerful symbol quickly became synonymous with Husky athletics and has remained constant.

-Modern Adaptations and Variations (1900s onwards)
While the "W" remained the centerpiece, the logo underwent several stylistic changes. In the 1950s, bolder fonts and playful designs emerged, reflecting the changing aesthetic of the time. The 1959 logo, for example, featured a whimsical Husky mascot alongside the "W," offering a more lighthearted representation.

By the 1980s, a more modern approach was adopted. The 1983 logo featured a sleek, sans-serif font for the "W," set against a contrasting blue and white background. This streamlined design emphasized the power and strength of the Huskies brand, reflecting the program's growing national prominence.

The 21st century saw further refinements to the logo. The 2001 iteration introduced a subtle gradient effect to the "W," adding depth and dimension. This version and the 2016 logo featuring a bolder, more aggressive font solidified the Huskies' visual identity in the modern era.

-A Legacy in Purple and Gold
Today, the Washington Huskies logo is a testament to the program's rich history and enduring legacy. With its simple yet powerful design, the "W" symbolizes excellence, representing generations of talented athletes and passionate fans. As the Huskies forge their path in college football, their iconic logo will undoubtedly remain a cherished emblem for years.

Check out the logos and more at the 1000logos.net link below.

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There are a handful of early coaches who have had such a resounding impact on the game of football that they actually changed the game, and took players to the upmost sides of their God Given talents. Percy Haughton, not a household name by any means, is one of these rare individuals in gridiron lore, whose story needs to be told.

Author Dick Friedman joined us to chat about his book on the Harvard coaching legend.


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⏰Sat, 06/01 05:45AM · 48mins

Transcript

Darin Hayes
Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes at pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pigpen, your portal into positive football history. And we're gonna stare down that portal today and go way back, probably 125 years or so back into the East Coast of football, where football started. And we have a gentleman who's written a book called The Coach Who Strangled a Bulldog, How Harvard's Percy Haughton Beat Yale and Helped Reinvent Football. That's, of course, author Dick Friedman. Dick Friedman, welcome to the program.

Dick Friedman
Thank you very much, Darin. It's great to be here.

Darin Hayes
It's very interesting to have this talking about Coach Percy Haughton because we have not covered him in our program and we have, you know, probably about 1000 different podcasts and I can't believe I've never had anybody talk about him before so I'm really excited to hear a little bit more about coach.

Dick Friedman
Well, I gotta say, I think I won't say he's totally lost to history. He is, of course, in the College Football Hall of Fame. So if you're in the College Football Hall of Fame, you're out there, you know, you're a figure. But he's, because he did most of his coaching before World War I, before the age of the newsreels, I think to some degree he is lost to history. You know, for instance, he's not nearly as famous as Newt Rockne, who followed him along and is now the most important coach in American College Football, arguably. I mean, I guess you could also, you know, invoke Bear Bryant and maybe even Nick Saban at this point. But in any event, Percy Horton was a figure who did his greatest work really by 1915. And, you know, and then the United States went to World War I, and after that, things changed. And then Percy, except for a very brief stint in Columbia, was out of the game. So, in any event, he is kind of a distant figure, maybe more distant than he should be.

Darin Hayes
OK, yeah, that's very interesting. I think, and I can see, that your passion, and you're talking about the passion of Coach Haughton. And I'd like maybe to get some of your background to tell us why Percy Haughton is a person of interest that you would write a book about.

Dick Friedman
Well, it's very interesting, Darin, because I grew up eight miles from Harvard Stadium in Newton, Massachusetts. I started going to Harvard games when I was seven years old in 1958. And then I actually went to Harvard and graduated in 73 and, of course, went back most seasons to see games, either at the stadium or when they were on the road. But interestingly enough, it took an assignment when I was working for Sports Illustrated, which I did for 18 years. I was working on the college football coffee table book that Sports Illustrated did about 12 or 13 years ago. A piece of copy came in front of me written by my colleague, David Sabino, and it was Harvard's Percy Haughton, who was 71, 7, and 5 in Cambridge from 1908 through 1915. And I looked at it and I went, holy. And then I won't say the next word that I said, holy blank. I've known this my whole life. Has anybody ever written a book about this guy? And I did a little investigating. And the answer was no. Nobody had written a book about him, although he had been part of a few other books. And I said, wow. I said this has got to be worth something. This particular era, especially of Harvard football that he coached, was an amazing era with some amazing players. So there's got to be something there. A lot of people that I talked to didn't really think there was anything there, and they were sick and tired of hearing about Harvard. And there was a lot going on. Nevertheless, when I did a little more investigating, the thing that I found was, aside from the Outnet record, which is amazing, there was really a great story about this guy and about the players that played for him. He turned out to be an absolutely seminal figure in the beginnings of what I call modern football. And the more I got into it, the more fascinated I got. And then I discovered that he had written a book which is now a hundred years old, exactly this year, called Football and How to Watch It. I read the book, and it's actually available on Google Books. And I recommend that anybody read it because it's fascinating. And basically, the book holds up amazingly well a hundred years later. I mean, the one thing that is not as big a part of it as it is now in the game is passing. That was not nearly as big a part of the game. It was just coming in in the twenties and certainly was not as well developed as it became even 10 to 15 years later. But the rest of it, it's as if he could write it as if he had written it last week. And so the more I looked, the more I looked, and the more research I did, the more I was convinced that there was something there. Then, I found one of his great assistant coaches, who was actually his backup fullback at Harvard. He was a guy named Reggie Brown, who was his advanced scout and did notebooks. And these notebooks were suddenly hiding in plain sight of all places Notre Dame. I got in contact with the librarians at Notre Dame, and they sent them to me on loan. And again, reading, what he did was he had all sorts of diagrams and plays, like if he would be scouting Yale for the game and he would be scouting and he'd go to Yale practices and he put their formations down and everything. And again, the more you look at it, the more I am going, wow, what a treasure trove this is.

Darin Hayes
There's got to be there's got to be a story behind it. How did the assistant coach at Harvard's notebooks and playbooks basically end up at Notre Dame? There has to be a Knute Rockne who had to do something about this.

Dick Friedman
Well, it's possible the other thing that's that's, and I asked I asked he actually asked that question of a few people. And what they said is that often things go are sold to collections, various collections and then the schools will buy the collection. And that's probably what happened.

Darin Hayes
That makes perfect sense, though.

Dick Friedman
Yeah, yeah. But anyway, you look at these things, and these things are, you know, 110 years old now. And you're amazed at the sophistication of the game already. Right. I mean, that, that, that, in fact, every, everything as I as I kept researching, that was one of the main things that, that, that came through to me was how even back in 1910 1915 the game, the scouting, the media, of course, called the press then was already amazingly sophisticated. And, you know, again, I said, there's a lot going on here that, that, that's plenty for me to write about. And sure enough, you know, I almost got lost in the research; as you well know, that happens to all of us. We go down the rabbit hole and, and the next thing you know, you know, we forget to write the book. But luckily, that didn't happen. And, and, you know, that's how the coach who strangled the bulldog came to be. So, anyway, it was a great, great experience for me. And, you know, the other thing is that it got me some cred among the Harvard Athletic Department. And I ended up being, I now, for the last, since 2014, I've been the Harvard Magazine football correspondent. Really nice. Yeah, I mean, I've been, I, when I was on the East Coast, I would go to as many games as I could. Now that I've been on the West Coast, I've been streaming the games on ESPN Plus. I have to say it's not a bad way to be a correspondent. You know, I mean, you get it, but you get it almost as much as you need. Almost better than being there. And, you know, I write up a little report every, after every game and, and, you know, it's been a lot of fun, and it's also, you know, kept me in touch with a lot of people back at the school, which is wonderful.

Darin Hayes
And that's going to be fantastic to be in your alma mater, too. That's really special.

Dick Friedman
Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's been great. And, you know, the other thing is, I've gotten to meet and talk with the coach at Harvard. Now, Tim Murphy is a tremendous coach, and I have judged him as the greatest coach in Harvard football history, even greater than Percy Haughton. And I give him the nod, partly because Murph has been added for 28 seasons now, whereas Percy only did it for nine, you know, or eight. So no, I guess it's nine. So, you know, Murph has won like nine Ivy League championships and is a tremendous football coach. But anyway, so between one thing and another, it's been a tremendous experience for me.

Darin Hayes
Well, yeah, congratulations. That's a great honor. And, uh, something, you know, especially to be staying in touch with your Alma water and, uh, stay in touch with football, even though you're on the other coast. The Dick, let's get it a little bit into the Percy Haughton's background. How did he get involved in football?

Dick Friedman
Percy went to Groton, the fabled prep school. Percy was a member of the class of 95, that's 1895, at Groton, and then went on to Harvard, where he was in the class of 1899. Percy was a star athlete at Groton, one of the greatest athletes; even today is still ranked one of the greatest athletes that Groton ever had. He was a big, tall guy, very lean, very limber. He was a tremendous punter, but his actual favorite sport remained, and so was baseball, where he was a great center fielder for both Groton and the Crimson. And he loved baseball players for his football team. That's what they always said, that as soon as he saw a great baseball player, a lot of them already were great football players, but he would try to convert them into football players. Anyway, he went on to Harvard and played fullback for the Crimson. This was a time when Yale was totally dominant in football in the 1890s and early 1900s, a really great golden age for Yale. They were the Alabama of their day, really. He was involved in one game in 1898 when his punting helped Harvard win a rare victory. But again, when you have a rare victory in these series, people really do remember it. And then he went on after college, after Harvard, he went on and coached at Cornell for a couple of years. And he actually succeeded a coach that you may have heard of named Pop Warner. And then Percy went back to Boston, coaching not being a well-paid profession at that time. Percy went on back to Boston and worked in the bond business. And at the time, Harvard was kind of struggling, losing to Yale and finally people in Cambridge got fed up and they went after Percy and they said, how would you like to take over? He said he would with one condition, and that condition was that he had total control. He was not gonna take it if people were gonna be kibitzing over his shoulder. And sure enough, they were so desperate that they grabbed him. In the first year, he beat Yale in some polls back then, and some newspapers named him the national champion, Harvard national champion. There were seven, oh, and one; they were undefeated, and Percy had achieved his cred. From there on, he had a successful run. But again, it was his way or the highway. And he really systematized football. He really broke the game down and kind of modernized it. A lot of the things he innovated or made popular, at least, are things that we see coaches still doing today.

Darin Hayes
OK. Now, now with that story there with him, uh, you know, beating Yale sort of right out of the shoot with the coaching, is that where the title to your book came from, strangling the Bulldog?

Dick Friedman
Yes, it was that particular game that Yale game in 1908 when Percy, they went to Yale, they traveled to Yale the game was at Yale Field back then, there was the Yale ball was still a few years away from being built, and Percy, always a great motivator, he decided that he would strangle a bulldog, of course, that being Yale's mascot. What he did was though he had a bulldog being towed by I think back of a car and this, however was to allay the PETA fans who might be listening right now, this was not a live bulldog, this was a paper mache bulldog; and Percy grabbed it by the neck, said this is what we're gonna do to Yale and the team laughed like crazy but the legend grew that Percy strangled the bulldog and of course then he did so metaphorically three days later when they upset Yale with the mighty score of four to nothing thanks to a field goal by a guy named Vic Canard. So that was the whole birth of it, but whenever I would tell people that I was working on this, people would say, oh, isn't that the guy that strangled the bulldog? So after a while, I began to think, you know, maybe I should make more of this than my working title was things like Crimson Autumns and whatever, and I went, you know something, this strangled the bulldog thing, we got to get it right out there, you know front and center and sure enough that's what we did.

Darin Hayes
catchy title, and it's one that's unique and different from anything else you read, especially in a football book. So that's great, though. It really caught my eye when I saw the title.

Dick Friedman
Well, you know, that was the editors were happy that I came up with it, the editors of the book, you know, because they were starting to worry that this thing was going to sound very, very plain vanilla, you know, so, you know, I understood what they said being an editor myself for many years. You know, you got to you got to get something to grab the reader in, you know, pull the reader in.

Darin Hayes
1 .8 seconds to grab their attention. And once you do, you got them, right?

Dick Friedman
That's right. That's it. Exactly. That's it. Exactly.

Darin Hayes
Now I find it, it's a real interesting going back and looking at some of these, uh, records of some of these teams, especially the Eastern teams. And you see, you know, Yale and Harvard and Princeton and Penn, especially Yale and Harvard always being that last game, you know, sort of right around Thanksgiving last game of the season. And usually, you know, everything was hinging on on who was going to be, you know, the top team in the land, especially when they, you know, people like, uh, Park H Davis and the Billings report and Helms report and the rest of them went back retroactively and looked at these teams that sort of came down to that game would, uh, determine who would be the national champion or co-national champion at the time. And is, uh, Harvard and Yale, still like the last game of the season on their, OK?

Dick Friedman
Yes, that is called, still called the game, right? You don't even need the big game, which is what Cal and Stanford have out here. But no, the game is the last game of the season. And a lot of years, one or the other of the teams has a mediocre record or worse. And if they can upset the other, the hated rival, then the season is a relative success. And it's still the one that really counts. And for many years, you're right. It did have implications, either in the early days or national championship implications. Nowadays, since 1956, since the formation of the Ivy League, often it has had Ivy League championship implications of one or both teams involved with the chance for the title. So there's a lot at stake. I know the coaches feel it tremendously, the pressure tremendously. They think about it. They probably worry about it because they know that's the one the alumni think about. And it's a yardstick for the alumni. And it's also the biggest attendance in the Ivy League almost every year. It's the biggest attendance when it's at Yale especially. Because at Yale, you might have as many as 55 or 60 ,000 people at the game. Harvard's a much smaller stadium, but usually is sold out nevertheless. So it's quite a rivalry. I will say this though. Princeton and Dartmouth lately have been terrific. And before that, Penn had quite a run. And so in fact, a lot of years Penn and Harvard was the game for the Ivy League championship, which is the next to last game of the season. A lot of years like in the 80s and 90s. So it goes back and forth. The Ivy League fans, there aren't that many of us, but we're intense. That much I'll say.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, that's it's a tremendously is very interesting. I had a great opportunity probably about 10 years ago to go and tour the Yale Bowl and some of Yale's campus with a former player and a former coach that my wife's related to. And we got to get to experience. I got to talk to the former player and I told myself, you know, what was that? Like the biggest day, you know, of your career, you know, coming out of this Yale tunnel, what was what was the game that you remember the most coming out of there? It was all the two times that we played Harvard here. That was the thing. So they feel the same way up at Yale. I'm sure that you folks at Harvard do, too. So it's an interesting rivalry.

Dick Friedman
Well, you know, we consider Yale our safety school. What can I tell you? You know, only kidding, only kidding. Yeah. No, I mean, that one. I must say the other great thing is that I've had a real good chance to observe and, in some cases, to meet the other Ivy, some of the other Ivy coaches. And, you know, it's a it's a terrific group right now. I mean, they're the same same as the same group as last season, which is really rare, right, to have nobody in a conference lose their jobs. And but I think it's merited because they're they're it's a very impressive group of individuals and they're really good teachers. That's the other thing that I like about all of them, you know, very, very, you know, when you when you hear them talk, you know, you feel like you're learning something from all of them, which is great. So, you know, all of this has been very fascinating to me in my old age, you know, getting to, as you know, getting to meet and briefly sit in the press box with with 22 year olds or 19-year olds who could be my grandchildren. You know, it's great. It's a lot of fun.

Darin Hayes
Interesting. But let's get back to Coach Haughton. I'm sorry, I took you down a couple rabbit holes there. Coach Haughton had the big game beaten Yale early on in his career. Was that sort of the biggest game of his career or was there some other games that maybe are equal to that or maybe even surpassed it?

Dick Friedman
There were a couple of Yale games later on that Harvard won in big fashion, in convincing fashion. They won in 1914, I believe, was a 39 to six. And the following year, in 15, they also won by a very big score. And when you won, when you scored 39 points in a game back then, that was like scoring 75 points today. That was just, it was a low scoring era. So for you to pile up that many touchdowns in a major game was awesome. And a lot of it was just that he had a well-drilled group that executed brilliantly, especially in their blocking. And they were just unstoppable. They were unstoppable. So, they also won a major game in 1913 at the stadium, again against Yale, in which one of the most famous players, a fellow named Charlie Brickley, kicked five field goals. Now this had been done before, but never in as major a game with this kind of a spotlight. And Brickley, who might call the da Vinci of the drop kick, is still one of the greatest, if not the greatest drop kickers in football history. I mean, we talked earlier about, you know, Percy Haughton being a lost figure in a way, drop kicking certainly is a lost art in football. But Brickley, who also could place kick as well, drop kicking was a crucial element in a team's attack back then. And Brickley was the greatest drop kicker. And he was from nearby Everett, Massachusetts, but he kicked five field goals at the stadium. And this received totally national coverage. It was almost like the Super Bowl, you know, if somebody had done something great in the Super Bowl. And, you know, so all these games were receiving total saturation coverage. And again, the whole Haughton legend got burnished with every year that he achieved this kind of result. And, you know, but those were some of the results that happened and they did stick around one extra year in 1916 and Yale did win 63. So, you know, it wasn't foolproof, you know, that's the nature of the beast. But anyway, that was when you read about the coverage about, you know, Brickley, you know, Brickley was a God at that point, you know, Brickley was like, you know, any great athlete, you know, Joe Namath or, you know, Tom Brady or you name it. That's the level of celebrity that he had achieved.

Darin Hayes
Yeah. Isn't it interesting that, you know, back in that era, you know, that the kickers and punters were sort of the stars of the teams, of the great teams. And, you know, like you say, like Brickley and, you know, hot and hot and before him and, you know, Thorpe and it was all these, all these players, because the kicking game and the punting game was so important to the offensive before, you know, the forward pass was really prevalent. So it's fascinating.

Dick Friedman
Yeah, and Haughton, you know, was having been a great punter himself, really paid tremendous attention to it. What we today call the measurables, you know, he was already onto it. He would put a stopwatch on his on his kickers to see how fast they would get the punt off, you know, after the after the snap of the ball and, you know, that he drilled them to try to get it off, you know, no less than like one one in five, seven seconds or something like that. I could be misquoting. The other the other thing that he was a fiend about was back back then, you know, covering kicks was very, very, a very big part of the game. And what he said to his kickers was, you know, I want the ball kicked 40 yards. I'm not talking 41 yards and I'm not talking 39 yards. When I say 40, I mean 40. And one of his greatest players, besides Brickley, a guy named Eddie Mahan, kicked one 60 yards and Brickley yanked him from I mean, Haughton yanked him from the game and said, that 60 yard punt does us no good at all, because we can't cover 60 yards. You know, that's the kind of guy he was. He was a nut. Look, he was a bit of a nut. There's just no way around it.

Darin Hayes
You hear about it all the time. Even today that punters out kicking their coverage. So maybe he was on to something back then.

Dick Friedman
Oh, he definitely was, I mean, and he he had, you know, he wanted football played played a certain way. And, you know, a big part of the game was was exchange of punts to gain territory gain yardage. And the other thing is, he loved exchange of punts and and playing for the breaks. You know, back then, let the other team could fumble. They might throw an interception if the rare forward pass you know Harvard guy could intercept it, and they would gain territory that way and then they had Berkeley to kick a field goal. Three to nothing win that was fine by him, you know, but they had so much better material by that point than the than most of the other teams that they were winning by reasonably big store big scores. And they won. They were 33 they had a 33 game unbeaten streak from 1911 to 1915. Wow. And then a couple of ties in there but you know they just outclassed other teams, you know, so much better. And the team that beat them before the end of the, the beginning of the streak was Carlisle with Jim Thorpe. And Jim Thorpe put on a day for the ages back at the, you know, at Harvard Stadium, and Haughton said, you know, I've now seen the Superman in the flesh, you know, he was convinced so you know, and Berkeley and Haughton became good friends great kickers you know they do kicking contests and stuff. So, you know, if there had been more of an organized pro football in the in the late teens and early 20s, there'd be a lot more have been a lot more money for those guys.

Darin Hayes
Hmm. Interesting. Now, OK, besides the contributions that Coach Haughton did, you know, for just his record at Harvard and, you know, winning some national championships in there in the kicking game, what are some other contributions that you can sort of look back and say, you know, Percy Haughton, he's a guy that started that or has a lot of responsibility for that. Some things that maybe in modern football that we should be thankful for to him.

Dick Friedman
Sure, I mean, I don't know about being thankful for, but the whole organization of practice, you know, I mean, the way practices today are scripted to the minute, you know, he started, I don't know whether he started it, but he certainly popularized it. He had the players helmets lined up, you know, in front of, at the field, right? Didn't want to waste a second. He gave out the players knew exactly what was going to be worked on that particular day. You know, he'd had at three o 'clock, they were going to do such and such. At 3.15, they were going to do such and such. At 3 .30, such and such. He broke the team down into four segments. He had the varsity, then an A, B and C team. And it was a bit of a ladder in the sense that you could work your way up or work your way down depending as the year went on. Very big on drill and execution. You know, we've heard a lot about Vince Lombardi telling his team to run the power sweep 11 times or until they got it right. Well, that was, Percy Haughton did the same thing. He didn't have a big playbook. He had only 25 plays, but he could run them from five different formations. So he really had 125 plays. The other thing that he did was, I think was very, very important. He decided at a certain stage that the future of football was not to the heavy, to the weight, to the heavy guy. It was to the athletic guy. And that really, he figured that out early on. You know, that again, he loved baseball players, but what he wanted was really the athletic guy, not that, or as what they called it back then, the 200 -pound fat boy, you know, which now we would call the 400 -pound fat boy. But that was really important to the Harvard system, was to have really kind of raw boned great athletes who were fast, quick, as well as strong, not a big guy on weight, you know, working with the weights. Instead, he would rather guys be eased off and come in rested and, you know, be keen rather than work them and scrimmage them to death and practice. So all these things that have become common and standard and most coaches, you know, quivers today, you know, are what are a big part of the Haughton system. And because of Harvard's prominence, you know, they got a lot of publicity. And then he wrote the book and even more of his stuff. And then the one other thing I should talk about, which I think is very important, was that he decided also that deception was gonna be a very big feature of the game. And his teams were very, very skilled in deceiving the opponent. He really wanted the opponent to sweat hard and worry about what the next play is. He loved it when passing came in because he would pitch out to one of the triple threat backs that they had and the triple threat back would hold the ball up. And, you know, the defensive backs were wondering, what's gonna happen here? Is it gonna be a run? Is it gonna be a pass? You know, what's gonna go on? And he loved that, you know, he wanted that guy on an island just worrying and letting the Harvard guys get the jump on them. And again, this was all not totally new, but again, became much more standard with what he did.

Darin Hayes
Uh, very interesting. Uh, and you know, when you say we should be thankful to, I think, uh, us as fans and the players themselves should be thankful for having the organized practices and I'm sure coaches today sort of take it for granted, but somebody had to start doing that and organize those and having the drills and everything. And, you know, I, I think that's definitely something that you can hang, uh, Percy Haughton's hat on, uh, to, to, uh, you know, credit him for that. So I think that is something to be thankful for.

Dick Friedman
So yeah, yeah. And you know, and he even had like each week, you know, was given a name, you know, like, like, would be like, joy week, you know, break before the Yale game, he wanted the team really loose before the Yale game, he wanted them to have fun that week, you know, not to be have the entire season planned out. And, again, this was, you know, very contrary to what the image of football was of a bunch of guys in a scrum, you know, and it's fascinating for me to read it was fascinating for me to read about it, because, you know, again, I had a total image of guys in a scrum, you know, guys with a lot of hair and a scrum. And then you read about it, and you see, well, you know, what a method that this guy had, you know, he called it human chess. Right. And it's just the whole cerebral aspect of the game was brought to the fore by person.

Darin Hayes
Uh, I'm sure if he could see the game being played today, he would, he would really be excited, you know, being, having all the other formations in the passing game, be more prevalent and what it, what a chess chess match it is today. That's for sure.

Dick Friedman
can't make the case that he's any better than Rockme or Frank Leahy or, you know, Bud Wilkinson. You know, you just go down the line of all the tremendous coaches in college football. But I do think that he's lost to history in a way. And again, I think this is a big part of it is because he was early. He was too early, right? If there had been newsreel footage of him, he would have a better chance of being really famous. Now, I would say that he went to Columbia in the 20s. He took the job there and was starting to build that program. And one day after practice, he said he wasn't feeling too well. He laid down and he died of a heart attack. He was 48 years old.

Darin Hayes
Oh, well.

Dick Friedman
he had been in New York, in New York, where he was, if he had been able to continue in New York through the, you know, the war in 20s and into the 30s with all the celebrity of the of the New York Press, you know, then then maybe we would all be talking a lot more about it. You know, so that I think I think that's that's kind of what happened. But I but I do think given his record and given the various innovations that I've talked about, that he should be better known and should be given more, more credit than he has. Again, he's in the Hall of Fame. You know, you're in the Hall of Fame can't really get much more credit than that. But as I say, in terms of like the average fan, knowing who he is, very, very few would know today. And, you know, it's a shame. It's a shame, because I do think he was very important figure in football.

Darin Hayes
Well, I, that's why I'm glad that there, there's people out there like you that are preserving the football history. And we thank you for that and preserving, you know, coach Percy Haughton and some of his great contributions, his history, uh, you know, everything that he did for the game and for, for Harvard football and, uh, make, make some a legend. And we're glad that, uh, somebody recorded that in a person's user. And we thank you for that.

Dick Friedman
Well, the labor of love for me, going back through the archives was wonderful. I should, one more thing to add, I was able to get back into the archives and after a certain amount of time, you go back into the student folders and I was able to see various things about the players, including Percy who had been a player, of course, including their grades, which was fascinating as a former student myself. And the other thing that I saw of a very sobering aspect was that I think that we had one of the earliest cases, not recorded, but the earliest cases of CTE with one of the players, a guy named Percy Wendell, who was a terrific fullback for Harvard in the 1911, 1910, 11 seasons. He was known as the human bullet for his headfirst running style. And as time went on, Percy Wendell started to falter. And finally, in the late 20s, and he had served in World War I, and so they ascribed some of his problems to the war, but in the late 20s, he was described as being not the man he used to be, kind of a euphemism, and he died at age 42. And reading between the lines, it sure sounds like CTE, right? And we don't know for sure, but boy, every single symptom was there. And very sobering about the game and I'm sure that he was not the only one suffering from that illness back then, especially given that they were not wearing the, either not wearing helmets or wearing the leather helmets. And you run into that, and so that takes you aback when you're seeing it in the files. I also saw in the files, players who almost all of them from that era went on to World War I and served in World War I. And one of the players who was Brickley's backup got killed in action. And when you read this stuff, you feel like you know these guys, you've been on the football team with these guys, and then you see that they're gone. And at age 23, you see photos of them and it's heartbreaking, it really is.

Darin Hayes
And we thank him for the service like we do everybody else that's fought for our country over the years. But yeah, true. It had to be a scary war.

Dick Friedman
Oh, that was terrible, terrible. I mean, and pointless. But anyway, that's a whole nother topic that we could get on someday. But yeah, but anyway, the whole aspect of the game back then, so many things that pull you into the present. And you know, again, that was, to me, I keep using the word fascinating, but it was fascinating to be mesmerizing, really. It's a good thing that the library closed five o 'clock, or I just would have stayed there all night, you know, because it is, I mean, I'm sure everybody who has, who has done this kind of research, you know, can, can relate. So but again, just, just fascinating.

Darin Hayes
I fully understand it, I tell you that. So why don't you tell us again the name of your book and where folks can get a copy of it.

Dick Friedman
OK, the name again is the coach who strangled the bulldog, how Harvard's Percy Haughton beat Yale and reinvented football. The publisher is Roman and Littlefield. Roman spelled R -O -W -M -A -N. It's on Amazon, very, very available on Amazon, and it's available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle. So no excuse for people not to buy it and read it, and there will be a test. Now, only kidding. So yeah, but it's readily available on Amazon.

Darin Hayes
OK, great. And folks, if you're driving a car or something, don't can't write down the information right now. We will put it in the show notes of this podcast. Just look at the notes. It'll also be on pigskin dispatch for this article that's going to accompany the podcast. So you can find it either place and get you connected to Dick Friedman and his wonderful book. Sir, do you have any social media or anything you'd like to share where people can keep up on what you're doing? If you're writing anything new.

Dick Friedman
my website is being is is under reconstruction right now and when I when it is ready I am going to send you a note and you can put it in the in the show notes absolutely but yeah we have one of the many things that's fallen by the wayside during these last couple of years has been reconstruction of the website so it will happen and you know I am noodling with other book ideas and I can guarantee you that it will not be about Harvard football if I write another book enough already you know I've written enough about Harvard football in my lifetime so but you know but I've thought about other things too now that I'm on the west coast you know there might be a west coast oriented story about the early days of football and um you know we'll see could be something else you never know you never know but it but as I say it's been a tremendous um you know a tremendous uh project for me um this the book and um I like a lot of people I was kind of wondering what the heck I was going to do after I retired and it turned out I never really retire you know and so it's been you know so that's where I am but it's been it's been fascinating and much very enjoyable to meet people like yourself and and other people um you know who are who are in the uh world of college football history which is a you know a great history and um you know my dad went my dad went to Michigan so you know I I had heard a lot about that and uh he played um freshman football and he's a little guy like myself and the freshmen back then at Michigan were pretty much just cannon fodder and he was very proud though that he got knocked on his rear end by a fellow named Gerald R. Ford Jr and uh he said Jerry Ford was a tremendous football player and uh and and for my father to say that my father was a staunch liberal democrat so Jerry Ford must have really been great so

Darin Hayes
Yeah, he definitely was a great football player as well as, you know, in politics, as we know now, did, uh, did your father play for, uh, Fritz Crisler then? Is that.

Dick Friedman
No, the year that he that he played freshman ball was under a guy named Harry Kipke, K -I -P -K -E. Yeah, OK. Yeah, had to be.

Darin Hayes
pretty close, so I'll bet.

Dick Friedman
Yeah, yeah. And he and he was in the they played they were great. And when my father was a freshman, then they had several down seasons. And then my my father graduated. And then Tommy Harmon came in, in the late 30s. And they were great again. So my father would tell me about the great Tommy Harmon runs against Penn and schools like that. So he got me he got me very interested in an early age.

Darin Hayes
And the Harmon was definitely a great player too. So that's very interesting. Well, sir, we appreciate your time. We appreciate you coming on and preserving the football history and sharing it with us folks. Like we said, you can find a Dick Friedman's books where have the information, the show notes and on pigskin dispatch .com. And soon we'll have information on a Dick's website too, that you can go and see what he's got going on here in the near future. So Dick Friedman, thank you very much for joining us in the Pig Pen on Percy Haughton.

Dick Friedman
My pleasure. Thank you very much, Darin.

They're blockers, they're receivers, they're touchdown machines – tight ends have become a force to be reckoned with in the NFL. But who reigns supreme in the tight end pantheon? A new book dives into the gridiron archives to unearth the all-time greats at this dynamic position. Join us on this podcast episode as we crack open the book and explore the careers of the legendary tight ends who redefined the game. We'll discuss their dominance on the field, the plays that etched their names in history, and the impact they had on the evolution of the tight end position. So, buckle up, football fans, because we're about to get tight with the greats!

Image is Courtesy of Cole Holcomb chasing Travis Kelce OCT2021 is courtesy of All-Pro Reels via Wikimedia Commons.

We were proud to have the chance to sit down and discuss a football topic on How the Tight End Is the Sport Itself Distilled to One Position with Tyler Dunne Author of the New Book THE BLOOD AND GUTS: How Tight Ends Saved Football. Tyler is a veteran NFL journalist who covered teams like the Green Bay Packers and the Buffalo Bills for some significant publications. He now has his own gig writing some fantastic long-form gridiron posts on GoLongTD.com.

You can follow Tyler Dunne on Twitter @TyDunne

-Transcript of Conversation with Author Tyler Dunne on Blood and Guts Tight Ends book

Darin Hayes
Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes at pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pigpen, your portal to positive football history. And we have a very interesting look down that portal of history today as we are going to be talking to an author who has a new book out called Blood and Guts, How Titans Save Football. His name is Tyler Dunne, and we'll welcome him right now. Tyler Dunne, welcome to the Pigpen.

Tyler Dunne
It is a pleasure to be here there. Thanks so much for having me.

Darin Hayes
The pleasure is all ours, sir. We appreciate you taking the time here to talk a little bit of football history with us here in the Pigpen, and your book is extremely fascinating. We're going to get into more detail on that in a second. But first, we could share a little bit about you with the listeners. What started your football fandom to get you to the point of writing a book on tight ends?

Tyler Dunne
Yeah, yeah. I grew up in Western New York, about an hour South of Buffalo, and played football my entire life. I guess that's part of it, right? It was an elegant bill, small school. We actually had our sectional championship right where the Bills play raffles in the stadium, so that was a ton of fun. But then, yeah, you eventually got to move on from the plane and go the journalism route. Syracuse University loved it. It was just an unreal experience working at that student newspaper, covering big-time D1 sports, and then covering the Green Bay Packers and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for about four and a half years. Just talked about a crash course on how to cover pro football, Bob McGinn, Tom Silverstein, Laurie Nichol. That was an unbelievable experience and definitely helped me get to this point in the long haul. Buffalo Bills covered that squad, Rex Ryan's first year at the Buffalo News, and then Bleach Report reached out. They were expanding their features department, so it was a really good opportunity to still live in Western New York but kind of travel the country and just do long-form takeout stories for BR. Amazing experience. It really helped me learn the game and just tell some long-form stories. That's absolutely what I love to do more than anything. So that was great, and that ran its course, and I decided to launch my own site, golongtd.com. So I just do profiles, long-form Q&A, deep dives on the inner workings of teams, and that kind of stuff, and it's part of the sub-stack platform. So far, so good. People want to read, which is great. That was the fear, right? When you branch off and start a subscription website, is this something people want to pay for? But they do. So it's been a lot of fun, and yeah, if people want to sign up, they can. Right there, there's a free option, too. You can get stories for free on a different list, and if you like that, you can always upgrade.

Darin Hayes
All right, wow, that's that's quite a background. I mean, you have some very interesting people that you get to talk to every day. You know, both at Green Bay and, you know, God Rex Ryan. He was a story a minute. I'm sure when he was at Buffalo.

Tyler Dunne
Yeah, so the 2015 season was wild. That was Rex Ryan's first in Buffalo, so to be there in that locker room for the ups and the downs and all the absolute mayhem was just... You know, honestly, that was one of the more fun seasons on the job, just because you never knew what was going to happen to your point.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, your pen would probably run out of ink just covering him, I'm sure, you know.

Tyler Dunne
Literally, you got that, everybody.

Darin Hayes
Now, he was quite the quote machine, that's for sure. So very interesting. In Green Bay, you had some great teams there. What era did you cover Green Bay?

Tyler Dunne
So that would have been 2011 through 2015, I believe. So right after they won the Super Bowl and through several seasons where they probably should have won another Super Bowl, hotel short, yeah, it's very similar to Buffalo in terms of just the town kind of embodying the team. I mean, if they win, like literally everybody at the coffee shop, the bar is in a good mood, and if they lose, everybody is in a bad mood. So there's something really cool about that where, I mean, there's something not good. So there's not, like, outside of the football team, there's not a lot to do, which is fine because I just want to, you know, drink a few beers and watch football. But when that's the number one activity for everybody in the town, they definitely take on the persona of that team in every way.

Darin Hayes
I'll bet. Now, I guess that brings you right into your football book here on tight ends and blood and guts. How did you come up with the premise of covering the tight end? That's probably a position that, other than the offensive line, sort of doesn't get the love that they probably should because these guys are doing some pretty awesome stuff.

Tyler Dunne
No doubt, I mean, they have to do it all, right? It's a little bit of everything. You do have to operate in the trenches. So, you know, I guess to answer your question, I just want to do a book on real football. Like, what is real football? It's high intensity; it's a high level of violence. It's that adrenaline rush you get, you know? And when you're back in high school, and you're playing with the lights, and everybody's in the crowd, there's just something really cool about the game. And I just wanted to try to get to the heart of it, you know, search for the soul of it. And the more you think about it, yeah, that tight end, you have to do everything. Like, literally everything. So, that's how it started. And once I really started talking to Mike Jekka, Jackie Smith, Ozzie Newsom, and then even the contemporary guys, Rob Gronkowski, George Kittle, Tony Gonzalez, you really learn that this tight end position, yeah, it's football, it's the sport itself. But I think as people read this book, it doesn't even matter if you like football or not because you're gonna learn how, like, this position, this profession, most directly reflects our own lives. I mean, our own lives, whatever our job is, I mean, it is felt through that tight-end position, which is really cool. I mean, yes, it saves football, and you'll find out why, but I think you're also gonna see how, holy cow, playing this position makes you a better person.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, wow. When you're talking to some experts about the position, I think you hit the Hall of Fame of tight ends right there with those names that you talked about. It doesn't get any better than those guys. They each brought a different perspective to the game and the history of the game. You actually had different eras of the tight end and the development of it. Going from Dicca, who's probably helped develop the position as much as anybody did in football history, right up to these contemporary guys, like you said, like Gronkowski and even Tony Kinsallis, I still consider him a contemporary. He's probably been retired for ten years now, but now those are some greats that you got to talk to.

Tyler Dunne
It was just unbelievably fortunate. I wasn't sure about embarking on this cross-country tour, and I really wanted to talk to as many of these guys in person as I could and make it as real as possible to just sit down at a bar with Jeremy Shockey and get in his environment, right? Or hanging out with Tony Gonzalez right in Austin, Texas, where he moved into town. Mike Dicka, down at his golf course with a cigar nearby. I feel like I really got to know these guys, and it was important to get on their turf and go through their lives. I mean, I think that really each of the 15 chapters is a long-form profile of the 15 people who really were uniquely qualified to preserve the sport that we love, right? I mean, this is, it's a special sport. It's, you know, you don't just pick up a football and gather on your buddies. I mean, you can't play pickup, obviously, but when it comes to the physicality and the violence in an actual football game, you know, it's harder to get a group of friends together, put on the pad, put on a helmet, and have a full-fledged game. I mean, there's attrition in football that other sports just don't have, and I get it, you know, you gotta watch the violence, and they are trying to make it safer, but it's not safe, and I think that's okay. That inherent risk that the sport has, honestly, is kind of what makes it different, and kind of going on a soapbox here, but it does kind of bother me when the league almost pretends to be something it's not and do you want guys getting maimed in the defense of secondary? No, but do you want Chris Jones to tackle, you know, a quarterback, Tom Brady, and literally just fall on top of him and get a flag bet? That's ridiculous. So I think that preservation of what the sport is, what makes it great, is unbelievably important, and these are the 15 dudes that are those modern-day gladiators who I think era to era, you know, decade to decade, year to year, making sure that, hey, you know, if things are gonna be changing all over the place, you know, quarterback play, and what you can do with strong safety, which isn't even really a position anymore, but that tight end, you can still hit, and guess what, you're gonna be very, very visible, because when it's third and eight, and everything's on the line, that quarterback's gonna be looking for you, Dallas Clark, you know, in the playoffs, or you, Tony Gonzalez in Atlanta, or you, Rod Brankowski in the Super Bowl. I think that's a differentiator from the linemen, too. If you have a good game as a lineman, nobody's talking about you in three hours.

Darin Hayes
Right, yeah, you're preaching to the choir here on some of this what's going on with the quarterback, especially this year. You know, they've talked about that in decades passive, you know, putting skirts on them. I think it might be really amplified, and it's a bad situation like what's happened with it in Miami. That's a horrible situation, And that's more of a policy that needs to be changed than what needs to be changed play on the field. I think that the guys are cognizant of this. There's a brotherhood in football, as you well know, and they want to protect each other, But they also want to do their jobs, and you know They're there to make a living and them hitting people very hard and taking to the ground That's how they make their money. So you have to respect what the defenders are doing. That's for sure.

Tyler Dunne
Oh, that's perfectly put. Yeah, I just couldn't agree more. I just wanted to tell you that.

Darin Hayes
Now, with this wide array of people that you got to interview, all tight ends, legends of the game, all well known in every household that knows professional football, was there a common thread that they all said like a certain aspect of the game that they all loved or was it a variety of different things? I'm sure there had to be some common core theme to what they each said.

Tyler Dunne
I think a common thread with these tight ends is you have to do stuff that you don't want to do. And that's the case in all of our day-to-day lives. You don't get to wake up and just have a party every day. You got to run the kids to school, you got to pay some bills, you got to do some chores around the house. That's the tight end position, and that's always been the tight end position is, yeah, there's some glitz to it, there are touchdowns, and if you're a good-looking dude like Tony Gonzalez, your life's going to be pretty sweet. Maybe you will be a little bit of a celebrity, but even Tony Gonzalez says that's why the tight end is different from the other positions. It forces you to do the stuff you don't want to do. You still have to go over to that nine-on-seven inside run drill at training camp and bash people in. You're not with the wide receivers and the cornerbacks running one-on-ones and working on your routes, but there's an element of physicality here that's inherent to being a real tight end. Now, if you're a receiver, if you're receiving tight end, maybe you're doing less of that, but if you're still a tight end, that's still going to be an element to your game that you're going to need at some point or another. I think that's why the tight-end position almost chooses you. You don't necessarily choose the position. You have a certain set of traits and characteristics as a human being. You're Jimmy Graham, and you're basically growing up an orphan because your mom doesn't want you, and you're in a group home, and you're fearing for your life, and you're getting beat up in a van, and your will is being tested to the extreme before you're finally saved by a church leader who takes you in and gets you to school. It's no coincidence that Jimmy Graham has the intestinal fortitude to play four years of basketball at Miami, play one-year college basketball, go to New Orleans, and help evolve the position themselves. He didn't go out to be a tight end. It kind of chose him. It was the same with Dallas Clark at Iowa and everything he went through; he was a linebacker, like six, seven string, just getting the space beat in and pinching pennies together to even pay his way through school. Eventually, Kirk Baron says, hey, you're a tight end, and that indomitable drive was just a perfect fit for Dallas Clark. I think that's what's special about it. It definitely taps into your innermost traits as a human being. If you're going to work hard, if you're the type that's just going to put others before yourself, there's a good chance you'd be a tight end.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that you brought up that topic because so many tight ends were something else before they became tight ends. It's not something that in high school, hey, I was a tight end in high school. You never hear that. But most common, at least in past times, tight ends were former offensive tackles or maybe a running back every once in a while. But as you said, Gonzalez, Antonio Gates, and some of the others are Jimmy Graham, basketball players who were converted to be tight ends. And now you're talking like Dallas Clark being converted from another position. It's just wild. I think you're right about the money when you say a tight-end position chooses you because that's kind of cool about that position.

Tyler Dunne
It is. I mean, it really is just about the case for everybody, except for, um, you know, Rob Gronkowski, growing up here in Buffalo, New York, he's, he's fallen in love with the Jeremy Shockey. He sees, you know, he's a young teenager, and he sees this, uh, this dude in New York City with the blonde hair and the brass style, just saying whatever's on his mind, living it up, you know, in the nightlife in the big city. And he's thinking, man, I want to be that one day. I just want to party hard, play hard, and live like there's no tomorrow. And boy, it sure looks like I can do it at tight end. So I guess that's maybe what makes Rob Gronkowski the greatest tight end ever. He kind of knew all along that he was made for it. And by God, the way he grew up in Buffalo, as people will read in this book, it all prepared him, uh, to be that tight end.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, he's he's definitely a unique specimen at the position because you know Generally your tight ends you could almost put in one of two groups either They're a great pass catching tight end a threat down the field or they're just a road grader blocker And he was sort of you know, the best of both worlds, especially in his prime You know i'm a Steelers fan and you know He he on the Patriots just owned my team for you know, as long as he played they were just killing it You know, you got Brady, but he was definitely a big element of what they did And uh, you know, there's there's other instances of that too where you have a you know Great blocking tight end that can catch a lot of great passes and everything too But uh, you know, like but Gonzalez I never really think of him as you know I'm sure he had to share blocks But I think the general perception is this dude could get open and you know It was a big target when he showed his numbers to a quarterback and made some big plays that uh, Some of the others so I guess that takes a sort of the other end of my question Um, yeah, everybody had a common thread. Well, how about what was the most surprising? A unique story that one of these legends told you about the tight-end position

Tyler Dunne
Oh my goodness, there were a lot. You know, if we're gonna get, if we're gonna get heavy, I mean, I would say Jackie Smith, and it's kind of two-fold. His upbringing is remarkable. Growing up in Kentwood, Louisiana, didn't really, didn't even barely play any football. He was just like a little spinner back in their wing T. He was a track guy. And by the way, at their school, their track, they just kind of ran around the football field. One time, they didn't really have a track, and there was one part of it that would flood, and it was like running in a bunch of wet dirt, but the dude could fly. He could run and run for days. He eventually worked his way to playing in college or running track in college. The only way he got a scholarship was because he said he would join the football team. It was just that he was kind of on the football team because the St. Louis Cardinals took a shot at him. And the football stories around Jackie Smith are remarkable. I mean, he's kind of forgotten in the history of the game, but yards per reception, he still has a record of a full two yards, I believe. He was a tough, tough, tough player. There are some remarkable stories of just being injured in one game. Terry Metcalf, I believe the running back, takes a cheap shot, and Jackie just runs right out on the field. Just runs right out and goes after the player for the Washington Redskins and gets to his face. And the ref is, you know, screwing him up. He thinks the fan is like a great fan running out of the field. It makes Jackie sit in a chair, far away from the team. Now that following up season, Jackie's mother down in Jackson, Mississippi, greets him at the door and says, hey, Jackie, there's a player for the Washington Redskins who had just moved in, and he said he wants to see you. And Jackie's a God-buried man. He's like, oh my gosh, Jesus Christ has delivered me my revenge. And so he goes over to the guy's house. He's ready to punch him, slug him, and get his vengeance. He's got a clutch fit behind his back. The player answers the door, and it's somebody else. And they have themselves a beautiful chat. He was a, you know, that those Cardinal teams, I mean, they had Conrad to Ober, right? They and Deardor. There were some tough tough guys on that team. Yeah, they are all to a man, really.

Darin Hayes
Jimmy Hart at quarterback, those teams, I believe, too.

Tyler Dunne
Yeah, yep, yep, good call. Yeah, but God, the name escapes me. They had somebody that competed like one of the world's strongest men, too. I mean, you're talking about gnarly, mean, nasty human beings, but Jackie Smith, they told me, is he was the bad, bad dude of mine. He was the man in charge. You feared him. He had a toughness to him. And it was great to just tell his story because, sadly, you hear that name and you think of 5.5 seconds in the Super Bowl, where that drop that he had in the end zone in 1979, there was so much more that went into it. Yeah, it wasn't like he just dropped this easy pass. The play call, where they called it, Rodgers, Staubachs, Thoreau. There were a lot of moving parts, let alone the fact that it was in the third quarter, they got a field goal that drove, and they gave Randy White a plumb of the kick-off return, and Staubach threw a bad pick that led to a tough hit. Many other factors were why the Dallas Cowboys lost that game, but I think the stories out of that on how he had to deal with this in his post-playing days, that's where it gets heavy because Jackie Smith is sitting down with him. I was like, sit with my grandfather, an unbelievably kind human being, great, great soul, and you can just feel his pain and how that moment affected him, and more so affected the relationships that he had with so many of his loved ones. It took a while. He was pretty honest. It took until about a couple of years ago for him to really look in the mirror, face that man in the mirror, and say, let's quit letting this bother you, like really cherish these relationships, and I think that's a huge element to the tight end position too. So many of these guys kind of had that man-in-the-mirror moment and bettered themselves as human beings.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Jackie and his previous, uh, you know, history because, as you say, he sort of gets a bad rap for that Super Bowl thing. But I have a little bit of theory on that. You know, first of all, he came from the Cardinals, which, uh, that way back then, uh, the Cardinals and the Cowboys were in the same division. Uh, sounds kind of foreign to us now, but I can remember those days. I'm a little older, but, uh, so, you know, he really, by Cowboys fans, he's a very passionate fan base now and then, um, you know, they've probably had a little bit just like from way back when, cause he, he heard them so much, you know, when he played against the Cowboys twice a year and then, uh, you know, him doing that and they needed a scapegoat, uh, you know, playing at the Steelers that year. And, uh, I think he just sort of, he was the, the donkey, they were going to pin the tail on, and the poor guy got a bad rap. But like you say, there was a lot of football left after that. And a lot of, uh, plays that were left on the field that, uh, could have changed the outcome of that game. So a great player, though. And I'm glad that you bring him up and, uh, talk about his, uh, being such a great player instead of being a scapegoat of a Superbowl loss.

Tyler Dunne
thank you. Yeah, you know you're right. There were other factors at play, too, like Vern Linquest's call. Bless his heart, we all people who were who remember watching that game can remember the imagery right of even like Roger Staubach Tom Lance or just the despondent look on their faces it was just heavy and right in the moment it was just played up to the extreme where oh my god so much other stuff happened and I just I think if everybody listening out there if you were judged by something that happened in your life that was such a fleeting moment in time I can't imagine

Darin Hayes
Yeah, it's not like he, you know, it was an easy catch that should have been made, not saying that. But I believe he's down on his knees as a result of a low throw by Staubach and a high-pressure situation. And what one of us can honestly say that you haven't made a mistake on the job when you're under a little bit of pressure, you know, in a unique circumstance, I can, I don't think anybody's going to be raising their hands says it's never happened to them because it's happened to all of us. I'm sure. He's just on the big stage of the most televised program in the country for the year, and everybody is watching at a critical point. So yeah, he deserves to get more credit for being the great player that he was.

Tyler Dunne
And you know what, just while we're on him, that play, Jackie broke it all down. Granted, we didn't just open up our conversation with that play. We were gently kind of easing into it because I think it is still a sore subject for him, obviously. Some of his closest friends haven't even brought it up. But that play, Roger Staubach, when he threw it, he kind of fluttered it, he floated it. Like normally, he'd zip it in there. But Jackie was so wide open. Unexpectedly wide open, like the fourth or fifth option on the play. It's not even for him that he thought he wanted to make it easy, where Jackie was running his route fast and like he always would. And that's what kind of made him flip, and then he dropped it, and also was called it like the 10-yard line. Typically, when they run that play, which was just put in, I mean, they just put the play in, it was supposed to be a goal-line play. So he'd go to the back of the goal line to catch it. And this time, it's just different, the dimensions of where they're calling; that's why, like Tom Landry, one of the best coaches of all time, whose fingerprints are all over the tight end position, too, as people will read. It's crazy that he called that play where he did. It doesn't make much sense for one of the smartest coaches ever to do that.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, but it actually worked though. He was hoping they could get an advantage on it.

Tyler Dunne,
regardless, he was open. Yeah, you're right.

Darin Hayes
You're right. Interesting. Now, I'm interested in hearing a little bit about Ozzie Newsom that you sat down with because that man's mind, I mean, as a player, he had to be one of the smartest football minds in football on the field. And definitely his, you know, general manager duties, he's, you know, off the charts. A guy had success with everything he did in the game of football. So I'm just interested in, maybe, some of the interesting things that you got out of your conversation with him.

Tyler Dunne
Oh, my goodness. He's so different than, you know, if you're talking common threads with these tight ends, it'd be personality, right? So many of them have just explosive, loud, fun, energetic personalities. I mean, Ozzy, when he was the GM, he went after Jan and Sharp. Jan and Sharp often went to the Super Bowl, so he welcomed that person. That wasn't Ozzy. I mean, he is, as Joe de la Melora says, quiet as a mouse. I mean, he really didn't say much privately. He doesn't say much publicly. To sit down with him for this book, I'm surprised that he was up for it, but he was. We talked for about an hour about his remarkable life. You know, I think it's a product of where he grew up, the segregated South, where he's living so many of the experiences we just read about in textbooks, really. I mean, he was there, and then he saw it, and he's on a youth baseball team, and their team is forced to just stay somewhere else because people at this establishment did not want African Americans there. So, yeah, I mean, I think the fact that he then decided, okay, I'm going to go to a white school, and I'm going to compete academically and athletically and prove that I'm just as good, if not better than everybody, and he did. He crushed everybody in that department. Gift of Alabama, Bear Bryant is like a father figure to him; he just wants to make him proud that they had unbelievably important conversations that he still holds near and dear. And I think that all the play of heartbreak in Cleveland, I mean, he just endured so much heartbreak, and those playoff losses, the Red Right 88, the Drive, the Bumble, the theme would be just calm and chaos. That's the title of that chapter. He's just so unbelievably calm. And even the way he caught the ball, he was smooth. I mean, he looked at him with his eyes. And after he had it dropped early in his career, he just dropped another pass. Practice games didn't matter. He never dropped the ball because he's just so dang calm and quiet and productive. And yes, that's absolutely how he ran the Baltimore Ravens. You know, that first draft when it's all bare bones. My God, they didn't even have a logo. They're working on the police barrack. Their rosters gutted. You know, the city of Cleveland wants Art Modell dead. Ozzy was just a de facto GM when he was like Bill Belichick. Whatever you call him, he just gopher before for the Phyllis Brown scenes. He was just a scout scout, you know, working on the card to practice. But now, all of a sudden, he's entrusted with running the Baltimore Ravens. And he had the foresight at that moment to just trust their draft board in 96. They had Nohner and Art Modell, and they had Coach and Ted Marcia Broda, who won the Lawrence Phillips. They want to make a big splash. They're running back out of Nebraska, talented, obviously troubled, very, very, very troubled, historically troubled. And Ozzy knew some; all he said was that we had done all this work on these college prospects. Our scouts have Ogden and Jonathan Ogden, and number one, we're going to stick with Jonathan Ogden. And the pick obviously worked out. They take Ray Lewis later in that first round, and the Ravens, for two decades, are a gold standard for how you run a team.

Darin Hayes
Absolutely. Yeah, that's fantastic on that. Now, why don't you take this opportunity to say the name of your book again and where folks might be able to get it?

Tyler Dunne
Absolutely. It's the blood and guts that tight ends save football. Amazon's probably the way to go, right? That's where everybody is anyway. So, hardcover, Kindle, and Audible are all available there. Obviously, Barnes& Noble, Walmart, Target, Indie Books, and your local bookstore are good options. It should be all over the place. So, yes, you'll get all these stories and a hell of a lot more; I promise you that. It was a passion project. Loved every second of it.

Darin Hayes
Well, that's great. Okay, one last question before we let you go here. Now, you know, the tight end position, we know how it's morphed into what it is today. You know, it's a dynamic position. It's always changing. But where do you see the course of tight ends going further? I mean, do you see any more changes to the position for the good of the game, or do you think it's gonna be pretty much what it is today?

Tyler Dunne
No, I think it is changing. I mean, you're seeing the athleticism just reach extremes. I mean, what Kyle Pitts does in Atlanta is unbelievable. Really, to have that kind of athleticism, that kind of speed, to run a 4 -4 at 250. I mean, he's unbelievably productive. We'll see how, you know, the quarterback play shakes out there. And if you can kind of develop as a blocker, blocking is obviously his weakness. But I talked to him about actually working on a story right now with Kyle Pitts. We just caught up a couple of days ago. So, I go along to you .com. People can check that out. I think this guy's got an inner drive, like Gonzales has, like Gates has like all of these greats really possessed. And as much as you really do want that do-it-all -tight end that can block and drive somebody into the dirt 15 yards field and make a play in the passing game, you know, George Kittle is the best of the best today. Kittles don't grow on trees because that's not a tight end that you're really going to find in college anymore. You're going to find athletes, and then you have to try to coach them up and teach them how to block. But that's okay. You know, I think Pitts is going to take this tight end position into a new realm that is hopefully going to get these guys paid because they're some of the most underpaid professional athletes in any sport. And it's kind of terrible. I mean, fullbacks and specialists only make less of them.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, that's very true indeed. Now, I really appreciate you coming on today to talk about the Titan position. I'm glad that you wrote this book and gave them the love that they deserve and told their story in football history. And Tyler, it's an amazing book. And folks, I highly recommend it. Like you said, you know, Amazon and the Barnes and Noble of the world, I hear they both sell a few books. So, definitely get Tyler's book there. Probably, it makes a great Christmas gift. We've got that season coming up for the football fan in your life who loves to read about football history. I appreciate that. Tyler, do you want to share any of your social media with folks so they can keep it? I know they can keep track of you on the website, but, you know, social media is always a good thing, too, for people who only have a couple of seconds in their pocket, you know, the phone in their pocket. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tyler Dunne
Just at Ty Dunn, so T -Y -D -U -N -N -E on Twitter, Instagram, and all that good stuff. So yeah, follow along, and we'll be spreading the tight end of love and uncovering pro football best mechanics that go along

Darin Hayes
All right, Tyler Dunne, book Blood and Guts, How Tight Ends Save Football. We appreciate you coming on here today, sir, and sharing and preserving football history.

Tyler Dunne
No, thank you, man. I really enjoyed the conversation. I hope we can do it again.

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Identifying the top five players in Notre Dame football history is a subjective task, as different criteria can be used for evaluation. However, here's a list of five widely recognized legends who have left their mark on the program:

-1. Paul Hornung (1954-1956):

A versatile athlete who excelled as a running back, defensive back, kicker, and punter, Hornung won the 1956 Heisman Trophy, the only Notre Dame player to do so. He led the Fighting Irish to national championships in 1953 and 1954 and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1985.

-2. Joe Theismann (1967-1970):

A talented quarterback known for his athleticism and strong arm, Theismann led Notre Dame to a national championship in 1966. He was a three-time All-American and finished second in Heisman Trophy voting in 1969. He went on to enjoy a successful NFL career, winning Super Bowl XVII with the Washington Redskins.

-3. Jerome Bettis (1989-1992):

A powerful running back nicknamed "The Bus," Bettis rushed for over 3,000 yards for Notre Dame and was a two-time All-American. He won the Maxwell Award in 1992 and was drafted 10th overall by the Los Angeles Rams in the 1993 NFL Draft. Bettis later became a Super Bowl champion with the Pittsburgh Steelers and is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame.

-4. Tim Brown (1984-1987):

Considered one of the greatest wide receivers in college football history, Brown set numerous school records at Notre Dame and was a two-time All-American. He won the Walter Camp Award in 1987 and was the Heisman Trophy runner-up the same year. Brown went on to a stellar NFL career with the Los Angeles Raiders and is a member of both the College Football and Pro Football Halls of Fame.

-5. Raghib Ismail (1988-1990):

Nicknamed "Rocket," Ismail was a dynamic running back and kick returner who revolutionized the college game with his speed and agility. He won the 1990 Heisman Trophy and led Notre Dame to a national championship in 1988. Ismail also enjoyed a successful NFL career as a kick returner and is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame.

It's important to note that many other Notre Dame players deserve recognition for their contributions to the program's rich history. This list is just a starting point for further exploration of the legendary figures who have shaped the Fighting Irish into one of the most storied programs in college football.

Honorable Mention: Joe Montana, Elmer Layden, Knute Rockne, George Gipp, Johnny Lujack, Angelo Bertelli, Tony Rice, George O'Connor, Ross Browner, Johnny Lattner, Leon Hart, Emil Sitko

Check out the BleacherReport.com article for their top 50 selections of Irish Greats of the Gridiron.

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Kentucky Wildcats' logo history is a journey through decades of evolving visual identities, mirroring the program's own transformation. Here's a summary of UK logo revisions:

-1909: Wildcats nickname appears after a football victory over Illinois. No official logo existed yet.

-1920s-30s: Various emblems featuring a stylized Wildcat head emerged, often accompanied by the letter "K" or "UK."

-1973: The iconic "Charging Cat" logo debuts, showcasing a fierce feline with open jaws and arched back. This aggressive design became synonymous with the program's fighting spirit.

-1984: A modernized version of the Charging Cat is introduced, with smoother lines and a slightly less ferocious expression.
The Intertwined "UK" (1997-Present):

-1997: A secondary logo featuring two interlaced "U" and "K" letters is introduced, offering a more contemporary and versatile option.

-2016: The "UK" logo undergoes a slight redesign, refining the letters' geometry and color scheme.
Additional Elements:

-Kentucky blue and white remain the primary colors throughout the logo history.

-The state outline has been a persistent element, signifying the team's statewide pride.

-Wordmarks with variations of "Kentucky Wildcats" have been used alongside the logos.

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Chris Willis's book, The Columbus Panhandles: A Complete History of Pro Football's Toughest Team, 1900-1922, dives into the largely forgotten story of a unique and successful professional football team: the Columbus Panhandles.

From Railroad Yard to Championship Contenders:

The book chronicles the rise and fall of the Panhandles, a team formed in 1901 by workers at the Pennsylvania Railroad's Panhandle shops in Columbus, Ohio. These immigrant railroad workers honed their football skills during lunch breaks on the sandlots of the railroad yards.

Key Figures and Strategies:

Willis highlights the role of innovative team manager Joseph Carr, who later became the NFL commissioner. Carr used perks like free railroad travel for employees and the star power of the Nesser brothers, a family of talented players, to build a strong traveling team.

Season-by-Season Account:

The book delves into a season-by-season account of the Panhandles' journey. Willis utilizes original interviews, newspaper reports, and photographs to recreate the team's triumphs and heartbreaks. Readers get a glimpse into the team's playing style, known for its physicality and toughness, earning them the nickname "Pro Football's Toughest Team."

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In the flamboyant world of the World Football League, one team stood out for its strong fan base and financial backing: the Memphis Southmen. While the WFL itself was a whirlwind of ups and downs, the Southmen carved their own niche, becoming a symbol of what the league could have been.

Over the next couple of posts, we'll be taking a closer look at the Memphis Southmen. We'll explore their origins, their star players (including some familiar names who shook up the football world), and their impact on the city of Memphis. We'll see how this team, armed with a growling bear logo and a passionate following, navigated the highs and lows of the WFL's short existence.

George Bozeka is a prominent figure in the world of football history. He serves as the Executive Director of the Professional Football Researchers Association (PFRA), an organization dedicated to meticulously documenting and preserving the history of professional American football. Bozeka's passion for the sport translates into his work as a writer, researcher, and advocate for historical accuracy in football.

Early Life and Football Enthusiasm:

Through interviews on the Pigskin Dispatch Podcast it's evident that George's passion for football began at a young age. Growing up near the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, he likely witnessed firsthand the reverence for the sport's history. A specific moment that fueled his passion might have been attending the 1964 Hall of Fame game, where he witnessed the legendary Johnny Unitas play.

Leadership Role in the PFRA:

-Bozeka's dedication to preserving football history led him to the PFRA. This organization, founded in 1979, boasts a membership of renowned historians and authors. As Executive Director,

-George plays a crucial role in leading research initiatives, promoting historical awareness, and ensuring the organization's resources are accessible to researchers and fans alike.

Contributions to Football History:

-Beyond his leadership role in the PFRA, Bozeka actively contributes to the field through various endeavors:

-Authorship: He has authored books that delve into specific historical periods or teams, such as "The 1951 Los Angeles Rams: Profiles of the NFL's First West Coast Champions" and "The 1966 Green Bay Packers: Profiles of Vince Lombardi's Super Bowl I Champions."

-Public Speaker: Bozeka participates in interviews, podcasts, and events, sharing his knowledge and insights on various historical topics related to football.

-Advocacy: He actively advocates for the importance of historical preservation within the sport, ensuring that the stories of past players, coaches, and teams are not forgotten.

George Bozeka's dedication to documenting and promoting football history is invaluable. Through his leadership in the PFRA, his insightful publications, and his public engagement, he ensures that the rich tapestry of the sport is preserved for future generations of fans and researchers alike.

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We have heard of the famous lost NFL Championship of the Pottsville Maroons in 1925 and the controversy surrounding it. However, another Title controversy brewed a few seasons earlier concerning a now-defunct franchise when the League was still under its original American Professional Football Association banner.

Controversy is always good subject matter for a solid story, and what we have for today is solid. Back in 2021 we spoke with Football Learning Academies' Ken Crippen, speaking of a Buffalo All-Americans NFL title controversy with the Chicago Staleys and George Halas.

The 1921 APFA title, the precursor to the NFL championship, went to the Chicago Staleys (later Bears) in a controversial decision. Both the Staleys and Buffalo All-Americans finished the season with a 9-1-1 record. A tiebreaker game was played, but there's disagreement on its significance. Buffalo believed it was an exhibition, while Chicago argued it counted towards the standings. The Staleys won the game, and league officials ultimately awarded them the title. This decision, known as the "Staley Swindle" by Buffalo fans, remains a point of contention.

Big thanks to Ken Crippen for sharing the information and his time. Check out the Football Learning Academy https://www.football-learning-academy.com/.

Ken has written a few books on Buffalo Pro football too. We share some links through our Amazon Associates Account that gives some proceeds to the running of Pigskin Dispatch if purchased through. Kens books include:
The Original Buffalo Bills: A History of the All-America Football Conference Team, 1946-1949.

The Oregon Ducks football program boasts a rich history dating back to 1894. Initially known as the "Webfoots," the team has evolved into a national powerhouse
synonymous with innovation and high-flying offense.  

Above is an excellent video on the football program at Oregon.

The program's early years were marked by inconsistency, but the arrival of legendary coach Hugo Bezdek in 1913 signaled a turning point. Under his guidance, Oregon claimed its first Rose Bowl victory in 1917. However, sustained success remained elusive for much of the 20th century.  

A resurgence began in the early 2000s under coach Mike Bellotti. Oregon's offensive prowess became a hallmark, culminating in a BCS National Championship appearance in 2011. The subsequent era under Chip Kelly further solidified the Ducks as a national force, characterized by fast-paced, high-scoring football.  

In recent years, Oregon has maintained its status as a Pac-12 contender while experiencing some fluctuations in success. Despite these challenges, the program's history and tradition continue to inspire a passionate fanbase and drive the team towards future triumphs.