Football History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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

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

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

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

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

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

Early football players wore tight-fitting, all-purpose pants suitable for the gym or for other athletic activities, but as the game became power-oriented in the 1890s, they added quilted pads to the front of their pants. The 1900s saw cane ribs integrated into the thigh pads to offer mechanical protection while the knees remained padded with felt or hair. — www.footballarchaeology.com

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Have you ever wondered why football pants have those strange white stripes down the sides or why they seem to get tighter and tighter with each passing season? Buckle up, football fanatics and fashion enthusiasts alike, because we're about to embark on a surprisingly stylish journey through the history of football pants! From the baggy bloomers of the early days to the sleek, high-performance gear of today, this exploration will reveal the fascinating evolution of a garment that's as much about protection as it is about (dare we say) aesthetics. Join us as we uncover the unexpected influences, technological advancements, and cultural shifts that shaped the way football pants look and function, proving that even in the rough-and-tumble world of gridiron battles, a little bit of style can go a long way.

Timothy P. Brown shares some history of the pants of gridiron players and their evolution over time.

-[b]Transcribed Conversation on Football Pants History with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes, PigSkinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. Welcome to our Tuesday and our visit with Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com, where he shares one of his recent tidbits.
Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. And boy, you have a really interesting title tonight.

Well, hopefully more than just title, but hey, obviously good to see you again. Looking forward to chatting about disintegrating football pits.

Yeah, the title is very eye-catching and makes you really want to dig into it. But you're right. The content is where the meat of the soup is here.

And it's a great stew that you cooked up. And we're anxious to hear all about this story.

Yeah, so this one, you know, is part of what I do. I mean, you know, I get my information and ideas from a lot of different places.

However, one of the things that I do is acquire old sporting goods catalogs. And, you know, I'm only interested in the ones that have football sections in them. But, you know, I come across those.

So I've got a collection of, I don't know, 30, 40 old catalogs. And so, you know, I just use those to try to understand how pads and other kinds of equipment changed over the years. The technologies, the fabrics that they were, they were used, how they were designed, you know, how they were built and kind of how they pitched to me, you know, how, you know, how they marketed them.

Well, I'm glad you glad you told us why you got them for, because I'm picturing your mailman bringing back all this mail to you. Return to senders. You're trying to order these pants, you know, a football for five dollars from a 1907 catalog or something, the J5.

And so, you know, there's a couple of the catalogs I have that still have the order forms in them. So, you know, I've always been tempted to at least photocopy it and send it in to somebody and see, see what happens. But I don't think the addresses will work for me anymore.

Probably not. Probably not. But so are the disintegrating football pants.

It's, you know, deliberately. Misleading title because, you know, people think that the pants themselves disintegrate and disappear, but it's not it's not like a tearaway jersey where I meant disintegrating in the sense of disaggregating. So it was, you know, back when football pants were first used, when people were first playing football, they wore these, you know, kind of very light knit.

You know, you know, almost, you know, they almost like the tights that, you know, I know when I run in the winter, I'm wearing tights and women are wearing yoga pants. I mean, it's that kind of that kind of thing. And I bet you wear yoga pants sometimes, too, right? I can't share that information with you right now.

Well, let's go on back into the football. Let's go back to the football. OK, sorry, I asked.

But so after that, you know, they were first wearing these tights, but then once the game got rougher and kind of that, the whole mass and momentum thing happened, and then they started wearing these. They padded the pants. And if you look at the old-time photos, initially, the fronts were quilted, you know, quilted, you know, there was horse hair or felt that got quilted into the pads.

And then then, you know, at the turn of the century, they moved to a little bit more mechanical protection, especially the thighs. And they had done it with the shins before, but they had these ribs. It was basically pieces of cane that, you know, were sewn into the into the pants.

And then, you know, backed by felt, the knees would still have horse hair or felt pads. And then you finally got to a point in the late 1910s where they added, you know. Also, the pants got high-waisted. You know, they were protecting the hips and the kidneys.

So, you know, if you see some picture of a guy with, you know, it looks like the pads are going up to his armpits. You know, that's probably, you know, 1916 to 24, something that time period. But at the same time, they were adding those high hip, that high hip look.

People were, you know, football, and they were still going through this thing about speed, speed, speed. And so there were players who were basically cutting pads out of their pants. You know, they wanted to be as light as possible, just like the players are doing now.

Right. And so so then the sporting goods manufacturers started making they started separating or disintegrating, disaggregating the pads from the pants. And in some of the early versions and this particular tidbit, I've got some images of it.

There is a big sporting goods manufacturer then called Goldsmith, and they offered what they called a. The their harness. And it was there was their padding, their inner harness is what they called it. But it was basically it was all the pads kind of in one get up or one set up that just wasn't part of the pants.

You know, but it was still kind of clunky, all in one unit from knees to thighs, to hips, to, you know, kidneys. And it probably had a tailpiece, too. I don't see it in the ads themselves or in the catalog.

So, it just seemed kind of dumb. But, you know, that's kind of what they did, you know. And they also would have liked those units.

That was kind of the beginning of them having elastic materials. So, you know, you kind of step into these things. So there was elastic going around your calves and then around your thighs.

And so that kind of held this piece in place. And then you then you slipped your pants on. So, you know, if you played football and you had either a step in girdle or a strap on girdle, you know, and then you put your pants on.

It's kind of the same sort of deal. But then, you know, somewhere in that time, late teens, or the early 20s, they started converting to somebody who got the bright idea of let's separate all the pads. They basically created pockets in the pants or pockets so that you could slip a separate knee pad or a separate thigh pad and then separate hip pads.

You know, each of those was a distinct unit. Oftentimes, guys still had knee pads; they still wore knee pads like basketball players had, you know, so they were strapped behind their knees and that kind of thing. So anyways, it's just one of those things where just this.

You know, it's like anything else; there are all these steps along the way as something progresses. So it's just interesting to look at these and say. You know, we didn't just go from the beginning, and all of a sudden, we have these great pants with, you know, today's material, you know, all those fabrics that we have today, and great pads.

You know, it was all these baby steps of just these natural fiber kinds of materials. And, you know, it was so anyways, I just found that to be a really interesting step of the disaggregation of the pants, you know, into separate units that then players could pick and choose which ones they put it, they actually wore. Yeah, that just reminds me; I had to keep looking up my wall because I must have it at the office where I work.

I have a copy of the patent of pants back, probably in that era. And it's amazing how similar those pants are in that patent from 100 years ago are so similar to the pants at least you and I wore when we played ball. You know, like you say, you had pockets for the knee pad and the thigh pad.

They didn't have snaps for the pads up around your waist, but, you know, tailbone pad and your hip pads and everything. But how similar in design they were to the laces, you know, everything to button them up and keep everything in place. You know, nowadays, I don't even know if they make the pants with pads anymore because you never see thigh pads and knee pads anymore, even though at the high school level, I believe they are.

They are mandatory, but kids will sure try to do it. So they'll just shove them down their pants and not be in a pocket, and they get all discombobulated when they get hit or hit the ground or something. So, well, you know, and the funny thing is that the original reason for knee pads was not to protect the guy wearing the knee pads.

It was to protect the guy they were tackling because they, you know, the four guys wore helmets or when they were just fairly, you know, light. You know, I always compare the early helmets. It was like, you know, the leather helmets.

It's like taking a baseball glove and putting it on your head. You know, that's kind of the level of protection and less, you know, that you receive. Right.

And so, you know, guys used to get need in the head a lot, and so that's why they, you know, people had to wear knee pads. It wasn't wasn't to protect your knees. It was to protect the guy, you know, your opponent's head.

So yeah, some of that stuff is just really fun to see. See how something like that is as simple and straightforward as a pair of pants, how that evolves and, you know, and, you know, again, those pants back then were they're all made of canvas, or they used to call it moleskin. They used to call them, you know, players, moleskins.

They refer to that a lot. So, these are all cotton fabrics that absorb water. For example, going out of style, cotton just absorbs water. And so on a wet day, those pants got heavy as anything, you know.

And then you think about, you know, trying to they weren't form fitting in the first place and then, you know, they're waterlogged. So they're dragging all over the place. And, you know, especially in the 20s, you see photos of on the front of the thigh.

A lot of times, you see these little two patches on either thigh. They're like little blocks, little squares. And those were just reinforcements because, you know, a lot of manufacturers, they created these tie systems where, you know, that is like a shoe string or a piece of leather that you would tie, you'd tie your pants to your thighs and then that little patch just kind of reinforced the fabric.

So it didn't tear easily. Right. So if you see those old photos and you see those two patches, that's just, you know, they didn't have elastics, you know, so that's the, you know, you just tied your pants in place, you know, just like kids would like, you know, if we had a loose pair of pants, we'd take athletic tape, you know, and tape it around, right.

They did it with those strings and the reinforced patches. Wow. That is some great stuff.

Tim, you have these tidbits with these interesting pieces of football knowledge and football of yesteryear that come out each and every day. Maybe you could share with the listeners how they, too, can enjoy these great tidbits that you have. Yeah.

So, you know, just go to footballarchaeology.com. You can sign up very easily. Just subscribe, and you'll get an email every night with some kind of story about the football past. You can also follow me on Twitter.

And then, you know, I've got a couple of different books available on Amazon. So those are described on the site as well. So, you know, just take a look.

There's some good stuff if this kind of thing interests you. And then actually, for those who do paid subscriptions, you know, I send you a copy of my latest book, Putt-Hut Hike. And, you know, just send that out to to those that subscribe, paid subscribers.

Well, that is an excellent, excellent deal to take advantage of, folks. If you haven't read one of Tim's books, that's a great way to get involved with it. And I'm sure you'll be wanting more that you can find on Amazon and touch base with them each and every night with some of his interesting topics.

So, Tim, thanks again. And we will talk to you again next Tuesday. Hey, very good.

Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

---

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

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

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

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

-Transcribed Conversation of Timothy Brown on the Otto Graham Comics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, yeah, well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Timothy Brown:
Very good and sleep well.

---

We are so used to scoring in football being a touchdown equating to six-points with the opportunity for another point or two available with a successful PAT. Likewise a field goal is worth three and so on. But what if we learn that football has not always had the tally in that way with points?

Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology joins us again this week to educate us on another aspect of football. This week we chat about the evolution of football scoring and the time before the current point-based system. Timothy Brown's FootballArchaeology.com has a daily football factoid that he shares that is really quite interesting in a short read. They preserve football history in a very unique way 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.

Of course, this discussion all stems from Tim's original article titled: Football Before Points-Based Scoring.

-Transcribed Conversation on Football Points-Based Scoring 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 our Tuesday event, what everybody's been waiting for: Football Archaeology with author Timothy Brown. Tim Brown, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin; thank you once again. I look forward to chatting and seeing what we find out today. Yeah, no, Tim, you have some really interesting topics that come up on your tidbits and some of the other works that you put out.

And I know you have a lot of different avenues where you're bringing in information for your research. But one of them that I know you've mentioned in the past, and maybe go into a little bit more detail, is the collection that you have of some college yearbooks. And maybe you can share a little bit about how you get information from those.

Yeah, so I actually only have about I probably have about a dozen college yearbooks that I physically own. But I've got a couple thousand that are, you know, PDFs. And then I subscribe to a thing called eyearbooks.com. So if I'm able to download them, I download them, you know, from university sites, just because then it's just handier, it's easier to search through them.

But you know, basically, what I do is if I'm watching a football game or kind of listening to the news, but not really paying full attention, a lot of times I'm just, you know, scrolling through college yearbooks, looking for images. You know, it could be the artwork in, you know, the athletic or football-related artwork, but mostly, I'm looking for images that just show something about the game at the time that is not, you know, it's no longer part of the game, or it just it illustrates a concept. And other times, it's just, hey, it's just a really cool-looking image, right? I mean, some of the photographs are just great.

And so, you know, what I do is I just have a way of pulling those off; I kind of catalog them with a brief description. And then, you know, sometime down the road, when I'm looking for a topic for a tidbit, or, you know, for an article that I'm writing, you know, I kind of scroll through my items to do searches on them. And, you know, so I've just got handy, you know, I've probably got, I know, I've looked at over, you know, 3100 yearbooks.

So and, I can tell you which issue is for every school, maybe 140 different schools now. So, you know, and then I just, you know, basically, I've got them available in the little library. So anyways, that's, you know, a lot of the way I illustrate stories or generate stories, it's just looking through these old images.

Like, oh, yeah, I haven't talked about this one yet. So let's do a story about it. So a lot of times, the images that you're collecting are, whether it's through PDF or from the yearbooks in your own collection, those are your inspiration for some of your posts and tidbits.

Yeah, you know, because there's the unfortunate thing with the yearbooks, there really isn't a good way to just search through all these yearbooks. So, you know, in some cases, I know, for instance, that I'm, you know, I'm writing about a particular topic; I came across an article while I was doing some other research. And then I'll go to that yearbook, you know, that team's yearbooks, to see if there are images that relate to the article I'm writing.

But, you know, certainly a lot of times, I'm just going in, you know, I found, you know, in all in, in all the yearbooks that I've got, I found two images of the punt out process, you know, so, you know, basically a part of the game that disappeared in 1922. And, but I found two punt outs, you know, and it's just, it was great, just because, you know, if you didn't know what a punt out was, you wouldn't even know what the heck that image was, or what it was representing. But I, you know, I spotted these two, I think one in Texas, and one, one was a Chicago game, maybe might have been an Illinois yearbook.

But anyway, you know, it's just kind of cool stuff, just finding these things that, you know, at least it shows, hey, this really did exist. Right. It wasn't just a story.

That's interesting. And you bring something to light that many of us don't know. I mean, even somebody like myself, I learned something new almost every day.

And I'm, I'm quite a bit in the books and newspapers and everything else in football history, but I learned something from your tidbits each and every day. So I think listeners, you can too, we'll give you some information near the end of this program. So, and it's in the show notes as well.

So you can get connected with Tim and the great tidbits he has each and every day. But today's topic, we're talking about old football, but we're talking about even a little older than your, uh, the pun outs of, uh, you know, 1922 when they ended, uh, going to football before points-based scoring. And, uh, I think that's an interesting topic you had back on September 9th. It is one of your tidbits, and I hope that you could chat about that a little bit tonight.

Yeah. So, you know, uh, you know, football, as we, as everybody knows, is derived from rugby. And when the, uh, intercollegiate football association met in, uh, 1876, they basically adopted the rugby rule book with three or four exceptions.

You know, they did change a couple of things. Um, and one of the things was just kind of renaming, you know, they named whatever rugby call it, they called it touchdown instead. Um, but so the scoring was just, it's not what we think of as a normal scoring system today.

So I'm going to read this just because it's kind of bizarre, but, um, rule number seven from that rule book defined, you know, the scoring process in one; it says a match shall be decided by the majority of touchdowns. A goal, a goal shall be equal to four touchdowns, but in case of a tie, a goal kick from a touchdown shall take precedence over four touchdowns. I mean, that just sounds like total gobbledygook, but you know, back then, the goal or the purpose of football, what you were trying to do was to kick the ball through the uprights, and a touchdown was really just a means to an end.

It wasn't the end. It's, you know, for the most part, it wasn't the end itself. So you wanted to kick; you wanted to score a touchdown because then you got a free kick at the goal.

Um, and you know, you also, um, and so, you know, now we all know that the touchdown is what really counts, you know, at six points in the, the kick after the touchdown is only worth one. But back then, the game was very much a kicking game. Um, and so, you know, the value came in, in, uh, kicking goals.

And so, you know, it was basically, um, you know, it was this equivalency-based system. It wasn't a straight-point process. Like we, I think virtually every sport used today is just this kind of gobbledygook: a goal shall be equal to four touchdowns.

Um, so, you know, so basically, you'd have four touchdowns to add the same value as just one goal kicked through the, um, you know, through the uprights. Uh, however, if you, a goal kicked from touchdown, meaning a goal kicked after the touchdown, if two teams ended up tied, one had four touchdowns, the other had a goal kicked after the touchdown, then that the latter team would win. That's what the last part of that rule meant.

Okay. So the kick, the kick, uh, took the kick being good was more important than the four touchdowns, which equal the same amount of points. Yes, because it was; it came the kick, and the kick came after a touchdown.

Okay. Gotcha. You know, as opposed to a goal from the field, which would have just equaled the goal.

Now I know you have this, uh, in your book, uh, how football became a football, but I'm not recollecting the year right off hand. When did that sort of change from that, that, goal, uh, scored to more of a point-based? Yeah.

So 1883. So still, you know, very early on in the game. And once that occurred, then, um, a goal from the field, what we call field goal.

So as a scrimmage kicked goal could, could have been dropped. Well, at that point it would have all been dropped kicks, but that was worth five points. The goal from touchdown or try after touchdown was worth four points and a touchdown was worth two.

So, in effect, the field goals were five. Um, and then the combination of a touchdown and the kick afterward was six points, right? So, you know, it kind of was making a touchdown worth one point. Right.

Uh, and, and then, you know, safety was one point that year. Um, and then, you know, things, they kept tweaking it as, basically, people became more interested in moving the ball down the field and scoring touchdowns as opposed to kicking goals. Then they kept ratcheting up, um, the value of the touchdown, um, relative to the field goal.

And part of that, too, was just the, you know, they just, they felt, you know, that football was a team game, and they didn't want so much of the point value resting on the ability of a kicker. They wanted, you know, the ability of all 11 to show through. And so the, you know, so they were, they kept adjusting the, the point values until, you know, basically 1912 is when, when we got to our current scoring system, not including two-point conversions and, and, uh, you know, some of the defensive, uh, you know, the one point safety and defensive scores after, you know, extra points, those kinds of things.

Well, we're certainly glad that they did, uh, change it to the way it is now with a touchdown being more, uh, important than, than the field goal and the extra point, because it really changed the landscape of the game and made it a more exciting game and the great game it is today. So, yeah. And it's, you know, it's always, uh, I think especially Europeans make fun of us for having a game called football, where the foot really isn't as big a part of the game as it used to be, but it once was, you know, that that's, that's for sure.

And we just take it for granted. We don't even think about the foot and football being related to the foot. Really.

We just, it's just football. Yeah. So yeah.

Yeah. Very interesting. Tim, why don't you share now? We promised earlier that you would share where, uh, people could get their own subscription or get their own daily dose of your tidbits and, uh, give them the information, please.

Yeah. So, uh, I published a tidbit every day, uh, on, uh, football, archaeology.com, a couple of times a month. I'll publish some other long-form articles.

And then I also published the links to, you know, your, um, your podcast, uh, on the site. So it's football archaeology.com. You can also find me on Twitter under the football archaeology name. And if you were intrigued enough by our conversation about punt outs, there is a story about punt outs that I wrote, I don't know, two years ago, something like that.

So it explains that whole process. So, um, on the, on the front page, there's one of those little magnifying glass search functions. And so you just type in punt and it'll be, you know, it'll pop up without, without an issue.

Okay. Tim Brown, footballarchaeology.com. We thank you once again for sharing your knowledge, your wisdom, and your daily tidbits. And, uh, we'll hopefully be talking to you again next week.

Okay. Very good. Thanks again.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

---

Our friend historian Timothy P. Brown recently wrote about the exciting variation of high school football played in less populated areas where each team field six players rather than the normal eleven.

Born in the heart of the Great Depression, six-man football emerged as a testament to American ingenuity and the unwavering spirit of small-town communities. Its story is one of adaptation, resilience, and the enduring passion for the gridiron.

-From Necessity to Innovation:

In 1933, the harsh realities of the Depression hit small Nebraska towns like Chester hard. With dwindling student populations, many schools struggled to field full eleven-man football teams. Enter Stephen Epler, a resourceful superintendent who saw an opportunity amidst the hardship. Inspired by basketball and tennis, he envisioned a modified version of football played with six players on each side, allowing even the smallest schools to compete.

-Birth of a Game:

Epler's brainchild quickly gained traction. The first six-man game was played on a crisp September night in 1934, drawing a thousand spectators to witness the clash between the combined teams of Hardy-Chester and Belvidere-Alexandria. The game, a 19-19 tie, proved the concept viable, and six-man football began its ascent across the plains.

-Spreading the Game:

Word of the innovative game spread like wildfire. Texas adopted six-man in 1938, followed by states like Oklahoma, Kansas, and Montana. Soon, the gridiron echoed with the cheers of six-man fans from coast to coast.

-Six-Man Football 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 once again, it's Tuesday, and we love to go into that footballarcheology.com in the mind of Timothy P. Brown, its author, to talk about some great football that might be off a little bit on the beaten path of what we normally get to discuss in the realm of football. But Tim brings it to us so eloquently each and every day with his daily tidbits.

Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen. Darin, hey, thank you. Thanks for having me back.

And I'm not sure about the eloquence thing, but I definitely like to kind of chase down odd tales. It was on my Word of the Day calendar, so I had to throw it in there somewhere. Well, you used it perfectly.

Okay, I'm glad I pronounced it correctly. That's off to a good start.

That's good. Before I fumble some other words during this, that's the way it usually works out. But Tim, you had one back in mid-January, a tidbit that came out daily that talked about six-man football and some of the origins of that style of play.

And I'd love it if you could chat about that a little bit. Yeah, so one of the things that I like thinking about is how the game can be played differently. So maybe a year and a half, two years ago, I wrote a story about how touch football and flag football developed.

And then you have the Canadian game and whatever. There's different to play this game, the same generic game. And so what was happening is the origins of six-man football go back to the 1930s, so countries in the depression.

And we were still a much more rural country. But not everybody had working vehicles, and there weren't two cars in the household or anything like that. And so people just couldn't get around as easily.

And so the combination of factors led to the fact that there were lots and lots of very small high schools in the country. And so, while schools wanted to have organized athletics for their students, just the sheer numbers didn't always make sense for that to happen. And especially when it came to football.

So I'm going to cite a couple of numbers just because I think kind of reinforces the case. But six-man football was developed by a teacher and coach at a high school in Nebraska, a guy named Stephen Epler. And so Nebraska at the time had 505 high schools, but only 218 or 43% played football.

And so the problem was a lot of them just had about 300 schools with fewer than 100 students. So when you think about that many schools with less than 100 students, then just to get 11 guys, I mean, to scrimmage, you'd need 22. So you need half of the school, 50 kids, 50 males presumably.

And then half of them, you'd want to be out there for practice every day. And it just didn't work out. And it wasn't, you know, Nebraska wasn't alone.

It was like at the time there were 24,000 high schools in the country, 18,000 played basketball, but only 8,000 played football. So it kind of just kind of showed there was an appetite for sports, but football needed a lot of equipment relative to other sports, especially basketball. And the numbers just weren't there for a lot of schools.

So this guy devised a game in this like 33 or 34, I believe it was. So he devises a game with six players, you know, so they played on a field that was 80 by 40. And then like they kick off from the 20.

Teams had to have three players on the line of scrimmage. That meant, and then they had, you know, a quarterback and, you know, two backs. And, like, the quarterback could take the snap, but he had to get rid of it, you know, kind of like the old style of football where the quarterback had a lateral or, you know, pass it to somebody.

And then, you know, initially, the center wasn't eligible, and even the quarterback wasn't necessarily eligible, but, you know, that got resolved pretty quickly. So basically, he had a game where every player was out and became eligible for the pass. Everybody could, you know, you could come up with some kind of play where everybody could run with it.

Everybody was needed on defense, you know, and, you know, in effect, what you had was a center, two ends and three backs. I mean, that's really kind of the way the game was played. So you got rid of four of the real skill positions, the offensive linemen, and then, you know, they just went off and played.

And then the other side of it was that they had, you know, money, which was a real issue because of the cost of the equipment. So a lot of the sporting goods manufacturers, I mean, you know, Epler wanted to devise a game where you didn't need much equipment. At the time, not everybody wore helmets anyway.

And so, and then the sporting goods manufacturers basically came out with a whole line of equipment, and a number of them did this, you know, kind of using lower quality materials to make the helmets, you know, less padding, using canvas rather than moleskin or a lower grade leather, you know, so kind of anything they could do to cut the cost, they did so. But, you know, you look at their catalogs from the 30s, they're just, you know, there's three, four, five pages of just six-man football gear that they sold. So, you know, it ended up that this game became very popular, you know, and it was played in, you know, like 40 of the states eventually, you know, had enough teams to play.

And, you know, so they had high school officials and coaches, organizations, everything, you know, included the six-man game. And then, you know, eventually, I think, you know, there were some places where six men, they were big enough, the school started consolidating, you know, you'd have these schools, and they're named after like the four villages or whatever, you know, a lot of rural schools are like that. And so, they end up, you know, so then there was an eight-man game and a seven-man game, you know, there have been variations, and there still are, you know, teams play, I think, in high school right now, it's anywhere from nine to six-man, you know, games.

I think Michigan, I think we've got eight. Yeah, I think that's still, I know, in the National Federation rule book, at least six years ago, when I got my last copy of it when I was still officiating, there's still a section of back for eight-man football, which is very popular in the Midwest, like you said, Oklahoma, Texas, probably Nebraska, where there's a little bit more rural than up north and east and far west. So, yeah.

And like in Michigan, the upper peninsula, I think, is where a fair amount of that football is played because they just, it's just more difficult to get to other schools, too. Yeah, that's understandable. So, yeah.

So, I don't know, it's just one of those things that's just an interesting slice that gave kids the ability to play football under fundamentally similar conditions, you know, by reducing the fewer guys on a smaller field, the six-man, the original six-man game, there was each player had 10% more square footage than in the traditional 11 man game. And if you compare that, you know, when you include end zones, Canadian football has 40% more space than American football, you know? So, the six-man game was pretty comparable, in many respects, to playing regulation football. So, it's pretty cool.

Yeah. Definitely some cool stuff. Now, I don't know if you've heard this before, but somebody was telling me, somebody, I had on the show probably about a year ago, and I'm trying to place my, I can't remember exactly who was telling me, but they were telling me some of the roots of the eight-man football were from playing on the naval ships because they had limited space and, you know, limited people that could play.

And they were, I think, aircraft carriers or something. They were playing some kind of ball there, and they reformatted, you know, the number of players to fit that. But I don't remember the details; I don't know if you ever heard that or not.

Yeah. Yeah. I've never heard that.

I mean, I've done a lot of, you know, research and writing on military football. And, you know, typically, they just waited until they got into port, you know, and they had all the land, you know, that they needed. But, you know, in the Pacific, you know, a lot of, you know, kind of recreational islands that, you know, troops kind of, you know, went and recovered in Iran, and they had big football leagues and everything going on there, you know, right, you know, during the middle of the war.

So, and there were big teams playing in Hawaii and everything. So anyways, yeah, I've never heard the story. It doesn't mean it, you know, I'll have to look it up and I'll shoot you something on it.

Cause I know, I know I got it somewhere, but look that up. Well, yeah, I'll definitely follow it up too. It sounds interesting.

Yeah. But Tim, before we let you go here, we appreciate the history on six man football and some of the aspects of it. Why don't you share with folks where they can get your daily tidbits like this, like six man football for some of these unique items associated with football each and every day too, so they can enjoy them.

Sure. So I publish every day, seven o'clock Eastern on footballarchaeology.com. And if you subscribe, so you can subscribe for free. I'm more than happy to for the paid subscriptions, too, but you know, you can subscribe for free; check it out.

And basically what's going to happen is you would get an email every day with the story. You can still click on it and go online, or you can go directly to the site to view the today's story or any of the, the archive of stories. The other option is to follow me on Twitter.

And I'm just, you know, still footballarchaeology on Twitter. There's an English guy that has, you know, soccer related stuff using more or less the same name, but mine, football and archeology are merged together. So, you know, you'll find me.

A green logo with a leather helmet on it. That's like 1918 leather helmets embedded in it. It's always good stuff, folks.

It's worth a great read every day at 7 PM. And it's usually a pretty short read, you know, usually a minute or two, maybe tops. So, some great images and quotes and all kinds of great stuff to go along with the great story.

So Tim, we really thank you for joining us here and hope to talk to you again next week. Okay. Very good.

Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

---

In a weekly visit from author and gridiron historian Timothy P. Brown, he enlightens us about a team of unique individuals that loved the game of football and, despite obstacles, played the game and won. This group was from the Kentucky School of the Blind in the early 20th century, as yes, even though their sight was impaired, these fellas had a great time and won some ball games.

-Transcription of the Kent School for the Blind 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 going to portal back in time to football archaeology and Timothy P. Brown because it's Tuesday and Tim's going to talk about a very interesting and unique school that played football so many years ago. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey Darin, thank you once again. Glad to be here and like we have a pretty cool story to talk about today.

Yeah, I had never heard of this one until I read your tidbit back on November 20th. And your title of that tidbit was really a high catcher, football at the Kentucky School for the Blind. And I said, okay, he's got to have some kind of an angle on this, literally mean, you know, this is a school for the Blind, but I guess it was.

So I'll let you explain it. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, so that was just the first thing I could even think about when because this actually involved young men playing football who were blind. I mean, I think it's just a story of courage, you know, it's just, but it's also just, it's such a cool, cool thing that these kids just wanted to play, you know, and so they found a way, you know, they found a way to play and, and, you know, then obviously they had opponents, and all of their opponents were sighted teams. And so anyways, it's just, you know, kind of a cool thing.

And so it's just, you know, it's one of those, I mean, I remember, you know, as a kid, you know, I started playing football, and I guess, you know, organized like sixth grade, you know, we had a grade school team and then high school and dah, dah, dah. And so, you know, and there, there were times, you know, if you're going, you know, I was a late developer. And so, you know, there are times when you're, you know, you're kind of intimidated, you're scared, you know, in playing, you know, or you're just, you know, you just happen to be positioned against some 4,000-pound mammoth, you know.

And so, so it just takes guts to play the game. Right. And absolutely.

These, these kids were out there playing, and they couldn't even see their opponents, you know. And so it's just, I just think it's, you know, it's remarkable that they were still willing to get out there and play, you know. And so, you know, I guess the other thing for me as I think about it, you know, tend to think about like accommodations for people with, you know, various types of, of, you know, disabilities or limitations of whatever sort.

But they, you know, it just, this story tells you that there were accommodations made back then, too. So, and, you know, these may have, I think I, in some of the newspaper articles, it's clear that you know, they did things like, you know, the, the team, the opponent had to run between the tackles or between the ends when they were on offense. Tim, if you don't mind, I'm not sure if we mentioned to the listener what timeframe we're talking about; we're talking 1904 to 1912.

So this is 130, 120 years ago. So this is a, you know, so really fascinating that you know, it'd be remarkable in today's age, but this is really incredible for the game that they were playing back then, too. Yeah.

Yeah. I apologize for not mentioning that. I kind of had the picture of the players in my, in my mind, but you know, if you're just listening to the podcast, you don't see those pictures, but yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, these kids are, so like, you know, what they had the, the opposing team had to run between the tackles. They were, they, if they were going to run the ball, then they made out a certain call. I think they just said hike, but if they were going to punt the ball, then they yelled punt.

And so the, you know, the kids on defense would know, you know, what was going on, but you know, and so it's kind of like, okay, well, how did these kids play? And the report suggests they kind of had a certain sense, right? That, you know, just as like, defensive linemen, for instance, you know, are taught to react to the pressure coming from the right or to the left, you know, kind of, you resist the pressure, whatever direction it's coming from. And I'm sure they had developed a lot of that sense themselves, probably even before they started playing football.

But so that was one of the things, you know, that they were able to just, you know, sense pressure. The other, I think, is as long as the ball had to be run between the tackles or between the ends, you know when these guys were on defense, then it's kind of more like, you know, it's a little bit more like wrestling, you know. So, like, you know, I wrestled when I was younger.

And so I, you know, I can see that being, you know, it's easier to think of a blind wrestler being successful, right? Just because it's a, you know, sport of close quarters and very technique oriented, you know, and you're physically grabbing one another, you know, all the time. And so that makes sense to me. But football still just seems like crazy.

You know, it's like, how do you? You don't even know if somebody's coming at you until they come at you, right? And just tackling the ball player or the ball carrier, you know, you know, it's kind of like they must have just grabbed anybody that was coming, right? And yet they apparently were, I mean, they won a bunch of games, like half of them. It might be friendly fire, or it might be your teammate going down. Yeah, that's right.

You know, you have a really interesting photo on footballarchaeology.com on this is one of the challenges and I, you've got me. So I'm looking at these photos a lot closer and trying to pick up things. And one thing I looked at is it had to be like challenge.

Number one is they're lining up. There's sort of a line on the field where these guys are lined up, and there's the far left end, which has his hands beyond the line. The ball's probably, I don't know, a quarter of a yard shy of the line, and the right end is probably almost two yards deep off the line.

So they're sort of cattywampus to the line. So, probably staying on the side. And I'm sure maybe, you know, I always look at it from an officiating lens for something, but I'm trying to get these guys to line up so that they're legal, legal formation.

Yeah. They just had some challenges there. I'm sure.

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, I noticed that in that image too. I just was like, I'm not going to write anything about that.

I'll leave that one alone. Just let everybody pick that pick up on themselves. But, you know, so I think this is some of the accommodations I think was probably like when you were a kid, and you were on the playground at the park half the time, there'd be one team had six guys and the other guy, other team had five or someone team had the best kid, and everybody else stunk or, you know, whatever.

So that's why you have all the time quarterback, Tim. Yeah. And he was out the sides.

Yeah. But, but then there were but these, so I just have to imagine there were things like where, like when you're a kid, you negotiated that stuff with the other kids because you wanted it to be fair and competitive. Otherwise it wasn't fun to play.

Right. So, you know, they probably had something where there was a process where these guys got lined up correctly, you know, so they're on side and, you know, then they went from there, but still just, you know, yeah, I think it's just kind of an incredible story for these kids. And I think we mentioned it briefly on another previous podcast, but the Kentucky School for the Blind completed at least one forward pass in one of their games, which is just nuts to think about.

That's amazing. Now, in one part of this tidbit, you explain how they would kick extra points, and maybe you could talk about that a little bit because I thought that was really interesting. Yeah.

So what they did was they had, so back then, extra points were a free kick. Right. So, so what? That meant there was no snap, nothing.

It was just, you know, like, so, so the one guy. What we call a kickoff today is a free kick. Yes.

Start each half, and after a score, there is a free kick. Just a, yeah. Or like, you know, somebody, it's still part of the game.

If you catch a, if you fair catch a punt, you have the legal right to kick the ball from there to try to get a field goal. Correct. And so, uh, so back then the, the, the team that just scored, um, assuming they had scored near the middle of the field or near the goalpost, they could basically just walk it straight out as far back as they wanted to.

And then they then kick it from there. So then once they would get the kicker, and the holder lined up, then the, um, there was one of the teammates would stand between the goalposts and get, and then, you know, behind them, and he would, uh, yell towards the kicker and then two other teammates with sticks would hit the goalposts and that the combination of those noises would allow the kicker to kind of center where he's trying to kick the ball. And apparently, they made about half their field goals, too.

So, or extra points. So, you know, I mean, it's just, again, I mean, it cited people didn't do that well, uh, with, with, uh, you know, kicking accuracy back then. So, it's actually, you know, pretty darn amazing what they did.

Definitely is. I thought that was great. It was a great story.

Especially like you said, the, the part where they completed a forward pass, I mean, that, that had to be so well-timed when we talk about timing between a quarterback and a receiver. Now, you, you would have to put it right where a guy's expecting it or at the right time or, you know, it had to be like a basket catch, you know, you gotta, gotta believe. Right.

Yeah. That's, that's great stuff. This is, is that's what makes these tidbits so interesting because they're just such off-the-wall topics sometimes that, uh, you know, you, you grab from an old newspaper or book or the postcards or whatever, and, uh, really makes for some interesting reading and, and makes you scratch your head sometimes and sit there in amazement like this one is because these, uh, these guys really did some amazing things.

So really appreciate you chatting about that and, uh, and sharing this with us. So it's a good story. Yeah, definitely is.

And Tim, uh, maybe if you could share with the listeners where they too can, uh, pick up on some of the tidbits that you have each and every day, that'd be a great thing. Yeah. So, uh, footballarchaeology.com is my website.

I post a new story or what I call a tidbit every day at seven o'clock Eastern. Periodically I post other, you know, longer form stories as well. I also post it on, on Facebook or not Facebook, but Twitter.

And so, you know, just a reminder, if you're, um, if you go find the site, you know, you can, you know, now there are, I don't know, 400 some different articles sitting out there. So, um, you know, just use a little magnifying glass to search, uh, search whatever topic you want and see what's out there and, um, have at it. I mean, if you like it, then sign up, subscribe, and, uh, you get the email every night at seven o'clock.

It's great stuff and, uh, really makes your football brain work each and every night and, uh, really enjoyable. So, uh, Tim Brown, thank you very much. footballarchaeology.com is the site, and we'll talk to you again next Tuesday.

Okay. Very good. Thank you, sir.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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

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

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown Murder Football Field

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigScanDispatch.com. Welcome again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to another Tuesday.

We have Timothy P. Brown here from FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Hey, Darin.
Look forward to chatting.

It's a potentially difficult topic that we're going to talk about, but. I'll let that story develop as we go. Yeah, this one is kind of surprising.

Usually, your titles and your articles are a little bit lighter. And your title from early October was Murder on the Football Field. A little bit of a mystery hangs over with that.

I wanted to read this article like any good Agatha Christie or Alfred Hitchcock. I'm sure a lot of the other readers of FootballArcheology.com did, too. So we are glad you were here to tell us about this instance in this article.

Yeah, so, you know, one of the things I enjoy doing, you know, is kind of set up to some of these some of our discussions on your podcast is to just kind of talk about, well, how did I come across this issue or idea or information? And so this is one where, you know, I'm always looking at old RPPCs, so real photo postcards. And some of them I buy just, you know, because the guys are wearing some old equipment or, you know, the gear they have is just so horrible that it's just, you know, kind of almost amazing that they decided to play. And other times, it's just photographically, or something is appealing to it.

So, in this case, I came across an RPPC. It showed through the backfield for the Bethany College team in West Virginia from 1910. And I thought the picture was amusing because they're standing on the field.

You can see the goalposts in the background, and not too far behind the goalposts, but not too far to the left is a school building. With a bunch of glass windows, I just thought, OK, well, hopefully they had an accurate kicker. But, you know, if they didn't, then they broke some windows.

That's actually what got me interested in the image. But then, a lot of times, what I do is, you know, I knew it was identified as 1910 Bethany. So I did a quick search on them and found out that in one of their games, an opposing player had died.

And so then I said, OK, I'm going to bid on it. So I had a thing, and eventually, you know, I got it. And so then that's when I really kind of dove into the research.

It just did enough to know, OK, I could probably make a story out of this. So, I mean, what happened is that Bethany College, a small school in West Virginia, they were playing for the second time they were playing West Virginia University in football that year. And, you know, they'd lost, I think, a tie to a close game earlier in the year.

And so this is like, you know, if there's a 10-game season, there's a 7th or 8th game of the season. And the game had been pretty chippy. And, in fact, the Bethany coach had complained to the officials about, you know, just some of the behavior in the game.

And so, with a couple of minutes left, Virginia's quarterback, a guy named Monk, kicks a field goal to seal the game, make it 5-0. So, Bethany was pretty much going to be out of it. And then, several plays later, Monk is still on the field.

He gets by a Bethany player, falls to the ground, is carried off the field, and dies a couple of hours later. So now, you know, some of the initial reports came out. So, you know, any time a player died in a game, and especially in, you know, this is a fairly big-time game, you know, it got publicized.

So there were, you know, if you looked at almost any small town newspaper in the country, it had a short article about this player who was killed in a football game. The initial articles said that the umpire had kicked the Bethany player, a guy named McCoy and that he had seen McCoy hit Monk from behind. And then, so he thought it was deliberate.

And so then he kicked him out of the game for that. And then, you know, basically, right away, the local coroner sets up a coroner's inquest. It's going to be scheduled for a couple of days later, and he orders McCoy to appear. He wasn't arrested, but he was the next thing to being arrested.

And the whole thing was, OK, he was the coroner was viewing this as a case of he was investigating it as a murder. And so obviously that made it, you know, the headlines all the more dramatic. And, you know, pretty much right away, both schools canceled the rest of their football season.

So then, when it comes time to do the inquest, McCoy shows up. But by that time, the umpire was kind of walking back to some of his earlier comments. So, yes, he had kicked McCoy out of the game, but he was no longer saying, well, I saw him hit from behind.

And then other people, nobody on either team said, saw the hit. But there were people in the crowd who testified at this inquest that. McCoy hit Monk from in front, and it was basically a standard football play.

So nothing, you know, nothing unusual from that from that vantage point. Now, then, what was revealed in this inquest is that Monk. Had a history of concussions and even beyond anything that you can even think happened today.

The previous year, he had in a game, he had been hit, and he went down unconscious. The newspapers varied whether he was unconscious for two days or two weeks, but he was out of it for a significant amount of time. And then, you know, basically, the doctor said you cannot play football anymore.

His parents told him you could not play football anymore, but he went back to school for his senior year, went out for the football team, and, you know, because he's, you know, this hard-nosed kid or whatever, the team looks to be captain, you know. So, so basically, you know, once that testimony came out that, you know, the coroner is like, well, this is an accidental death. Right.

You know, you can't, you know, even if this, even if McCoy had done something dastardly, you know, Monk was playing when he shouldn't have been. And, you know, he had this history of, you know, significant head injury, and yet he went out there and played again. You know, so anyways, you know, it's one of those where, you know, there's some other little extenuating circumstances.

But I think for me, then, you know, I don't recall seeing other instances where, you know, somebody was being, was potentially charged with murder for activity on a football field. I'm sure there are other situations, you know, I probably should do some searching for that. But it kind of raises the question of what would it take to, you know, so what would have to happen today for people to leave the field and, or, you know, folks in the stands and look at it and say, that guy ought to be charged with murder, you know, in the event somebody was killed as a result of being hit or struck, you know, on a football field.

So, you know, you know, in my mind, I see certain, I'm not advocating necessarily for the murder charge, but I'm not advocating against it. But there are some of the targeting hits that I think are horribly foul, you know, in terms of the way that some, you know, players are hitting one another. There, I've seen cases, more at youth level, actually, than among older kids, where somebody grabs a face mask and is literally like spinning another guy around, you know, twisting his neck, that kind of thing.

What would you know if that happened? And then you got, you know, another case would be, you know, sometimes it's these fights, you know, and somebody's helmet comes off. But if somebody took their helmet and swung it, hit another guy who doesn't have his helmet on, you know, if you hit him in the head. It's sort of that Miles Garrett, Mason Rudolph from a Steelers-Browns game, probably about four or five years ago.

I think that was a famous case of that with Miles Garrett swinging the helmet at an uncapped Mason Rudolph or whatever, whatever happened before that because they were talking about maybe pressing charges there, and it didn't even make contact, you know, for assault. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, you think about it, it's like, OK, how far does the fact that you're playing a football game absolve you from your behavior? You know, behavior that, you know, I mean, you played the game.

One of the great things about it is you can go run into a guy, slam him, and take him to the ground, and it's all sanctioned. Everybody's happy that you did it, right? You can't do that on the street, right? And you can't do it in your classroom. You get to do it on the football field.

And yet where, you know, where does one cross the line? I just think it's an interesting question. Thankfully, you know, it's not one that we have to face, at least, you know, certainly very often, but, you know, the potential is out there, you know, that so it's kind of, I mean, it's not that you have to answer the question. Still, it's just, you know, to think about what would it take, what would it take to for somebody, you'd say, OK, that that guy ought to be charged with murder for that. Yeah, are you going to solve this mystery? I don't know if I want to be the judge and jury on that one. That's yeah, I mean, I think there's, you know, especially nowadays, we have video on everything from little kids' games.

You have probably three or four parents filming it. Everything's filmed, though, you know, and you get the NFL games. You got forty-five cameras from every angle of the stadium looking at it and, you know, five drones and whatever.

You know, so I think you can probably figure out what's going on pretty much on almost any football game, especially major college and professional and probably a lot of the other ones, too. So, I think you may have more video evidence if a crime happened on a football field than you would maybe even at a bank. You know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good point. I bet it was like, you know, very few games, you know, were filmed and certainly not a Bennie West Virginia game, you know, I'm right just wasn't going to happen, you know.

So, yeah, it's. Yeah, yeah, I mean, just another one of those other examples of where technology just changes, changes the questions and the answers and. So.

Yeah, and I think it's crazy, crazy, crazy; I think there's more of a camaraderie in football, maybe in the more modern eras when there's a brotherhood, and everybody understands, you know, that you're all on the same side and you can get somebody can get hurt badly if you do a cheap shot because you see, you know, teammates and opponents come together when somebody goes down. I think even more so than this era where people just, you know, wanted to hurt you sometimes, and that was just the way the game was at that period of time. Yeah, so I think it's a little bit more. It's calmed down a little bit, and people understand a little bit more that they can really do some damage to somebody.

Yeah, and I think, you know, obviously the the protective gear and everything is much better, obviously, all the concussion protocols are we're in a lot of space. Both have bigger, faster, stronger athletes. So, you know, it's.

That getting that goes on is really pretty incredible; that's true, and people are still getting hurt, and sometimes even death is occurring, and that's a bad thing, too. So hopefully, we will get some technology, rules, and techniques and try to prevent people from getting permanently injured and, you know, even worse. So, hopefully, that's in the future for football.

So, Tim, we really appreciate you bringing up this story; I mean, it brings up you bring up a lot of questions; people are going to be thinking about this, I know I'll be thinking about this and something that happened, you know, one hundred and ten, one hundred fifteen years ago and, you know, bringing some light to it and bringing some memory of this young man that passed away playing a game that he loved, even to the point where he knew he was in danger playing it and did it anyway and to his own detriment. And, you know, it all comes through just seeing a building with a bunch of windows and a goalpost by it. And you're really interesting.

So, yeah, you have some interesting things like this each day in your tidbits on footballarchaeology.com. And maybe you could share with the listeners how they, too, can participate in reading this and enjoying your work. Yeah, so, you know, the easiest, best, and my preferred way would be that somebody goes to goes to the site, you know, www.footballarchaeology.com, subscribe, you'll get an email every night at seven o'clock Eastern with that day's story. Alternatively, you can follow me on Twitter, in threads, or on the Substack app.

Of course, you can always bookmark the site and visit it periodically. But do whatever works for you. The information is out there, so have at it and consume it however you prefer.

All right, well, footballarchaeology.com is the website; we have the show notes and the links to get to this particular tidbit, we'll also have a link in there, too, that'll get you to the rest of Tim's site. And his name is Timothy P. Brown, and we enjoy him each and every Tuesday here on Pigskin Dispatch. And Tim, we thank you once again for shedding some light and enlightenment on Football of Antiquity.

Very good. Thank you, sir. And we will see you next week.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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Have you ever wondered how American football evolved from its rugby roots into the juggernaut sport it is today? The answer might surprise you, and it involves a surprising organization – the YMCA.

Today, we're thrilled to welcome Timothy P. Brown, the mastermind behind the fascinating website footballarchaeology.com. Mr. Brown has dedicated his research to uncovering the forgotten stories and hidden origins of the game we love.

In this special post, we'll delve into the often-overlooked role the YMCA played in shaping American football. Through a conversation with Mr. Brown, we'll explore how this organization fostered the development of the sport, nurtured its early pioneers, and ultimately helped lay the groundwork for the gridiron giants we witness today.

So, buckle up and get ready to embark on a journey through the fascinating history of American football, where we'll unearth the surprising influence of the YMCA!

Here is the full transcript of the conversation with Timothy Brown on the YMCA's influence on football

Darin Hayes
Welcome again to the pig pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to Tuesday football, archeology .com day. Timothy P. Brown, the host of that website, is here to visit again, as he does every Tuesday. Tim, welcome back to the pig pen.

Timothy Brown
Hey, thank you, Darin. I'm looking forward to talking about a song. Well, it's not; it's about a subject related to a song that we can't talk about and that we can't sing or play because of copyright restrictions.

Darin Hayes
But, audience, we can share with you that Tim is dressed like an Indian chief, and I am dressed like a construction worker as we are talking about the subject, but we're just kidding. But of course, we are talking about the great organization of the YMCA. We have probably heard of that before or attended or taken some swimming classes like I did; I have one not too far from me. And we have some great ties in football history with the YMCA history that Tim had in a recent tidbit. So Tim, why don't you take it away and share this great story with us?

Timothy Brown
Yeah, so, you know, this is one of these. One of the things that fascinates me about football is that it is a different type of organization that supported and helped football grow, especially in the early years. And so we tend to think of football as this thing that's run through schools, and then obviously, it became professionalized. And so the NFL and AFL and AFC and, you know, various semi-pro teams, whatever they're, you know, but there were, you know, back in the day, there were organizations like the American Legion after World War One, there were all kinds of industrial leagues, some of which are where the basis of the NFL, right. So, different kinds of organizations have influenced football's growth and one that is vastly underestimated, I think, by many is the YMCA. And so it came about in a couple of different ways. One is that, back in, you know, one of the arguments for playing football and justification for football was the Muscular Christianity Movement that came out of England. And so it's just kind of this, this belief in the mind and the body and the spirit and that, you know, football was a way to meld, you know, that all three of them came together in football and provided good training for young men who needed to be hardy, you know, da da da. And so, that philosophy matched very well with the YMCA, which also had, I believe, come out of England, but in any event, the YMCA had a school that is now Springfield College in Massachusetts, that was was a school to train people to go out into the world and be YMCA directors. So I mean, it was kind of like a seminary, or you can think about it however you want. But you know, this is when there weren't physical education majors anywhere, and if you wanted to become somebody who would go out and teach, you know, physical fitness. You know, you also bought into some of the, you know, the religious side of it, then the YMCA training school was the place to be. And so, you know, right after he graduated from, from Yale in 1890, Amos Alonzo Stagg shows up, but, you know, he becomes the football coach and, well, basketball wasn't invented yet, but he was a football coach and baseball coach at YMCA training school. Now, in those days, he also played for them. So he was, you know, a player-coach. And, you know, they played typically a bit of a, you know, and, you know, they kept playing, you know, for years, they're still playing today in Springfield, but, you know, they would like a lot of schools in the Northeast States to step up and play, you know, Harvard and Yale here and there. Most of them played, you know, a smaller college schedule, but they played; they were very competitive and had a lot of good players. And one of the guys on Stagg's teams, the two years that he coached there before he went to UChicago, one of the guys was John Naismith, who ended up inventing basketball while at Springfield. And another guy who's a little bit later was William Morgan, who invented volleyball. So, these schools were pretty influential and certainly created those two sports. And, and then, you know, playing football. And so, but, you know, their impact came from World War One. And the YMCA and its role is kind of underappreciated, you know, in training camp, any American training camp around the world, and then even those, like rest camps and stuff, you know, once and once they're in Belgium and France, and in England, had a YMCA hut. And so these were typically fairly simple structures. But, you know, they, they had stationery for the guys to write home, they had, you know, a library, just they taught classes, especially, you know, there was a lot of, you know, they weren't GIs yet, but they were, you know, the doughboys, a lot of them couldn't speak English, so they teach English classes. But another big emphasis was that they supplied, you know, what would be the equivalent now of $80 million worth of athletic equipment to soldiers. Now that was basketballs and tennis rackets, etc. But football was a big one. And so, if there were athletic events at a military camp in World War One, it was likely very much, you know, YMCA involvement in it. And so, you know, these are especially like the interregimental games rather than the all-star teams for a camp. So, you know, that was an opportunity, you know, this is a time when I think it was less than 5% of Americans went to college. And so they, you know, they might have played for some rinky-dink little high school team in the little farm town that they grew up in. This became an opportunity for them to experience, you know, well-coached, you know, and more sophisticated football. And so it was, you know, it really kind of democratized football, you know, the World War One camps. Because, I mean, the vast majority of guys of that age range, you know, served in some form or capacity or their brother did or, you know, so it, you know, really spurred interest in football. And, you know, there's many, you know, folks that had made the case that, you know, that military football in World War One was a key to spurring the development of the NFL, you know, because it just demonstrated that people would come and attend games played by these former collegians, these college all-stars that, you know, nobody had said that they would do that before, you know, the NFL before that, you know, the pro leagues before that were mostly like kind of steel town folks and guys who, yeah, some of them went to college, and some of them didn't. Still, it was, you know, more of a semi-pro field than what came in the 20s, you know, and then obviously really took off in the 50s and 60s. So anyways, it's just, you know, the YMCA is one of those organizations you don't think of as being influential in the development of football, but it was. And there was, you know, physical instruction for the Navy anyway. Was this guy named Walter Camp? So, I mean, they were connected, right?

Darin Hayes
Yeah, another interesting story comes out of that with Nay Smith and a connection to football innovation. And I wrote an article about three years ago about who was the first to wear a helmet was the question and nay, smith's name is thrown in there because he, he, I wouldn't say that he wore a helmet. He had a; it was described as his, uh, he was getting cauliflower ear from getting knocked around playing the line, you know, in 1891 game against Amherst is what I sort of narrowed down to going through some of the descriptions of it. I think that's a game on October 17th, 1891. His girlfriend at the time helped sew some flannel together and tie it around his ears so he wouldn't get boxed and be irritated with his ears. It was one of the first head coverings in football that was publicized. Uh, they were not like a rag tied around your head or something, you know, but something for protection on your head. So, it's just odd that, here, the inventor of basketball who gets credited, played at this small college and has had so many great sports sprout out of it and so many great sports stories that connect to football. I think that's just amazing. Yeah.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, he, well, he, I've used that image of Naismith with that headgear, I think, in one of my books, but you know, definitely in some of the writing. And I know I got that I got, you know, Naismith was Canadian. So I got that image from their equivalent of the National Archives; whatever, I can't think of the name right now. But yeah, it's a great image. He's playing center; he's snapping the ball with his hands. And, he's got that, the thing wrapped around his head. Yeah, I, you never know, you never know where stories will come from. And, and the, you know, what I enjoy is, you know, the links of one thing to another. Yeah, so that's fun.

Darin Hayes
And I think it's interesting, too, if you can; you made me think about it in this context. So here you have Amos Alonzo Stagg, who, I assume, graduated from Yale. I think he graduated from there. Yeah. So he graduates from Yale and gets his master's in a phys ed degree at YMCA school. Just today, we look at him like, Hey, what the hell was that? You know, you went to Yale, you know, and are going to get a phys ed degree, you know, but

Timothy Brown
Well, you know, he was. I think he was a divinity student at Yale, but I'm not positive.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, I think you're right.

Timothy Brown
But he was definitely, I mean, his whole upbringing, a very religious man. And, and so, yeah, it made sense. Right. And, and some of his, you know, the guy who became president at U Chicago, knew him at Yale because he'd been, you know, faculty there. And just, you know, so he knew the character of Stagg. And, you know, he's an excellent athlete, one of the best baseball pitchers of his time. And so, that's part of why he said, hey, I want you to come out here.

Darin Hayes
I'm just putting in today's context. If my kid graduates from Ivy League after paying that and says, hey, I'm going to go to community college to get a phys ed degree too, because that's what I want to do. You're like, what do you mean you'll do that? You know, let me choke you first. But yeah, great stuff. That is a very interesting story. And it has so many webs and tentacles coming off, and it's just awesome. And I'm sure, you know, that connects to a bunch of your other tidbits. And you have these tidbits to come out every day, about 7 pm. They're very enjoyable. And, you know, talk about some great parts of football history that aren't mainstream but are very interesting. Indeed, maybe if you could share how folks could get their hands on those every day, too, that would be some enjoyment for them.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, so, you know, my site is footballarchaeology.com. You just go out there and subscribe, and once you're subscribed, you'll get an email with that day's story every day. And then, you know, kind of read them at your leisure. Alternatively, I'm under the same name, Football Archaeology; I'm on Twitter threads and on the sub-stack application. So, however, it works for you, if you want to read it, that's how you get to me.

Darin Hayes
Well, that's very good, Tim. We appreciate you preserving that football history each and every day, coming on each week, and sharing with us. And, uh, we want to talk to you again next week, and we appreciate you.

Timothy Brown
Thank you. That's very good. I look forward to it.

Up until about World War II football players by rule pretty much had to play the entire game. There were not offensive and defensive specialists. The skill sets that soldiers who trained for war by playing football gained added a surplus of roster talent and the rules were then adapted post war to allow mass substitution as often as coaches wanted to.

This ushered in the era of two-platoon football and Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology wrote a great post on the first All-America team from this new era.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on the 1st Two-Platoon All-America Team

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to another day where we get to talk to footballarchaeology.com's Timothy P. Brown about one of the great tidbits that he writes every day about football of yesteryear. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Thank you for having me on. I look forward to talking about two-platoon football.

Yeah, why don't you first let's give you a title? You titled this tidbit back in October of 2022, the first two-platoon All-America team. And why don't you explain to the audience what two-platoon football is and what was significant about this All-America team? Yeah.

So, back in the day, if you played a football game, you put your 11 guys or 15 guys out there, and that's who you played with. There were no substitutions. Then they started allowing substitutions, but pretty much, once you left the game, you were out, just like soccer remains today.

It was the same game; they came from the same origin, so similar rules applied. But over time, football allowed substitutions in certain instances, but for the most part, until 1941, if you, once you're out, you're out. There were no go-backs. And so, in 1941, because of concern about the, you know, there were a lot of guys enlisting, and they were, you know, I'm not sure if they were being drafted yet or not, but either way, there were a lot of college-age men heading into the military, even, you know, pre-Pearl Harbor.

And so, they were concerned about roster sizes. And so, they passed a rule allowing coaches to substitute anytime they wanted to in a game. And so, the funny thing is, this is, you know, I think at multiple levels, this is a story of how much people follow tradition as much as the rules.

So, even though the rule was passed in 41, pretty much without exception, the only people who got substituted, in the way that we think about it today, were kickers and punters. You know, coaches would bring in those kinds of people, but they and even those were very few because typically your punter, the kicker was your halfback or somebody, you know, one of the regular players. And so, but then in 1945, Michigan had a really depleted roster, and they were going to play, you know, Army, which had, you know, Blanchard and Davis and a bunch of other guys.

And they just knew they were just going to get their lunch handed to them. And so, Fritz Crisler, the coach, was looking for, you know, some way to try to, you know, give his team an advantage. And so, he realized, hey, the way this rule is written, I can swap my offense and defense out whenever I want to or swap players in whenever I want to.

Even though nobody's done it, the rule says I can't. So, from his vantage point, he was exploiting a loophole, right? I mean, not in the way the rule was written, but in the way it had been traditionally applied. So, he does that against the Army.

He basically plays offensive and defensive units. I think there were three or four guys who played both ways. They're, you know, that much better players.

Other coaches picked up on that, and they started doing it. Over the next couple of years, the two platoons, you know, the old no substitution was called the single tune. And two platoon, what became, you know, kind of the standard term for swapping offensive and defensive players.

And so, then, that's fine. And there, it was raining, you know, gaining speed. But it wasn't until 1948 that anyone named an all-American team with two platoons.

So, in 1945, 46, and 47, they still kept naming a single platoon all-American team. So, 11 guys, no specialists, right? And so, finally, this organization called the NEA was a big one, kind of like the UPI or the AP or somebody, you know, along those lines at the time. They named a two-platoon all-American team in 1948.

So, just, you know, some of the guys whose names, you know, a lot of people probably will recognize as Charlie Justice, who was back at, you know, North Carolina, Doke Walker of SMU, Eddie LeBaron, who played at Pacific, some guy named Darryl Royal, who was at Texas. Leon Hart was the only player named to play on both the offensive and defensive teams at Notre Dame. So, then the other thing I just said is that it doesn't so much relate to 1940. I just find it really interesting that it was not until the 1980s that all-American teams added kickers and punters to their rosters, right? So, I mean, it took all that, so, you know, we had moved into specialist players.

I mean, even through the 60s, there were still a lot of kickers and punters who were everyday players, right? You know, Don, like I grew up, so Don Chandler, an end originally and kicked, was a kicker as well. Honey Anderson was the punter, and he was a halfback, you know, so there was a lot of that going on. And like George Blanda, you know, he was a quarterback.

Yeah, Lou Groza is a lineman. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you can just go through it; there's a whole slew of guys like that.

And so, but so anyways, you know, but clearly specialists had come into the game, especially after the, you know, onset of the soccer-style kicker in the 60s, you know, with the Go-Go Axe and others. But it wasn't until the 80s that they, you know, they named separate punters and kickers. So just, you know, it's an amazing thing that it took that long.

Yeah. Wow. I didn't realize that about the punters and kickers.

I thought that would have been, you know, going on for a while. I was like, man, that's great stuff. So, you know, I guess the kickers today, even though they feel that they're shunned by the rest of football and looked down upon a little bit of not being, you know, sometimes called not real football players and everything, they would have been pissed back in the 70s when they weren't even honored.

Yeah. Well, you know, and the funny thing about it is like, you know, if you go back and you read the newspaper reports of guys who were named all American in the teens and the twenties and thirties and whatnot, a lot of backs were named, you know, especially in the heavy punting years, you know, they were named as much for their punting ability as for their running ability or their passing ability. You know, punting was just so important to the game, and they were the ones who did it.

Yeah. It wasn't like Jim Thorpe, one of the greatest punters and dropkickers ever. And that was sort of what some of his fame was besides his running.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. I mean, that's the triple threat. You know, the whole thing is running, passing, and kicking. You know, it is either a form of kicking or typically punting. So yeah, I mean, it was, there's, I mean, you just can go on and on about the, the number of guys who, who were especially running backs with, you know, fullbacks, fullbacks, a lot of times were like the big studs of the teams in the twenties and thirties.

And, you know, a lot of them were, were really, really effective punters. Yeah. So I guess, you know, World War II changed the world, and it changed the world of football, too.

So it's sort of that line of debarkation between the single platoon and the dual platoon because of the rule changes and, you know, a substitution. So very interesting. Great stuff.

Well, then, in college, they went back to single platoon in 52. The pros, you know, once the pros went, you know, swapping offensive, offense, and defense, they never looked back, you know, their game was much more about entertainment and everything. But once you went to platoon, you needed more coaches and bigger rosters.

The coaches became more specialized. I mean, think about how much more complicated the game has become. And a lot of that's because it's two platoons, you know if you only have so many minutes a week to impart, you know, knowledge and techniques to players, if you got to cut it in half, well, you know, it can't be as, you know, you just can't complicate it as much.

So, these coaches studied just defense and coached just defense. So, I mean, it's, you know, certainly among the top four, five, six rules in terms of the effect on the game, but the colleges went back in 52 to dual platoon really as a cost-saving measure. And then, you know, kind of slowly, and then especially in the late fifties and early sixties, swapped it over.

By 64, Katie had barred the door, you know, a total of two platoons. Wow. Amazing stuff.

And you sit there, and you think about how good athletes these guys had to be to be on the field for, you know, 60 minutes or 48 minutes, whatever it was at the time. It might've been longer than that back in that era, but they had longer, longer halves back then, too, like 35-minute halves. Yeah, that was more; that was all like pre-1912 or something like that.

I mean, that was earlier. Yeah. But I mean, just think about it in terms of just the shape of, you know, what players look like.

I mean, you know, you've got these six, eight, six, nine, 340-pound guys running around now, can't play a 60-minute game. They just can't. No, they can't even take all the offensive-defensive snaps, you know, unless you're an offensive lineman or a quarterback, you're, you're probably going to get substituted in while your team is on the field, and that, uh, that genre, that offense or defense.

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, my part of my argument is always looking at world-class rugby teams, and they've got guys for six, three, two 60, you know, running around as the, you know, kind of the forwards blocking, um, you know, they're the guys leading the scrum, but there aren't, you know, there aren't the kind of guys that you see in the NFL or, you know, almost any major college team.

And nowadays, half the D3 teams have kids who weigh more than 300 pounds, right? Um, you know, so it's, you know, you just can't, you can't play like that in a, in a 60-minute game, especially when there were far, there weren't TV titles, there weren't, you know, anywhere, there weren't anywhere near the number of passing completions or weren't that many balls out of bounds. The ball went out of bounds, and the clock kept running.

I mean, all that kind of, you know, the rules were so different. Um, the body types were different, but yeah, amazing stuff. Yeah.

Tremendous. Tim, you know, we enjoy these stories and, and, you know, learning about these little pieces of football, which this one's a pretty major story of the evolution of football, but, uh, you know, you, you share with these, uh, these stories and sometimes they're just fun. Sometimes they're really serious and game-changing like this one was. You call them your daily tidbits, and maybe you could tell folks how they can enjoy your daily tidbits.

Yeah. So, you know, the best thing is just to go to footballarchaeology.com and, you know, subscribe. You can subscribe for free.

You'll get an email. As a result, you'll get an email every night at seven o'clock with that day's story. Otherwise, you can follow me on Twitter, sometimes called X, but I don't call it that.

And then, catch me on the Substack app on threads or just bookmark the site and pop in whenever you want. Well, Tim, we appreciate you educating us and sharing your knowledge on football history. And we'd love to talk to you again next Tuesday about another one of your tidbits.

Well, I think we can find something to chat about next week. I'll leave that up to you. Thanks much.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.