Football

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Anyone that has traveled to a North American Tourist destination has probably walked by or in to a wax museum of the uncanny called 'Ripley's Believe It or Not."

We that are old enough probably remember the 1980s television series of the same name. The concept is just what the name says, they tell stories that are so off the charts that they are hard to believe to be true.

One of the top experts in early football rules history, Timothy P. Brown, joins us in the discussion to chat about the work of Robert Ripley and an early connection to the history of football.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown about Ripley Believe It or Not Football

Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And as we try to do every Tuesday, we will talk to our friend from football archaeology, Tim Brown, the great historian and author of multiple books and many tidbits that come out every evening for our football enjoyment. Tim Brown, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin, thank you. Thank you. Football season is well underway, so it's always the best time of year.

We hate to see the weather start to change, but we know it's football season. It is the most exciting part of the year, especially on the weekends.

And now it's spreading out throughout the whole week. So it's even better, but better for us, maybe worse for the players. But I so love the game.

Yeah, exactly. So tonight, I thought we could talk about one of your tidbits from mid-August on Ripley's Believe It or Not and some of their thoughts on football. And I think most of our listeners are familiar with Ripley's Believe It or Not.

We're going to get rid of the not part when we talk to you. We always believe you. But let's hear what Ripley has to say about football.

Yeah, I'm a truth-teller. I don't. I don't make anything up. So, you know, just to take a step back when I'm researching any topic that's football related, if I spot and, you know, a lot of the early newspapers, so, you know, into even 1920 or something like that.

A lot of times, they didn't print photographs. They printed line drawings, you know, illustrations rather than photographs. And so I always find those really interesting.

I find, you know, just the artwork interesting in general. And so if I spot one that I think I could write a tidbit about and, you know, make it interesting, then I just kind of have a way of cataloging them and coming back to them. So, not too long ago, I came across this one, and I think his name is Robert Ripley.

But so is the guy from Ripley's Believe It or Not. And he, you know, grew up in California and ended up working for the New York Globe as a cartoonist. And this is like the World War I era.

And so. In 1919, he published a cartoon that looked back at football prior to all the rule changes of 1905. So he's showing all these kinds of conditions of what the game was like at the time.

But the interesting thing about it was. His first Believe It or Not was published about two weeks after he did this cartoon. So this cartoon is a tree, believe it or not, if you can believe it or not.

So anyways, and then, you know, once he did the Believe It or Not a thing, he became famous, rich, and all kinds of good stuff. So at the time when he was still just, you know, a young illustrator, he did a thing, and he basically showed stuff like, you know, tandem blocking. And, you know, that's where before you had to have, you know, seven men on the line of scrimmage, sometimes teams would line up.

They take the guard and tackle from the other side and line them up right behind, you know, the right tackle or whatever. And, you know, so two guys in tandem would then push through the hole. He showed kind of the whole days when running backs had handles sewn on their pants so that guys could grab them by the handles and throw them over the pile to gain yardage and hurtling.

He specifically showed or mentioned Harold Weeks of Columbia in that cartoon, who is famous for he was famous for jumping, leaping over the line with both feet forward so that he could hit the opposing player in the chest, knock him down, and continue. But was it he the one that they sort of had that play where they would almost throw him over the line? Yeah. Yeah.

OK. They did it both ways somewhere. He got a good head start, and he leaped, you know, with both feet forward and others where they would swing them and then, poof, you know, pop them over.

Old alley-oop. You know, so I mean, we still know it's back. You know, Mullins were outlawed for for quite a long time, but now they're back in football.

And so we see our offensive linemen. We just saw an example that gave one of the games an opening weekend. Yes, there was a lineman who pushed his guy across the goal line.

Right. And so that's legal again. It wasn't for a long time.

But, you know, it's still not legal to pull. But back then, you know, linemen pulled there. They're running backs forward as well.

I think they sort of opened that back up again, that famous USC Notre Dame game back when Reggie Bush got pushed over by Matt Leinert, I think, and a couple of others. I think that that critical play at the end is where they sort of because it was illegal at that time, but they let it happen. And I think it was like the year after that, they sort of lessened up on that rule and allowed that to happen again.

Yeah, I mean, it was a big, you know, that was a big part of it. It's just like a rugby scrum. I mean, it's it's kind of where that all came from. But they got rid of that for a long time.

But then, you know, they also talked about, or his cartoon also includes a little thing on pumping and talking about, you know, roughing the punter and which originally was roughing the fullback because the fullback is typically who pumped it. And, you know, as there's a long involved explanation of that, which if you search on my blog, you can find, you know, find that whole thing roughing, roughing the punter and the origins of that. But anyway, it's just a cute cartoon.

And so, you know, just kind of it. The other thing I liked about it was that in the article beneath it, he mentions that the changes in rules and more open play that had developed by 1919, when he published this thing, allowed some smaller schools to become prominent. You know, he listed Colgate, Georgia Tech, Dartmouth, Washington and Jefferson, Occidental, and Brown.

And, you know, really, Georgia Tech's the only one now that we consider prominent W&J, and Occidental played Division three, and Occidental doesn't play anymore at all, you know, so. So, you know, their time in the limelight didn't necessarily last that long. Yeah, that's definitely true.

There are a lot of those schools, the Lafayettes and Suwannees of the world, too. Those are sort of. They had some big seasons. And now they're, like you said, they either don't have teams, or they're playing Division II, Division Three, or something else.

Yeah. And the flip side is, you know, there are a lot of schools that Wernie didn't exist at the time that are now playing big-time football. You know, I mean, we didn't realize that Florida State was a women's school until 1948.

So, you know, they've they've changed quite a bit, right? I mean, they were male back in 1902 or three or something like that. And then they went all female. So, you know, school is like that.

Then, Central Florida is in the FAUs. Florida's got a million of those schools. And so does Texas, you know, schools.

But, you know, we're little commuter schools or normal schools, you know, that kind of thing. But they, you know, times changed, and now they're massive, you know, massive significant universities. So as one of those like Florida International or Florida Atlantic, one of them I was reading about recently, and I was surprised to see that they just started having a football program like in the 1980s, or it might have been even, you know, 1990s, even it wasn't that long ago.

They started a football program. Now they're playing, you know, you know, FBS D1 football. And it's kind of unbelievable.

Yeah, I think there are about six schools playing FBS right now that didn't have football in 2000. So that's how, you know, that's how fast some of those programs got up and running. And then there were a bunch of them that, you know, even more that the school didn't exist until, well, the school didn't exist in, say, 1960.

You know, you got a Boise State that was a junior college for a lot of its history, you know. Anyways, I mean, there are as many examples as there are of schools that dropped down. There's probably an equal number that have kind of risen up or, you know.

They've become substantial schools, and, you know, so they go with the advertising benefits of intercollegiate athletics. Football's a moneymaker, that's for sure. That's I think it's been like that for over 100 years and still is that way today.

It's amazing. There's some good stuff. And folks, if you want to enjoy this picture that Mr. Ripley drew way back when on Tim's site, there are some links through Pigskin Dispatch.

We'll also try to put the link in the show notes of this podcast, as well as how to connect to Tim to have his daily tidbits delivered to you. And maybe, Tim, you could talk about that just a little bit. Yeah.

So you can, you know, go to FootballArcheology.com, subscribe and, you know, you can subscribe for free. There's also some paid levels. But if you subscribe for free, you'll get at least one email every day that has whatever the tidbit is.

And then I'm also on Twitter. Just look for Football Archeology as well. And you should be able to find me.

Well, Tim, thank you so much for sharing this tidbit of football again with us and our listeners. And I hope to talk to you again next week about some more. Very good.

Look forward to it. And yeah, we'll get together as always.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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Ever seen a penalty flag thrown and wondered, "Wait, why'd they move the ball THAT far?" Well, friends, get ready to dive into the strange world of "half-the-distance" penalties in American football!

These penalties, often triggered by infractions inside a team's own territory, can result in some truly eye-opening yardage assessments. Today, we'll be tackling some of the longest half-the-distance penalties in NFL history. We'll be dissecting the plays, the penalties, and the impact they had on the game. Were they backbreakers for the offending team? Did they create crazy scoring opportunities for the defense?

So, buckle up, football fans! Let's get ready to analyze some of the most unusual and potentially game-changing penalties the NFL has ever seen!

Let's listen to some of the most extended half-the-distance penalties in Football History by Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on the Longest Half-Distance Penalties

Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. We also have another great episode where we get to talk to Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Talk about one of his most recent tidbits. Some of those unique aspects of football history.

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Thank you, Darin. I Look forward to talking about the penalty situation in football.

Yeah, this is a very fascinating tidbit you had back in late May. It was titled football's longest half the distance penalty. Now we're we're sitting there, you know, in our modern times, we think of a half a distance penalty.

You know, somebody gets penalized and gets the penalty, gets walked back towards their own goal line. And usually, maybe they're at the nine-yard line, and it's, you know, a holding call, and they got to walk back to the four and a half or whatever. That's what we're doing.

But you're talking about something entirely different here as far as yardage. It's not a four-and-a-half-yard walk-off. These are some of the massive jaunts for the teams to travel.

So please do tell. You know, I mean, so early football didn't necessarily have distance penalties as we think of them today. Typically, the penalty for the fouls that were called was the loss of the ball.

You know, it was a turnover. But then they, you know, kind of recognized those were too severe. So then they started, you know, especially after the field got marked with yard lines, and they started doing distance penalties.

And so in 1889, there were they created that was the first half the distance penalties, and that was for, you know, intentionally tackling below the knees because you couldn't tackle below the knees, then budding, tripping and throttling, which was choking. And so that penalty was 25 yards or half the distance. And then, you know, later on, they started doing some things where it was.

Like in 1908, they kind of bundled all the unsportsmanship penalties together, and they made it if you committed an unsportsmanlike penalty, then you were disqualified and your team was penalized half the distance. And that that stayed in place till like 1947. And then then they limited the half distance to to 15 yards.

Right. So you couldn't be more than it was, whichever was 15 yards or half the distance, but Max was 15 yards. And so that's, you know, like you said in the open, it was, we think of a half a distance, half the distance penalty is applying when you're inside your own 30.

Right. If you're at the 45, either either 45, it doesn't matter. It's just whatever the normal penalty is.

And, you know, we cap them at 15 yards nowadays, but 25-yard penalties used to be pretty common. So, you know, before we kept them, there was the opportunity in a half-the-distance world for some really long penalties. And now, I mean.

I'm kind of limited by the way I can search in these newspaper databases, so I'm searching for keywords and strings of words. So I can't say that I found the longest. It's what I found that was the longest that I found, but it's still pretty long.

So the longest one that I came across was in a 1901 game Northwestern against Minnesota. Northwestern was in the red zone. They were on Minnesota's eight yard line.

A Northwestern player jumped off the side and slugged a Minnesota player. So they called the penalty. So they were on the eight.

This was in the days of the 110-yard field. So that meant that you know, 110 minus eight was 104 or no, I'm sorry, 102. And so they walked off a 51-yard penalty against Northwestern, which took the ball, as it turned out, it took the ball all the way back to Northwestern's 51-yard line.

Right. And then, in 1906, I found Vanderbilt got nailed for a 32-yard penalty in the same year Penn State got hit with a 30-yard penalty. And then, at that point, I stopped looking.

You know, I mean, I found a couple of instances, and then, in 1912, they reduced the length of the field to 100 yards. So there's no way you were going to have a 50 another 51 yard penalty. So anyway, it's possible that there was a 52, 53, or 54-yard penalty at some point out there.

I didn't find it. But if somebody else wants to go look at it and let me know if you find it. But, you know, it's still it's just kind of, you know, really fun.

And that that these existed. And then, but even after the field was reduced, you know, the thirty-three Pittsburgh Pirates running back was heading into the head, headed towards the end zone. Stiff arms the opponent but stiff arms him in the face.

And he gets called for an unsportsmanlike penalty at the two-yard line. So, there is a forty-nine-yard penalty as they walk off half the distance. Right.

So that's likely the longest or at least ties for the longest. So in the hundred yard NFL officials have been against the Steelers even before they were the Steelers back in the Pirates days in the first year. Yeah.

Thirty-three. I'm not going to play your game there with the officials who do not understand your Steelers. But the other thing that's just kind of funny is, OK, so now this half-the-distance thing is capped, you know, at 15 yards.

But you mentioned your favorite Steelers and now I grew up a Packer fan, but I've lived in Detroit long enough that there is a certain amount of lioness that has become part of my body. So I can appreciate, given the Lions history, that in 2015, a cornerback to the Lions incurred a 66 yard pass interference penalty. Because, you know, in the NFL, pass interference is a spot foul, right? Right.

So 66 yards downfield, he committed a little P.I. And so it was the Packers, which was OK by my standards. So, you know, 66 yards on a penalty. Yeah, those are astounding facts.

I did an article last year. I did some of the NFL's longest fourth and yardage to go penalties. It was it was fascinating.

I mean, we had a fourth and twenty nine that was converted by Ray Rice in 2012. The Oakland Raiders had a third and forty eight against Kansas City that I think they end up getting first down back in 2013. But in 1971, the Patriots had fourth and sixty three against the Cowboys.

And the biggest one, though, was my Steelers had fourth and seventy four against the Raiders in 1970. And they punted and the punt only traveled fifty five yards. So they were still 20 yards behind the sticks after the fun.

There were no half-the-distance penalties. I was going through that earlier to see if I could find something in there that helps your story, but that's just part of the thing. Like before, like in college football, you really don't have much in the way of there are no consistent statistics until thirty-six or thirty-eight, which it is.

But even then, it was just a subset of all the major colleges. So so, you know, the things so looking for like the longest half the distance penalty, there's no source. You know, there's no database that has that.

You know, you can only search for it using like newspaper databases and, you know, those kinds of things. But the other thing that it brings up and I wanted to ask you about it as a former official. Is, you know, one of the one of the problems football had over the years was.

The lengthier the penalty, the more reluctant officials often were to call the penalty. Because, you know, they you know, they didn't want to be the ones deciding the game. I mean, they would if need be.

But on things like, you know, a lot of the early clipping calls, they weren't, and they didn't want to call clipping. You know, it's kind of just the nature of the game. People accepted it.

So things like that, you know, that. So, that was one of the reasons they got rid of those 25-yard penalties. You know, it just was too much of they felt like it put too much power in the hands of an official who often were overworked back then, especially, you know, they you had three or four men, four-man crews trying to figure out what, you know, watching everybody on the field.

You know, it just wasn't possible. Yeah, I think it's a lot of human nature. I mean, most people, and I will put most before that, don't want to inflict the ultimate sentence upon their fellow man.

So, I mean, it's just human nature. You don't want to do it. I mean, one of the things I guess we could compare in modern times is somebody getting a little loose with their arms against another player.

It's taking a swing at them. And, you know, in high school football, even a swing and a miss is an automatic ejection. And most states have it where you will not play the next game after if you're ejected in a game, you're disqualified not only for that game but for the following game.

So you're really punishing him. So so that goes to the back of officials minds. I mean, it's got to be something very blatant to to get ejected from a game for the most part, especially when you know you're going to get dequeued for the following contest.

But I think that has some merit to what you're saying. A 25-yard penalty. That's that's pretty substantial.

You know, that's a quarter of the field. And could definitely change a game in a heartbeat. Well, you know, but if you think about, you know, back to the origins of penalties, penalties were turnovers or fouls, you know, were turnovers.

The penalty was the loss of the ball. So, you know, forward passes until 1906 forward passes the turnover, you know, on sportsmanship on sportsmen like, you know, conduct until 1889 was a turnover. So, you know, and then dequeues were, you know, much more common.

I mean, people should get up in arms about targeting disqualifications now. But, you know, hey, to me, if, you know, if you if you're going to endanger, you know, if you're going to endanger another player, then that's not good. And I personally love what college football does with the targeting.

And, you know, it's called on the field, and they really take a great look at it to make sure that the official on the field was calling it on the spot to get it right, says it is going to be an impactful thing. It might be the star linebacker getting ejected or staying in the game. You know, it's so many times you see that happen in the last couple of years since they've been doing that and enforcing it and even getting rid of the penalty.

Sometimes I think it's a great thing for football. And I'm glad that they do that. Yeah.

And I mean, people go, and people make a lot of arguments against it. And, you know, hey, you know, when I played, I was aggressive with Bob about, you know, whatever, go ahead and tell your story. But it's like.

You know, you just have to learn not to hit that way in that situation. You know, they all know where the sideline is. They all know, you know, things like when the ball's coming and you can't hit the pass receiver until he gets a ball, all those things.

They're aware. And so, to me, I don't buy the argument that, you know, it can't be controlled. Right.

Go lower. Go higher. Don't hit the guy in the head.

A good legal tackle has just as much impact, I think, as somebody crushing somebody in the head or whatever. And the guy's probably not going to be hurt, you know, by a good tackle on the midsection. You know, just a good wrap-up.

So, yeah, I think that goes a lot to teach the teaching technique of modern coaches. You know, just teach them to hit and wrap up and take a guy down instead of trying to take him down with a blow. Yeah.

You don't need to decapitate. Right. Right.

Well, Tim, great stuff. Great discussion. You know, I know we got a little bit off-topic with the half-distance penalties, but it brings up so many great elements of football, of the game of yesteryear and today.

And you do that each and every day with some of these tidbits, just like this one, where you bring up something that's maybe not the mainstream talk of football history or even modern-day football, but you bring it into a new light and a story of its own. And we'd love for you to share with the listeners how they, too, can enjoy these on a daily basis. Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, I just try to find things that I think are interesting every day and that shed light on past practices and hopefully illuminate something about the current game, at least something that we can compare ourselves to. And so, you know, if you're interested in following, just go to footballarchaeology.com and subscribe.

You'll get an email every day in your inbox at 7 o'clock Eastern that has that story. And otherwise, you can follow me on Twitter at football archaeology. Either way, if you're interested, consume it however it is that makes you happy.

Well, Tim, we thank you for once again joining us here. And I'm going to throw this out here, Tim, and hopefully you won't get angry with me. But these are such interesting things.

And I'm sure there are a lot of listeners who may have questions about where something started in football. And maybe we could get them in contact with you. And maybe on a future show, we could answer some of those questions.

So either you go on to Tim's website, footballarchaeology.com, or you can email me at pigskin-dispatch at gmail.com. And send in your questions about where something started. And maybe Tim has it in one of his multiple books or on one of his tidbits. And if not, he loves to put on that research hat and hit the library hard and the newspaper archives.

And we'll try to find something for you. So, Tim, thanks again. And we will talk to you again next week.

Very good. Darin, thank you very much, as always.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

The football fields on which modern games are played have undergone many transformations over the years. The field has been morphed almost as many times as the rules of the game have been changed.

Our guest, Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology, has admired and brought to our attention the work of a historian who has really captured the evolution of the American Football Field.

James Gilbert has put together an impressive research study on the evolution of the American football field over the years of rules revisions and modifications since 1876, complete with graphics. Enjoy this Substack post that he put out recently.

-Transcribed Conversation on Football Field Evolution with Timothy Brown and James Gilbert

Hello, my football friends. This is Darren Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And wow, we have a great episode coming on tonight.

We have Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology joining us, and we're going to be talking about the football field and some evolutionary changes that have happened to it over the years. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Darren, good to see you again, as always.

Thanks for having me. Never want to take it for granted that you're going to let me come onto your show. The invitation is always there, my friend, and I'm never going to take it for granted that you join us each week because it's quite a treat for myself and the listeners.

We get to learn about something new with football or be reminded of something maybe that's been long forgotten. And I think that's kind of typical of what we have tonight. You know, something that we see every single game that we watch, and it's so obvious that we probably take it for granted.

That's the football field itself. You know, without it, there's not much of a game going on. And you came across a friend of yours that you guys wrote a piece together a few years ago on the evolution of the football field, and it's really quite interesting.

And maybe you could talk about that a little bit tonight. Yeah, so this is, you know, the friend that you're mentioning is James Gilbert. And, you know, kind of longtime readers or somebody who's gone back through the archives might remember that back in November 2021, he and I co-authored a story about the University of North Carolina team from 1893.

They were the first Southern team to go to the North and play a game because they played Lehigh towards the end of the season in Manhattan. So, you know, he and I kind of worked together on that. And I forget, even now, how he and I first connected.

But, you know, he's in the kind of old football and just general sports, you know, arcane information, you know, like me. And I had, you know, like in my How Football Became Football, I documented at least the major sequences of how the field and markings changed. You know, goalpost locations, all that kind of stuff.

So, I mean, I took it to a certain level. And, but now, James recently launched a Substack newsletter or blog called James's Newsletter. And one of his first articles is an article about the evolution of college football field.

So basically, he's what he did, and he's been doing this for quite some time. He's been creating, you know, graphics, images of the football field and all the markings at each point in time. So, going back to 1876.

And then, you know, each time that it changed, either the dimensions or the markings, location, this or that on the field, he basically created all these graphics to show this information. And then what he's done now is mirror it in a Substack article. So he's got kind of the description of what was happening, you know, why it changed what was happening, the game led to the change, and then just the detailed description of the change.

And, like, when I did mine, I stopped at 1960, but he carried on to really to the present. So all the different changes that, you know, we sometimes don't think about the things like the size of the coach's box, the size of the team, team's box, how far off the sideline to get back, you know, they get back coach has to get back, you know, all that kind of stuff. You know, he just he's outlined, outlined, he put in detail all this information.

So this is one of these where, you know, normally we talk about my tidbits or an article, but this, I just wanted to make sure there's some attention brought to him and the effort he's gone through. Because it's just, you know, it's a great resource. And I don't know anybody who has documented how the field has, has changed over, you know, 147 years of football history, like he has, you know, so it's just a really neat effort.

He's done a couple of other things as well. Yeah, that's. I know exactly what you're talking about. I did a piece similar to you, where I covered the football field probably two or three years ago. Actually, it was an adaptation of an article I wrote back in 2003.

And I had my son, you know, throw some graphics up there. And but James's article, you know, I had the grid field in the early 1900s, but I had it going, you know, goal line to goal line, which it did. But I had forgotten about the aspect of the back in, and I believe it was 1903.

And we were just talking about it. I ran across an article the other day in newspapers.com, where they went from a 25-yard line to a 25-yard line with the grid. And then it was the normal stripes, you know, outside the 25s or to the goal line. Anyway, so just the detail, he's doing that.

And I can tell you from officiating, you know, the 27 years I officiated at the high school level, there was a field change every single year, you know, as you said, the coaches box changing by the yard or, you know, the teams were allowed to the 20s. And it was a 25s or boundary lines or a hash mark is now, you know, instead of three inches, it's four inches wide or whatever, you know, so I can imagine what the collegiate field has been doing over those years. It's probably every year; there's something small.

So, this is really a Galathian chore that James is doing, and it's much appreciated. We'll have a link here in the show notes, folks, to James's site and Pigskin dispatch.

So you can appreciate his work. You know, that's really going to take a lot of effort on his part. And that's appreciated.

Yeah, you know, the thing about it is like there's so, you know, there's a bunch of times when, um, yeah, there's, well, you and I go on a particular site that sometimes they post a pic, you know, these unidentified, you know, people can't figure out where's this, you know, who's this team in this picture? You know, there's a game in a stadium. Where is this? Who's playing? What's the period? So, a lot of times, you can tell certain things just based on the uniforms or the formations, and you have a pretty good sense of what's going on. But there are other times where, you know, if depending on the angle of the shot, you can see the field markings, and that tells you a tremendous amount.

In some cases, like 1903, it tells you exactly what year the game was played. You know, if you have the right kind of angle or the right kind of shot. So, so anyway, so just anybody who enjoys doing that kind of thing, or sometimes finds themselves looking back at an old photo and trying to figure out, well, when, when was this thing from, you know, his site will be really a great reference, you know because it just collects all that kind of information in one place.

You know, the other, the other thing that, another thing that he does that is interesting is, and he, some of his posts on it, on the, on his newsletter reflect this, where he's a, he's a North Carolina, you know, UNC graduate and fan. One of the things he's done is go back and try to figure out where every North Carolina football game was played. And I don't mean that at a very casual level; I mean out of detail.

And so, you know, like, you can go back, and there are all kinds of sites where there's a site called jhowell.net that I use all the time to find the old scores and where games were played and that kind of stuff. And so it might say the game was played in Milwaukee or New Haven or wherever it was, but it doesn't necessarily tell you the exit or the field. Well, a lot of the old football, you know, especially going further back, you know, in the 1800s, you know, maybe up till 1920, sometimes these games were just played in some local park, you know, and they slapped up temporary stands or the games were played in a minor league baseball park that got torn down 80 years ago.

And now there's, you know, an expressway is sitting on top of it or, you know, a shopping mall or whatever it is. There are all kinds of these past stadiums that just are no longer there. And in a bunch of cases, kind of people have lost track of where they are.

So he goes in, and I don't really understand all the resources that he uses, but I know he uses like these old, there's a bunch of online through like Library of Congress, there's these online insurance maps that used to document, you know, the streets and major cities and all that kind of stuff and which buildings were where. And so I think he uses those kinds of things and all kinds of stuff from, you know, the newspapers telling you, well, it's at the intersection of 42nd and Western or wherever. And so then he finds where this game or where this field was and then plots the field atop, you know, what it looks like today, like in Google Maps.

So it's just really kind of fun. And then he's created some databases that, you know, dig into other information. You know, it's very UNC-specific.

So, I don't necessarily care about UNC, but I really appreciate his digging into it. It's just, you know, just getting the details of a particular topic. But just think about all the fields that it covers, you know, everybody that UNC traveled to play over the years, where their stadium is, you know, you're going to know where Duke played their games when they were, you know, Trinity College or whatever, you know, at the time. So that's some really interesting stuff.

I'll have to add that to my bookmarks and check that out because, you know, you have like the uniform sites, you know, the gridiron uniform database, and you have the helmets, you know, sites that you can go to and see where helmets are from here. Now that having a resource to look at fields of an era and where football stadiums were, you know, that's pretty cool too. So that's why I'm sure a lot of people will be interested in having that information too.

So good job, James. Yeah, no, it's just kind of fun stuff. And, you know, just the, you know, again, as I said, I don't know the method that he uses to get there, but, unfortunately, he couldn't join us tonight.

Otherwise, you know, he wouldn't would have done so. But so anyway, it's just interesting stuff. And, you know, if you're enough of a geek, like you and I are, you know, you can really, you just, you know, it's like you see somebody who's got an interest in this sport or this aspect of the sport, and they dig into it, or they collect, you know, certain things.

It's just one of those things. There's nothing I had thought of, but I just have a really deep devotion to the particular aspect of the game. Yeah. Well, let's use a little bit of James's information.

Okay. Now, you just recently saw this and appreciated it. What's something that jumped out at you that either you didn't realize, or maybe you forgot, and it brought a different light on what James did in his fieldwork?

Yeah. You know, I think the, I don't know that for me it's, it's any one thing. I know he just did it, just did an article.

I think maybe it was today or the other day where, you know, he's pointing out that North Carolina is going to play a game in Charlotte. You know, I think they're playing at the Panther stadium. And so he's, the articles about, Hey, they played, you know, it's the eighth most frequent city that they played, you know, but for them, it's kind of like, you know, they played, they played at a lot of intermediate cities, you know? So, I mean, teams used to do that all the time.

I've got an article that's my Saturday tidbit is about this, where, you know, teams traveling, you know, we've got this big thing about the West coast athletes are going to be traveling to get to the Big 10 schools and all that kind of stuff, you know, with the conference modifications. But back in the day, when people traveled by train, they spent a lot of time on the train, too. And so a lot of times, they find these cities halfway between one another, and both teams would meet there and be a bigger city, especially if they were kind of rural schools.

So they played in all kinds of locations, you know? And so, but in North Carolina in particular, it just seems like they played a lot. They played in a lot of places, you know, a lot of different intermediate towns. And maybe it's just the geography of, you know, where they were in the transportation network at the time. But yeah, it's just kind of interesting, all the different places that they played.

Oh, very cool. All right. Well, why don't you go ahead and if you have James's information, if you want to call it out now, so people can do it.

But again, you know, if you're driving or something, you can go to the show notes and get the link there. But Tim, go ahead and let us know where we can find James. Yeah.

As I said, he's on Substack, which is just a platform. You can find him at jameslegilbert.substack.com. And I checked beforehand, just Googled James Lee Gilbert Substack. And, you know, it's one of the first things that comes up.

Then you'll have the link, you know, the actual link in the show notes. But James Lee Gilbert, Substack, should get you there. All right.

And folks, the graphics are really splendid. You're going to be really pleased, I think, when you see these graphics, especially of the football field evolution that we started talking about. I got to go and check out all these coordinates of where the fields were. I have to go. I appreciate that here when we get done.

So I can't wait to do that. You just added another thing to my to-do list tonight. So, thanks, James.

So far, he doesn't have a lot of those on this site. But you know, he's done a bunch of them in the past. So, I hope you know that he recycles them and republishes them on Substack.

Well, Tim, wow, that is great stuff. Thanks for bringing this to our attention so we can appreciate his work and your work.

Why don't you tell us how folks can get your daily news? Yep, just go to footballarchaeology.com, and you can subscribe. You'll get an email every night at seven o'clock Eastern with today's article. Otherwise, you can follow me on Twitter, Threads, or the Substack app. All right, Timothy P. Brown, footballarchaeology.com. We thank you once again for joining us, and we will talk to you again next week.

Very good. Thanks.

-Frequently Asked Questions About an American Football Field:

-How long is a football field? A football field from goal line to goal line is 100 yards long with two ten yard deep end zones. Want to know more about the evolution of the playing field, you are in the right place as we covered it here:Football-Fun-Facts/Facts-About-the-Field" target="bbcode">Field Size Evolution.

-How wide is a football field? Most levels of American football play on a field that is 53.3 yards wide.

-What are the hash marks for? The hash marks are used for a few different things during a game, but most importantly they are the inbounds spot for the ball to rest fo the next play adjacent to where it became dead on the previous play outside of the hash marks or out of bounds. Here is a great piece explaining the has marks and their history and evolution: The Fumble Fiasco Out-of-Bounds Oddities in Early Football.

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-Transcription of the 1905 Fairmont Experiment with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to Tuesday, Football Archaeology Day. As we go to FootballArchaeology.com's author, Timothy P. Brown.And Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Thank you.

Good to see you again. Looking forward to chatting. You have one of your most recent tidbits that you've dug up some real good football archaeology on this.

And just a great story from 1905 that I'd love to have you tell the audience about. Yeah. So, I mean, I think probably anybody that's listening knows that there were a lot of concerns, you know, leading up to and then in the 1905 season about injuries and deaths on the playing field.

And so, you know, there was just a lot of pressure to make some changes to the game. We had the whole Teddy Roosevelt thing. And then, you know, in the end, the guy who was the president or chancellor of NYU, he formed, he got people together to start really looking at this issue.

And, you know, so there were, the newspapers had all kinds of suggestions about possible rule changes. And, you know, there are people throwing out all kinds of ideas. And so, they kind of started talking about, you know, is there a way that we could experiment and have a test game? And, you know, there have been other times where that occurred.

Stag did some things, you know, this is about another five years down the road. And Hugo Bezdek, you know, did some testing. So, there are a couple of different instances of stuff like that.

But so, this one was, you know, while they were kind of looking for a game to be played, you know. Basically, the teams had disbanded for the year. But for some reason, the folks at Fairmont, which is now Wichita State, you know, in Wichita, they had been looking, you know, to maybe play a Christmas game just to kind of keep folks entertained and have some fun. And it turned out then that they agreed to play a test game against Washburn, which is a, you know, a state school in Kansas.

And so, you know, they were, and basically what they agreed to do was to try out some of the rules that were being proposed. And, you know, I don't know exactly how much interaction these guys had with folks back east, but the coaches of the two teams, Fairmont, were coached by a guy named Willis Bates, and Washburn was coached by John Outland. So, Bates had played at Dartmouth, and Outland had played at Penn, and, you know, he's the Outland trophy guy, right? So, so they were both, you know, they both had, you know, East Coast cred.

And the fact that they would play a game would be something that would be kind of, you know, trusted, you know, for want of a better term. So, and just one other odd thing about that year was that Fairmont, earlier in the year, had played a game at night. And it was played under, I think Coleman Lanterns is a local manufacturer somewhere in the Wichita area.

And so they lit, they had Coleman Gas Lanterns hanging all around the field and over the field. Maybe not, maybe not over the field. I think they had but it turned out to be kind of a mess because it just didn't put off enough light.

But anyway, it's just one of those early, early little factoids. Yeah. I never heard that before.

It's kind of interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, there were others that did electrical, you know, lighting before that, but they were the only ones I've ever heard of that tried to do, you know, gas lanterns. But we have the Zippo factories not too far from here. I wonder if they tried that bunch of Zippos lit up at the same time.

Or just have all the kids turn on their cell phones. So yeah. So anyway, they agreed to play a game on Christmas day.

And so they said, okay, we're going to allow the forward pass. We're going to require offenses to gain 10 yards rather than five and three downs. And then they also gave officials the authority to, you know, throw somebody out of the game if they, you know, for any kind of unnecessary roughness, which was, they didn't have that necessarily at the time.

So, you know, as it turned out, it turned into kind of a, the game was kind of a turd, frankly. It was like, it ended up in a zero, zero tie. Each of the teams threw some forward passes and completed two or three.

But we don't really know. I mean, all we really can operate off of these newspaper articles. So we don't really know how they threw the ball.

Right. And we just know they didn't do it very effectively. But the whole thing comes down to that they just couldn't imagine and think through how to change the game of football, how to approach it differently, given a new set of rules.

Right. And so it's just that idea that for us, we know the old spiral is to throw a football, but they didn't. You know, they tried all kinds of basketball and two-handed set shots.

They did shovel passes. They did, you know, you name it. You know, they tried, and they threw the football like a grenade, with a straight arm, you know.

And just if you think about it, how do you tell somebody to go out on a pass route when they've never seen a pass route before? Right. I mean, what do you do? You know, so these are the first guys trying to figure this stuff out. And they didn't do a very good job of it.

You know, and you can't really blame them. A lot of people struggled with it for about 10 years. You know, once the pass was legalized, there were some that got it, got after it right away, but most people didn't.

So, you know, and it turns out that, so one of their big conclusions was that, you know, because they really didn't adapt their offenses at all, they went from playing a game where they had three downs to getting five yards. Now, all of a sudden, they have three downs to get 10 yards. They didn't change their offense really.

So guess what? They didn't get many first-downs, right? And so they viewed that as a silly rule. Oh, it's never going to work. Well, it didn't work because they didn't reimagine the game.

And then, you know, find the tactics, find the techniques, you know, to do things differently. So anyways, I think it's really just the neatest part of the game in total is number one, that it failed, right? And that it, but it shows the difficulty of reimagining how to play this game under a new set of rules and why it took a while for that to occur. But, you know, they did their best.

They were willing to try it. And, you know, so, you know, good for them, right? Right. You know, I always found it kind of interesting, you know, hearing that story and, you know, the reason why they did it is to try to report back East to give them some information on, you know, it's an experimental game on some of these rules, but you never really see a whole lot, except for maybe years later, there was, I think one gentleman that was involved or was a spectator or something that had some information about it.

We don't know how accurate it was or anything, but there's nothing going back to, you know, to camp or to, you know, John C. Bell or any of those guys back East that tells what happened in this game, you know, what they tried. And I'm always surprised, maybe someday somebody will open up some notebook and, you know, in their great-grandparents' house or something and have some information. But I was finding that kind of fascinating.

Well, you know, you have to believe that there were at least personal letters exchanged. So, like, because, you know, both of these coaches were, you know, they were Eastern guys, you know, and they maintained their connections. So, there had to be something back and forth.

But yeah, I mean, as far as I know, I mean, there's no report to a committee and, you know, maybe it was because things were, there was so much turmoil at the time, you know, we'd had multiple rules committees in the late 1800s and now, you know, we're going between the IFA and, you know, whatever. And this whole thing that NYU is getting going will eventually become the NCAA. But yeah, you know, who knows? Yeah.

It's not like they picked up the telephone and called somebody very well. No, exactly. You know, and so, it had to be, you know, just the fact that they were even in touch.

Somehow, they got all this material. Now, the newspapers, you know, that was, you know, the wire services and that, that would have been one of the main ways for them to even learn what the potential rule changes are. But, you know, as this game got reported on, you know, if you look it up, I mean, you name it, any newspaper in the country, they did at least some kind of report on this test game.

So, you know, people were paying attention to it, but, you know, then it was forgotten pretty quickly. Right. So, it might be one of the original bowl games.

Of course, the Rose Bowl came out in 1902. So, I guess it wasn't the original holiday bowl game, but it was played right on Christmas day even, right? Yeah. Okay.

And so, one of the things that, you know, part of the reason I kind of, I did this particular tidbit was because I'd come across, you know, a real photo postcard of the 1906 Fairmont team, you know, online. I, you know, I ended up, you know, buying things because most people looked at it and said, I don't know who this is. Still, I knew who they were, you know, you know, so I basically was able to pick it up for a song, but, you know, and so, my best guess is, you know, that the vast majority of 1906 guys were on the 1905 team too. So, probably a number of the guys played in the game are in that picture, but, you know. Interesting.

I have a piece of history in my possession. Yeah. Well, that's a cool piece of history and, you know, we appreciate you sharing it with us each and every day on your tidbits.

And speaking of that, why don't you tell the listeners how they too can enjoy some of these great photographs and, you know, your website and where they can, you know, get a hold of the tidbits each and every day? Yeah. So, the site is, it's a sub-stack site, but I've got a, you know, personalized URL.

So, it's just footballarchaeology.com, and you can sign up there. If you sign up or subscribe, you'll get an email delivered to your inbox every night at seven o'clock Eastern, and then you can read it at your leisure. Yeah.

And so, you know, the only other thing I would just say is, you know, if you're, if you bookmark the site and you're trying to figure out something on football history, you know, there's got one of those little search magnifying glass things in there. So, put in a term, see if something pops up for you and there's probably a story or two in there. Yeah.

So, great stuff. All right. Well, appreciate you, Tim.

And we'll talk to you again next week. Darin, thank you very much. Look forward to it.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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Timothy P. Brown, in his FootballArchaeology.com Daily Tidbit, reveals the evolution of pass interference in football. An interesting origin and need for the rule arose as the forward pass morphed.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown Football Before Pass Interference

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 edition where we get to go down that historic road into some football archaeology with the host and founder of FootballArchaeology.com, Timothy P. Brown. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Thank you, Darin, for this beautiful summer evening. Glad to be sitting inside in my basement talking with you. And I, too, am in a basement where it's much cooler than the rest of the house and 80-degree weather that we're not used to, going from 50s to 80s in a couple of days.
It's kind of a shock to the system. But we've got a little bit of a shock to the system in one of your recent tidbits that we're going to discuss tonight. And you have a great title to it, and it's called Before There Was Pass Interference.
And I don't think any of us listening or talking on the subject remember before pass interference. So we're really interested to hear what it was like. Yeah.

Yeah. And I still, I've got an article that I've been working on for quite some time to try to describe the difficulty of coming up with a passing attack in 1906. So, the forward pass was new.

And the fact that they, well, they didn't have a pass interference penalty when the forward pass was first legalized. And so, you know, just to kind of set the scene for that or, you know, to describe why, you know, it's the fact that, you know, I think we now tend to think of, we think of passing the way we've always known it, you know, the overhand spiral, throwing the ball down the field, airing it out. And that's not what they conceived of at the time.

You know, football had, you know, all basically always had forward passing. It was just legal. And for them, a forward pass was a forward lateral.
So it was these, you know, just short little, either inadvertent or, you know, on purpose, they tossed the ball forward. And if the referee caught it, they were penalized for it. And it was actually, you know, a loss, you know, they lost the ball.

So when the forward pass was first legalized, most people were thinking in terms of fairly short-range kind of tosses, you know, pitch kinds of approaches. And, you know, the techniques were, you know, there was kind of the basketball two-hand set shot, sort of, you know, pushing the ball to another guy, the grenade toss, things like that. So, and so, you know, if you think of the forward pass in those very short-range kinds of dimensions, you probably weren't thinking in terms of pass interference.

I mean, people were getting jostled around, you know, I mean, they were, somebody was tackling you, and the guy in front of you was blocking and, you know, maybe you pitched the, you know, you pitched the ball to the guy who was blocking. And so, you know, pass interference didn't kind of make sense conceptually. The other thing that was related to that is that in 1906, they also expanded the onside punt.

So, making every player on the offense eligible to run downfield and get and recover a punt for the off or for the kicking team, regardless of whether they were offside or onside relative to the punter. So, you know, and football already had, you know, they didn't call them gunners that didn't come till maybe the fifties or something. But they had, you know, their ends would split out oftentimes on punts if it was, you know, a planned punt.

And so then, you know, that guy would get jostled by a defender all the way down. And so, you know, the expectation was somebody running downfield like that was going to get hit. So there was just not a, you know, they just didn't conceive of a forward, the forward passing game we know and love today.

And so they didn't think of pass interference the same way. And so they played the first two seasons without really without any rules regarding pass interference. And then in in 1908, they adopted a new rule that said the defense can push the offense out of the way to get to the ball and to try to catch the ball.

But there were no restrictions on the offense. So they could they didn't even have to, you know, they could push the guy so he wouldn't catch the ball, you know, the defender to not catch the ball. And so that stuck around until 1910.

That sounds like a whole lot more fun to watch than what we have today. Yeah. Well, you just I mean, you think about it.

I mean, like the, you know, press coverage and, you know, some of the things, you know, where now, you know, the defenders can't hit the receiver, you know, five after five yards downfield, things like that. You know, those rules, you know, weren't around until like, you know, I think it was the early 70s when those rules came into being, you know, and then that was obviously, you know, when the so you couldn't be in contact when the ball was in the air. Prior to that, it was kind of anything goes.

So that was, you know, maybe to some extent, the remnant of it. But yeah, I don't think the five-yard chuck rule in the NFL came into maybe the late 70s or early 80s. I think it was pretty prevalent during the 70s.
You could have contact, and yeah, right. Yeah, because I mean, the Raiders were the, you know, probably the foremost that, yeah, Lester Hayes and Mel Blount were guilty of it, too. All of them were big corners.

So then, in 1910, they said, OK, you can't, you can't make contact. You can't push or shove, you know, but you could kind of use your body if you're making a bona fide attempt to catch the ball, which is fundamentally the rule that we have today. You know, they also just for 1910, they got rid of it in 1911.

They also added the rule that the defender could not tackle the receiver until he had taken one step after catching the ball, which kind of presages, you know, the targeting or defenseless player, you know, sort of sort of thing. But they got rid of it, you know, after just one year and, you know, just left it at, you know, basically at that point, they said, OK, once he catches the ball or touches the ball, then it's Katie bar the door. But so, you know, it's really, you know, it took a couple of years for pass interference to come into being.

And then, you know, by basically 1910, are pretty much our current. Handling and view of pass interference came into being, you know, now what happens in the hand chucking and all that kind of stuff, press coverage that has changed. But pass interference is pretty much what it is.

Yeah, that's that's an interesting look at it. And, you know, it's stayed pretty consistent through all the years. It's too bad that the definition of a catch hasn't stayed that same way because it seems like recently we've lost what, you know, catching the ball is a legal catch anymore.
At least the NFL has. I think college still has it right in high school as a right. But it's a little bit confusing in the NFL anymore.

Yeah, I don't I don't even try to understand that one. I wait for the call on the field and then or from the box and, you know. Well, hopefully they're getting closer and closer to get it back to what it should be, what we all know is a catch and what isn't a catch.

And you just know it's not hard to describe, but you know, when somebody catches the ball. Yeah, it's, but, you know, that's kind of the tough thing for referees to have a basis for their rulings. And that's that's true.

Or officials, I should say. But yeah, it's a it's a difficult one to try to figure out. But, you know, so what's, you know, back to the just the pure pass interference thing.
It's just interesting that they kind of settled on something early on that, you know, has worked for one hundred and one hundred and ten years. And it's really, really pretty remarkable because there aren't that many rules where that has been the case. Yeah.

When you can have a bunch of football minds around the country and throughout the ages all agreeing on something, that is pretty remarkable. Well, Tim, that was another fascinating tidbit that you had recently. Now, folks would love to get their hands on your tidbits each and every day.

And maybe you could give them some information that you can share with them. Yeah. So, you know, I release the stories every day at seven o'clock Eastern.
And all you got to do if you're interested is go to footballarchaeology.com. There's an opportunity to subscribe on every page. And so you sign up and it's free. You get an email in your inbox at seven o'clock Eastern each night.

And so, you know, you can pile them up for the week or read them that minute, whichever you prefer. And if you're not, you know, if you don't want me invading your inbox, you can follow me on Twitter at footballarchaeology.com or not, or just footballarchaeology is my name there. Right.

OK. Well, Tim Brown, footballarchaeology.com. Thank you very much for joining us. And we will talk to you again next Tuesday.

Very good. Thank you, sir.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology joins us again this week to educate us on another aspect of football. This week Tim brings to us the honor he received in his research that brought him national attention. I am talking like the National Archives display attention! Listen in on Tim's great news!

-Transcribed Chat on the National Archives Celebration of 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 it is Tuesday.

And once again, we have our friend from FootballArcheology.com, Timothy P. Brown, the historian, the author, the great researcher of football, Tim Brown. Welcome back to the Pig Pen. Hey, thank you, sir.

Appreciate it, Darin. Looking forward to chatting once again. Yeah, Tim, you brought up a very interesting topic that you want to discuss tonight.

It's about something with the National Archives that you were able to be a part of, and hoping you could explain that to us and share it with us. And maybe some of us can get out there and witness it ourselves. Yeah.

So, you know, I posted a thing about this on my on football archaeology. But so basically what happened is I was invited to attend like a pre-opening of a new exhibit at the National Archives. And, you know, it was first time that I had been there.

But, you know, if you if you've been to D.C. and you checked out the National Archives Museum in the rotunda, they've got the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And then they have one room off to the side that has all kinds of, you know, kind of the history of the archives and the types of records they maintain, et cetera. Then, in the other direction is their special exhibit hall.

And so they recently opened an exhibit called All American, the Power of Sports. And so it's essentially a it's a it's an exhibit that will be open till for another like 14 months or so. But it's all about, you know, the role of sports in in bringing different types of people together.

And so in some cases, what they're, you know, is the emergence of opportunities for African-Americans in sports, for people of different ethnic backgrounds in sports, and for women as well. And so that's that's the general theme. And they've just got some really, you know, it's got some incredibly cool items, you know, a diary or autobiography, you know, that now I'm blanking on his first name, but big Boxer Johnson wrote while he was in, you know, the federal penitentiary.

There were all kinds of just really interesting artifacts, some things from, you know, Japanese internment camps. I mean, you name it. You know, there's a little bit of everything.

But and it was, you know, really nice events. I got to meet Anita Thorpe, Jim Thorpe's granddaughter, because one of the items on display is are his replacement medals, you know, from the 1912 Olympics. Dikembe Mutombo was the featured speaker.

So, you know, he gave a talk, and I had a chance to chat with him. And, you know, there are another, I don't know, half a dozen former NBA guys there. Did he shake his finger back at you? No.

Yeah. Well, I got close enough for him to strike me or wave his finger at me. But I tried to play nice with him.

So now he's, you know, really wonderful guy. He's doing some some great work raising funds for some challenges that, you know, are in Africa today. But but anyways.

And so the reason I was invited is that I had gotten involved in, you know, and, you know, did a lot of research on a story about the in the, you know, within the past year, the National Archives was processing some photographs, some old slides, actually, from West Point. And the guy who was doing the processing noticed that, you know, these were negatives. And so anyway, there are negatives.

He noticed that one of them, instead of all the people in the negative, had black faces in the negative; they had white faces. So he's like, oh, what's going on? You know, so anyway, he checked it out. It turned out to be this 1920s football team that represented the West Point Cavalry Detachment.

So they were Buffalo soldiers, so African-American men. And they were basically enlisted men stationed at West Point who taught, you know, maintain the stables and the horses but also taught horseback riding, et cetera, and cavalry tactics to the cadets, you know, many of whom grew up in a city and maybe didn't have a lot of, you know, experience in horsemanship. But these guys ended up, you know, having sports teams.

And West Point had an enlisted men's league. So there were a group there's a group of enlisted men who supported who helped teach the cadets artillery tactics. And there were other people in like medical and there are other people, you know, so there were different functions and each of them fielded a team.

So as I was, you know, I basically tried to figure out who these guys were. And because, you know, there was an article in The Washington Post about it that hadn't gotten into the detail. So, I basically figured out who these guys played.

I was able to find images of the twenty-eight, twenty-nine, and thirty teams, you know, in the old, you know, Spalding-type football guys. And so, you know, basically, I could start identifying who some of these guys were in the picture. While I was doing that research, I ended up seeing this trophy that a guy had online and, like, you know, a collectors group on Facebook.

And it was like it was a trophy for this West Point enlisted men's league awarded to the cavalry detachment. So I got a hold of them. And, you know, one thing led to another.

You know, it's just we've become friends. Ron Pomprey is the the owner. But when I wrote this stuff up, then the National Archives somehow came across it.

And so they reached out to the combination of Ron and I. And so he has his trophy on loan to the archives and as part of the exhibit. So it's just so that's why the two of us were invited to this thing and, you know, had a wonderful time. And so it was just a great event.

And, you know, there are some people there who just kind of stay in touch. And, you know, I just don't want to go into the names right now, but I'll just have that be very, very cool. What an honor to have something that you wrote be recognized by the National Archives.

And you get invited to go down there and celebrate, you know, this great sports heritage that we have seen here in the United States, along with the owner of the trophy. So that's really cool. Let's.

Yeah. Congratulations on that. Yeah.

So it's anyway, it's really fun. And, you know, just it's a great exhibit. And so if you live in the area generally or if you have plans to go to Washington, yeah, check it out.

You know, I mean, you could you could do it inside of an hour, probably, you know, and get a pretty good, pretty thorough going through. But really, it's a fun exhibit. And then the other reason I just want to point it out is that I. Have been trying to find ways to get some publicity around some of the research that I've done because I've kind of hit a wall.

And so. Anybody out there who was listening to this, who is aware of an ancestor who was with the cavalry detachment. At West Point in the 20s.

But please take a look at the site because I may have images of your grandfather, great uncle, great great, you know, whatever it may be, whatever the relationship may be. So I'm trying to trying to get people to go out there to see if we can identify some additional, you know, some more of these men. Right.

I probably figured out who half of them are, you know, and tracked them down through census records and everything. But there are others. All I have is the last name.

And I just haven't been able to get anywhere with them. Yeah. Get them recognized.

It would be so awesome to have them preserved in history as well and get the recognition they deserve for being, you know, such a pioneer and a trailblazer for what they did. So, yeah. And just, you know, for, you know, all the folks out there, you know, it's just cool to kind of learn something.

You know, I reached out to one or two people who weren't aware that their grandfather or green uncle had been on these teams, you know. So it was something they learned, something new. Yeah, definitely.

Very cool. OK, now I'm going to expose my ignorance, at least my ignorance, in one area. I have many ignorances.

But OK, the National Archives, we know that Washington, D.C., is that connected to the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, or are they all separate entities? Boy, yeah. In terms of organizational structure on that, I do not know. I mean, you know, I think the archives, I think, you know, basically their basic charge is to maintain the history of all public records.

You know, so obviously, they're involved in some of the things going on now with Mar-a-Lago, et cetera. But, you know, that's that's their main charge. And so, I mean, they've got census records.

They've got all kinds of geologic and, you know, you name it. You know, just all kinds of things that. You know, one government entity or another generated the military personnel records, you know, fall under them.

So, I mean, they've got a massive charge. You know, they've got a lot of work to do. So.

All right. So maybe it's a little different. The Smithsonian is just all the other stuff that's the things and the archives is the records and the documentation and data that's collected.

OK, I gotcha. Yeah, gotcha. OK, well, Tim, I very much appreciate you joining us.

Before we let you go, why don't you share with us your website and how people can stay in touch with you and learn about what you share with your tidbits? Yeah. So my website is footballarchaeology.com. It's a substack site, if that means anything to you. But basically, just, you know, just go to the address footballarchaeology.com. You can subscribe there.

That'll result in you getting an email every day with whatever that day's story is. You can also follow me on Twitter, and I'm a football archaeologist there as well. So, following on Twitter is great.

But the unfortunate thing is you might miss a couple of episodes here and there. So if you subscribe, you're going to get every one of them. You can still delete them if you don't want to read them.

But if you miss it, you don't have time to read it. Save it in your inbox, and you can double the pleasure the next day. So that's yeah, you know, and most of them take less than a minute to read.

So, you know, they're they're pretty quick. But good stuff as always. Congratulations again on that great honor of being recognized and getting to go down there and on that visit with your friend who has the trophy.

So, you know, Tim, we enjoy your company each and every Tuesday. Hope that we can continue to do this and talk to you again next Tuesday and get some more football archaeology brought into the pig pen. So, thanks, Tim.

Hey, very good. Thanks, Darin. I appreciate it, as always.

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.

---

One of the top experts in early football rules history, Timothy P. Brown, joins us in the discussion to explain the 1915 season of Brown University. Timothy Brown's FootballArchaeology.com has a daily football factoid that he shares, which is quite interesting in a short read. They uniquely preserve football history, and we are quite happy that Tim has agreed to join us each week to review some of his Today's Tidbits. Click that link, and you can subscribe for free and receive them each evening.

This post originated from a Tidbit that Tim wrote back in 2022 titled footballarchaeology.com/p/todays-tidbit-a-bad-loss-and-a-bonus?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web" target="bbcode">A Bad Loss and a Bonus.


-Transcription of the 1915 Brown University Football Team 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 it's Tuesday. And once again, we have some football archaeology with Timothy P. Brown, author and historian that has a great website of footballarchaeology.com. Tim Brown, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Thank you for having me on again. As always, I am looking forward to chatting.

Yeah, this is a really interesting topic that we're going to talk about, the 1915 Brown Bruins, and have a very interesting story that you shared back on September 2nd, and really enjoying this one, and I think the listeners will as well.

Yeah, well, actually, you know, before chatting about that team, I think it was yesterday or the day before, an RPPC, so a real photo postcard of that 1915, of Brown's 1915 team, sold on eBay for $1,025. Wow. So, I mean, that's the, you know, it's not like I've tracked it, you know, over life, but that's, I think, the highest-priced postcard I've ever seen.

But, you know, it has Fritz Pollard on the team. So, a lot of times, especially older African Americans, you know, football stuff, you know, can command a pretty good, pretty good price. You know, it's an item that I don't think I've ever seen before until it was offered in that particular auction.

And then, you know, even for NFL people, you know, Fritz Pollard was the first African American coach in the NFL, you know, back in like 21 or, you know, something along those lines. So, you know, but just a couple of interests kind of collide, and all of a sudden, you're paying some pretty big money for a postcard. I mean, he was a tremendous player as well.

I mean, I think every team that he went to, he really brought their game up quite a bit to a different level. So, that's another reason to want to collect that, to have a legendary player. So.

Yeah. Well, you know, so the thing about that, you know, the 1915 team, you know, is that you know, Brown, I think, you know, by and large, has been kind of a second tier program, you know, and it was at the time. I mean, and I'm comparing that to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, and then, you know, probably like West Point.

Those were probably the premier, you know, year after year premier programs. But they had a long-term, you know, long-term coach at Brown, you know, during some of that period. And, you know, they have some pretty competitive teams.

And so, they actually, I think they ended up, they were, they surprisingly beat Yale that year, which they seldom did. But that was the Yale team, the 1915 Yale team. Frank Hinckley had come back to coach the team in 14.

And they kind of struggled. And then they were really struggling in 15. That was the year that the captain, Alex Wilson, fired the head coach.

So, he fired Hinckley. And he brought in Tom Shevlin to come in, you know, kind of fix things up for the last couple of games of the year. But, you know, part of his being fired was, Hinckley's being fired was that they lost to Brown.

So, you know, it was, I think that's the last instance I'm aware of where, you know, that was the last year Yale still had that, the captain runs the show, you know, kind of philosophy. But, you know, he literally fired the coach because his word was final. And then they, you know, they switched things up at, you know, the following year.

So, that was, you know, kind of an interesting element of it. And even, you know, to kind of the perspective of Percy Houghton, who was the coach at Harvard, didn't even go, or he wasn't there for the Harvard-Brown game because, you know, he thought it more important to go scout Yale, you know, and coaches used to do that sometimes. Stagg did that a few times, and you know, you read about it, and you know, here and there, people did that.

So, I mean, it just kind of tells you that it was a real upset, you know, that coach didn't even show up for the game. But that sounds, I mean, it sounds so strange, but I think you explained it the last time we had you on; we talked about the first coach and when the word coach was used, and it just recently aired as a podcast. And, you know, you usually explained to that, that the coaches really were important, not really as important at game time as the captains were, like they are today, you know.

So, it's. Yeah, the captains called the plays, there was no coaching from the sideline, all of that, you know. So, the practice week was done so he could go scout the teams, and the captain took over.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, to some extent, that, you know, that is the case. But then, you know, so the other thing that's just kind of interesting about that team and football in general at the time was Harvard, Yale, and Princeton had policies that they didn't go to bowl games, right?

And, you know, this was still, you know, they didn't have postseason games. And so, this is, you know, the Rose Bowl had a game back in 02, and then that was kind of forgotten. And then they restarted it in 1916.

So, they're inviting, you know, the best team they could get from the east that played in the 1915 season. But, you know, so Harvard, Yale, Princeton wouldn't go. And so, you know, Brown ended up being, you know, the best team that they could find, you know, who would say yes.

You know, and so then they did whatever the five-day, you know, train trip out to Pasadena. But, you know, there were, you know, the Big Ten didn't allow teams to play in postseason games. They did allow Ohio State to play in the Rose Bowl, I think in like 22, I think it was.

You know, and so just in general. And then even teams that did where the school or the faculty allowed it, you know, sometimes the kids just said, no, we're done. You know, they're just, they were just done with the season.

And, you know, they'd already turned in their equipment, whatever. They didn't want to spend time away from family for the holidays, you know, those kinds of things. So, I mean, it's just a different world.

You know, we'd know so many teams playing bowls, you know, to begin with, but it's just kind of the expectation of, you know, well, of course, you're going to go to the bowl. But back then, you know, a lot of times, you know, teams had the opportunity to go, but they turned them down. But so Brown ended up, you know, playing in the game, and then they lost to Washington State.

So, you know, that was kind of a, for the folks out West, that was a big deal is, you know, kind of a credibility boost that one of their teams could play and beat, you know, a team that's now, you know, of the Ivy caliber. So, you know, it's a big, you know, kind of a big deal, you know, for those folks. Yeah.

So, okay. So we already said that Fritz Pollard was on that team. Was there anybody else significant on that team besides Pollard? Yeah.

One of them, Wade, now I'm blanking on his name. Wade, Wade, Wade, Wade. He was a guard or tackle.

Wallace Wade, sorry. And so he was, he coached Alabama, took them, you know, to a couple of Rose Bowls. And then he, he was the coach at Duke for quite a while.

They played when Oregon State played the Rose Bowl at Duke because of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. You know, so the 42 Rose Bowl, Wade was still the coach there. So, but he, you know, he and Pollard were probably the most famous of the Brown players that year.

Very interesting. And, you know, some great, great research, and we appreciate you sharing these teams and some of these innovations from football from so long ago, your football archaeology site. I want you to share with people how they can, you can find your tidbits that you'd share with us each and every day and how they can subscribe to your website to make sure they know when that you've released them.

Sure. So, you know, my website is just, you know, footballarchaeology.com. You can also find me on Twitter under the same name. And, you know, the gist of it is I publish these, I publish a tidbit every day, comes out at seven o'clock Eastern time.

And so if you subscribe, you'll get that as an email newsletter. And then obviously, if you're, you know, you could also just visit the site anytime you want. And, you know, there's a full archive in there with, you know, now getting on, you know, 300, you know, some article, you know, fully long-form articles or tidbits, which tend to be more, you know, 30 seconds to a minute long reads.

Okay. Just little snippets. And I can tell you that it is exactly right at 7 pm.

It's very consistent because usually my family and I were watching a rerun of the Big Bang Theory. And the chime for my email signal, my notification comes right at the same time of the theme song for Big Bang Theory every time. So it's like part of the song to us now.

Well, it's just gets scheduled in the application. You could have just take more punctuality credit for than that. Well, you know, so I still have to manually do it on Twitter.

So, you know, but then it's going to be a 703, 705, somewhere in there. Yeah. Yeah.

We're well into the show by then. So. All right, Tim.

Well, thank you very much. And we'll talk to you again next week with some more great football archaeology. Cool.

We'll see you next week. Thanks.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

Gridiron Grind: Get ready to rumble! This post and subsequent podcast episode celebrate the dedication and hard work that fuels every football season, from the grueling regular season to the electrifying prime-time matchups. Find the hidden words that represent every player's journey, from walk-ons to draft steals and the coaches who guide them all the way to building a lasting legacy.

-Two-Way Player

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.

The evolution of NFL players specializing in offense or defense reflects the growing complexity and athleticism of the game. In the league's early days, two-way players were common, gutting out both sides of the ball from the opening kickoff of the regular season through the final whistle of even a road game. Imagine those early afternoon games, players battling exhaustion while switching roles between series. As the game evolved, the strategic nuances demanded specialization.

Coaches, strategizing from the coach's box, began to see the advantage of dedicated units. The draft became about finding specialists, though sometimes a true two-way talent, a potential draft steal, would emerge. While some players, especially early in their careers or if they were a walk-on trying to make the roster, might contribute on both sides of the ball, the trend moved decisively toward specialization. This shift allowed players to hone their skills, leading to higher levels of performance, especially under the prime time lights. While the days of truly dominant two-way players are largely gone, their legacy remains, a reminder of the grit and versatility that once defined NFL athletes.

Even now, a team might look to the waiver wire for a player who can contribute on both sides of the ball if injuries hit the roster. The memory of those iron men who played both ways, preserved in a vintage ticket stub or highlighted in a legacy game documentary, serves as a testament to their incredible athleticism and endurance, a stark contrast to the highly specialized athletes of today who retreat to the locker room to prepare for their specific roles.

-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.

When I was researching information for my book World's Greatest Pro Gridiron Team, I kept seeing games where the time of the first half was much different from he second half.

It occurred almost every game, and though the first half was almost always the same time from game to game, the second stanza was all over the place. There had to be a reason.

Tim Brown over at Football Archaeology had the answer and he also shared it in a post he wrote and in a conversation on our podcast.

-Transcribed Conversation of Timothy Brown on the House of the Setting Sun

Football_Stadium_Minnesota_Golden_Gophers_Sunset_Panorama_-_panoramio.jpg" target="bbcode">Tcf Bank College Football Stadium Minnesota Golden Gophers Sunset Panorama Panoramio is courtesy of mjdemay via Wikimedia Commons

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

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Darren, good to see you, see your smiling face. It is about time.
About time. Yeah, great segue. Your segue-isms are getting better and better each and every time.
I am upping segue game. The dad jokes are a-flying, that's for sure. But Tim, now that you set it up, you have an interesting article from back in September that maybe back in September didn't mean as much as it does this time of year as we're getting closer to the winter season.

The sun going down affected the timing of games. I'll let you take it from there and tell us all about your tidbit. Yeah, so actually, the interesting thing is there is an unidentified reader.
I can't say who that is unless the reader gives permission. The reader gives you permission, Tim. Go ahead.
Oh, OK. So, one time, Darin asked me. Why is it always me? So, yeah, so just, you know, it's like anything else.

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

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

And so, you know, when I wrote it, I kind of used the, you know, the old terminology of de jure versus de facto. So de jure means, you know, by the rule or by the law, whereas de facto is in practice. Right.
And so when football first started, when we first brought it in, you know, when we were playing rugby. Football was just one of those stew of games that came out of, you know, 18th-century England and the norm was to play 45-minute halves. And so soccer still plays 45-minute halves, and rugby still plays 45-minute halves.

And when football got started here, we were playing 45-minute halves even though there was nothing in the rules that said that's how long it was. You know, the original football rules don't mention how long a game is supposed to last, but everybody knew it was 45 minutes. So that's what you did.
When football kind of, you know, as partly safety measures, you know, they were trying to give people rest and just reduce the amount of time that they're on the field. You know, football started, it went to 45 minutes and then 35 and then 30. And it's perhaps so.

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

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

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

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

So, then we end up in a situation where, you know, during World War One, the government instituted light savings time, daylight saving, no S on that, daylight saving time. And so that came into effect in 1918. And so that was the first time that anybody had experienced that, at least, you know, in the US.
So you just kind of put yourself. I mean, we know what happens when daylight saving kicks in. But they just didn't anticipate it.

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

But, you know, and in the tidbit, there's a discussion of like. And the USC and somebody, you know, playing in a game, and it's just like nobody could see by the end of the game; it was just so dark. And it's it's one of those things, you know, we take for granted that everybody's going to have lights.
Well, guess what? Very few places had lights. And if they did, it was jerry-rigged like the Navy used naval searchlights to light up the field for practice, you know. And, you know, so you have examples like that.
And that's that's one. I mean, some people had used them earlier, but they were painted white balls and yellow balls that came in right around. Yeah, that really became popular around that time.
That's when you start seeing them showing up in sporting goods catalogs. And it's really, you know, like. I know it's one of these things depending on where you have lived in the US; if you have not moved around a fair amount, you don't realize how much where you are in the time zone from an east, west, and north-south standpoint.

You don't realize how much impact that can have on how dark it gets early. So like Chicago is right on the east side of the central island. So it's like it's getting dark where it's like I'm in Detroit.
So, you know, still across the state, but if you're on the west side of Michigan, you know, it's light in the summer. It's like until.

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

So anyway, it's just one of those things you don't think about, but like. Daylight saving was a big story in 1918. So then, because of that, in 1922, they formalized the rule that said at halftime, the referee could approach the the two team captains and ask if they wanted to shorten the halves.
And then then they they'll do so as needed. And whether that's because of the lighting or the one team getting blown out. Basically, they had they had the chance to do that.
Yeah, it's just thank God that the football didn't adopt what soccer does now with, you know, you have the two 45-minute halves, and then we're going to just kind of arbitrarily throw some time on at the end, you know, just and not tell anybody, you know, how much time is left. Just, you know, whatever that drives me crazy. Drives me nuts, you know, that they don't have that public with how much time is going on there.
But yeah, very interesting stuff, Tim. And I'm glad you mean you really cleared up mine because I kept seeing this, you know, you'd have like a 25-minute first half and, you know, something like 10 minutes for the second half. I'm like, why are they doing that? You know, you have a 13-to-nothing game.

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

So that's that's great. So, yeah, again, it's just one of those things you just don't even think about because, you know, basically, there are very few people living today if there's anybody, you know, that that's that, you know when Daylight Savings first showed up. So.
Yeah, crazy. And there are probably more people who see live games under the lights, you know, at your local high school than you do in the daytime anyway nowadays. So we're so used to the lights.

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

So maybe you could help them out with some information. Yeah, so easiest and best thing is just hit my website, footballarchaeology.com in order to find it, you got to put the WWW in front of it. And then, you know, you can every, you know, every story gives you the opportunity to subscribe.
You can subscribe for free. And then, as a result, you'll get an email every night in your inbox. And, you know, some people let them pile up, and they'll send it to you.

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

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

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

Very good. Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.