Timothy P Brown

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NFL legend Bobby Layne wasn't just a great player, he was a player who adapted to the changing tides of the game. Today, we'll delve into a pivotal moment in his career – his transition from playing in the single-wing offense to thriving in the emerging T-formation. This wasn't just a simple position change; it was a testament to Layne's versatility and his ability to excel in a rapidly evolving landscape.

The single-wing, known for its reliance on a powerful running back and a more static quarterback role, was giving way to the T-formation, which emphasized a mobile quarterback with a stronger passing presence. Join us as we explore the challenges and triumphs of Layne's position switch, and how it not only impacted his career but also foreshadowed the increasing importance of the quarterback position in the NFL. So, grab your playbook and get ready to analyze the fascinating story of Bobby Layne's transformation from wingman to T-formation titan!

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on Bobby Layne

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 that time of the week again when we're going to visit Timothy Brown, the author and historian at Football Archeology, and see what he's up to with one of his famous daily tidbits.

And Tim Brown, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, thanks, Darin. Looking forward to chatting once again.

Yeah, this is a great weekly thing we got going on here. And Tim, before we get going into the tidbit, maybe you could, without giving away your secret sauce recipe here, tell us what your normal routine is for finding such interesting and off-the-wall topics for football for your writing. Yeah, you know, so I think, you know, some of it is really kind of planned out, and some of it's just happenstance or luck, I guess.

So, some of the topics are just things that, you know, I just have this the way my mind works a lot of times. I'm like, well, why is it this way? Why why do we do things this way? And so, you know, I just generally look at the game and ask the question and, you know, why do we call halfbacks, halfbacks and fullbacks, fullbacks and quarterbacks, quarterbacks? You know, I mean, just I ask kind of goofy questions like that. And so, anyways, as a result, you know, I just spend a lot of time researching football topics.

And so some of them are really kind of purposeful. I'm trying to find information on a specific thing. But oftentimes while I'm doing that, I just, you know, the article next to the one that I found, you know, for whatever I was researching happens to the headline that I noticed.

And that ends up being the more interesting article. So, you know, so and then other times just, you know, you're reading an article, and they're not just they don't just cover one topic. They talk about two or three things in an article.

And so sometimes the second or third topic is as interesting, more interesting than what I was really looking for. And so, you know, I just kind of notice them. And I have, you know, a couple of ways of tracking that information and kind of putting them in buckets. This is something I'm going to follow up on.

And once I'm done with the research I'm doing today. I just come up with judgments that are either worthy of a long article or a tidbit. Well, you really are quite the magician because I find myself quite often when you have that tidbit come out.

Yeah, I'm saying, you know, Tim's asking a question that I didn't even know that I wanted to know, but now I do want to know it. So it's something I never even thought of half the time. Like, wow, that's that's great.

This is really interesting. And it really dives into it. I think the listeners will enjoy that also.

And we'll give you a way to find Tim's tidbits here in a moment. But we're going to talk about one of his tidbits that really caught my eye back in early May. And it's on the great, legendary Bobby Lane and him switching some positions during his career.

Yeah, so this is an example of one that I kind of stumbled upon. I mean, I've always known about Bobby Lane and yada, yada. But, you know, I was I can't remember what I was looking for.

But at one point, I came across an article that said that leading into his senior season at Texas, he was going to be switching positions. And but he was just, you know, he was he played at a point when football was switching from the single wing and, to some extent, the Notre Dame box to the T formation. You know, so the T really came out.

You didn't say 1940 was really the word really bowed and then had the warrants that stopped some things. But so he's a post-war college kid, and his coach, Dana Bible at Texas, was a single-wing proponent. And so Lane was fullback slash halfback within the single wing.

And, you know, that was an offense that required. Required, I mean, the ideal was the Jim Thorpe, you know, triple threat, the guy who would who could kick, who could run, and who could pass. And Lane was all three of those.

You know, I mean, he was, you know, an absolute stud. The 46 Rose Bowl. He had three TVs rushing.

He had two passes and one receiving any kick for extra points, you know, which is, you know, 40 points every point in the game. He was a part of, you know. So, he was that kind of guy.

And, you know, some single-wing teams relied on their, most of them relied on their tailback to be the primary pastor. Some also had the fullback passing. You know, it depends on whether you have two talented pastors, and that's what you do.

But pretty much nobody had the quarterbacks pass the Notre Dame box. Yeah, they did. The Packers did that kind of stuff.

So anyway, they bring a new coach, and he installs the team. Oh, he looks around. He says, who's the best pastor on the team? Bobby Lane.

Boom. He became the quarterback during his senior year at Texas and was a total stud as a quarterback. But, you know, and it is because he was a great passer before.

You know, he's a great pastor in the single wing. So, he's a great pastor on the team. In some respects, he probably didn't utilize all his talents as well as a single wing did, but they wanted to move to the team.

OK, now I believe, you know, when he became professional, he went to the Pittsburgh Steelers, which is near and dear to my heart. And I think you even say that the Steelers were a single-wing offense at the time when they drafted Lane. I believe Jock Southern might have been the coach there and after the postwar days when they got Lane.

But then they they traded him away to the. Was it the Lions that they traded him to the Bears, the Bears, the Bears, who were a T formation team? It just seems odd to me. OK, he was a single wing in college, converted to the the the T formation and then a single wing offense drafts them and trades them to the T formation.

I'm just wondering, you know, a little bit curious about that. You know, it's part of my Steelers anxiety is part of that. But it's just a little interesting question.

I was wondering if maybe you knew. Yeah. So, you know, I think what happened there is that so he was drafted third overall by Steelers, and they were the last NFL team to be running the single league.

So that kind of tells you, maybe, you know. Maybe they should have thought it was an antiquated office at that time, right? It belonged as well. But that was the case.

But what was happening, too, is that right after the war, you had the All-American Football Conference. And so Lane also got drafted number two overall by the Baltimore Colts. So now he's in a situation where, OK, do I want to play for the Colts and the AFC, or do I play as a T formation quarterback, or do I go back single wing with the Steelers? And he basically told the Steelers he wasn't going to go play for him.

So, in order to recoup, you know, some value, the Steelers traded him to the Bears, who were one of the teams that pioneered the T formation back in 1940. OK, so he never played single-wing and professional. The Steelers traded him before he even played for him.

OK, that makes sense. OK, gotcha. Gotcha.

Because he wanted to be a T formation quarterback. Yeah, correct. Correct.

All right. That explains it. By then, you know, the NFL rules were, you know, a lot, you know, they were just more protective of quarterbacks.

They recognized the value, and they started just doing some things, liberalizing, blocking, et cetera, that just allowed quarterbacks to flourish and attract fans. And now we know what happened with NFL versus college games. Well, very interesting indeed, and a great glimpse back into both college and pro football history and one of the great players in Bobby Lane and Tim; why don't you tell people where they can find your daily tidbits and your website? Yeah, you can find the tidbits at www.footballarchaeology.com. You know, just hit the site and click on an article.

It'll give you the opportunity to subscribe. If you subscribe and you subscribe for free, you can. You'll get an email every day around seven o'clock in the evening with the tidbit or the full article.

That's what I published that day. There's also paid subscriptions that offer some additional value for those that are really into the stuff. And then or you can follow me on Twitter or Facebook using the same football archaeology name and but those, you know, potentially a few a few of my articles.

So I hope you subscribe. All right, folks, and if you're driving the car, don't try to stop and write it down or write it as you're driving. We're going to have it in the show notes.

So you can just come back later. And on PigskinDispatch.com, we'll get you right to Tim's site and to where his social medias are as well. So, Tim, thank you once again for this little glimpse into football history.

And we'll talk to you again next week.

Very good. We'll see you in seven days. Thanks.

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

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.

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Women playing football is not a new concept as we have seen time and time again through history. Heck we have even read and heard of some ladies that play on the men's teams.

Timothy P. Brown does an outstanding job of retelling the story of 1937 when some young ladies vied to play NCAA Football with the men.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on the 1937 Kicking Women

Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to another Tuesday as FootballArcheology.com's Timothy P. Brown joins us each and every Tuesday to talk about one of his recent tidbits that he writes about football history past and shares it with us. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, thanks, Darin, for the chat. I hope the listeners get a kick out of this evening's topic.

Well, I don't know if the men will, but maybe the women will, because it's OK. Yeah, you have a great title that really grabs the reader's attention.

And I remember when this came out back a few months ago, the Kicking Women of 1937, that could, you know, grab attention in multiple different ways. But from a football aspect, it's really intriguing to think about women kicking football anytime, especially back in the 1930s. So why don't you share the story, please? Well, I mean, you know, now it's not entirely uncommon, right? You know, I mean, it's been, oh, whatever, past 15 years, something like that.

You know, there's been various women at the high school or college level doing some kicking and recently had a woman playing defensive end or outside linebacker and putting the putting a smack on the quarterback. So this one is kind of one of those stories where it's like, you know, it's one of these where I stumbled across it when I was reading something else. And I saw this story about George Washington University, which is based in Washington, D.C. They have had what would never be considered a storied football program.

For whatever reason, they could never get it together. They were not a very good team, but they played football from 1928 to 1941.

And they're trying to turn the program around. I mean, it's a fine university and everything. They want to be proud of their of everything that they do.

So they went out, and hired Gus Welsh, to be their new head coach in 1937. So Welsh was the quarterback at Carlisle when Jim Thorpe was playing. And then I think he was a little bit younger than Thorpe, but he continued playing there.

He ended up playing in the NFL for four or five years. Then he went on to be the head coach at Washington State and then somewhere in Virginia. Then he was the coach at Haskell, you know, which is one of the Indian schools in Kansas.

So he'd been around a little bit but ended up at George Washington University. And, you know, he's trying to get this program resurrected and get some attention because, you know, he at one point made a quote that it was like, you know, the only way we're going to get any attention is to play a halftime of the Redskins game. So, you know, so he's just trying to get some attention for the team.

And so, you know, in October of 37, the story starts floating around that that he's got a co-ed, so a woman who's attending George Washington who's going to kick for him, you know, kick extra points. And. You know, it just kept popping up in the paper.

She's going to she's going to kick in the upcoming game or this Saturday. And then it didn't happen. And, you know, it goes on a couple of two, three times.

And so. And there's even, you know, I found one photograph that was in the newspaper of him holding the ball. So, you know, Gus Welsh is holding the ball.

And this kicker was supposed to be a barefooted kicker. But there's this woman wearing a skirt and she's got shoes on, but she's still, you know, so publicity kind of picture. But it kind of just goes on and it's going to happen.

And the student body votes for it. They support this program or, you know, having a female kicker. And then they kind of at the last minute, the faculty says, no, go.

You know, they would not allow one of their women students to to participate in the football program. So the day that that hits the newspaper, there's a story right next to it that talks about Tuskegee Institute down in, you know, in the south where they're claiming they have a kicker as well, a woman kicker. And that the plan is that she's going to kick in the rivalry game on Thanksgiving Day against Alabama State.

So the difference, though, is that Tuskegee's article names the woman and it was Mabel Smith. And so as I dug into, OK, well, who's Mabel Smith? You know, what's your background? It turns out that Mabel Smith, at the time, was the American record holder in the long jump, which, you know, she had set she had set the record at the AAU meet in 1936, which was the qualifying meet for the 36 Olympics. And unfortunately for her, the women's long jump was not an event at the 36 Olympics.

It didn't come into like 48. So she would have been the U.S. rep had she had they had the long jump at the time. But they didn't.

So she but she held that record. I mean, it really it was an amazing jump. And she held that record into the 1960s.

And she said in 30, that would have that would have been the Berlin Olympics. Right. We're Hitler.

That's right. Jesse Owens. Yeah.

OK. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So. Yeah. And in fact, I think she had a teammate at Tuskegee who made the team because she ran in the sprints or something like that.

But in the event, so, you know, obviously a premier athlete. So, you know, it's certainly believable that she could be an effective kicker. And then, you know, as it turned out.

On game day, she was on the field, but she was only there because they were recognizing that year Tuskegee had won the AAU championship, which was not just colleges; it was, you know, any club team, anybody at the time. They were the national champions for women's track and field. And so she was on the field to be recognized for that.

And Tuskegee won the game 14 to nothing. So they did kick two extra points, but it was there, I think, half-baffled back, you know, but one of the male players who kicked the extra points. But the other thing about Mabel is that she, you know, graduated from Tuskegee.

And then I forget where she did her master's, but she got a master's degree. Then she ended up getting a doctorate at Cal Berkeley. And then, you know, became a faculty member at Texas Southern and taught there for, you know, basically spent her career teaching, teaching at Texas Southern and kind of an education department sort of arena.

But anyway, so just an amazing, amazing person. And, you know, life, life history is just kind of cool. Even though she didn't get to kick in the game, you know, she had a pretty amazing story.

Yeah, boy, the brains and the athleticism. That's pretty amazing to be a world-class athlete at the time in multiple sports, you know, get attention. And you named four different universities.

There was a tour of the whole United States where she went and taught. So that's pretty incredible. And I'll start off with that sort of publicity stunt that the coach was doing at George Washington.

So interesting that that's kind of ironic that you found those in the same newspaper side by side of a woman kicker. So very, very. Yeah.

I mean, I suspect what happened is, you know, I don't know if Tuskegee picked up on the George Washington thing or if they were just kind of going to do it anyway. But I'm sure the editor found that second story and said, OK, let's put these two together. I was fortunate enough to find the one.

And that led me to the second one because otherwise, it was kind of like, oh, you know, it's a much better story with the Tuskegee side of it. Right. So definitely.

Well, Tim, you have some interesting items like this each and every day on some great football past stories and, you know, just interesting little tidbits that you call them appropriately. And maybe you could share with the listeners where they too can join in on the fun and read these tidbits each day. Sure.

So just go to www.footballarchaeology.com. That's a Substack application and our newsletter blog site. And so if you do that, you can subscribe, and you'll get an email at seven o'clock Eastern every night, and you'll get the story delivered to you that way. Then read it at your leisure.

You can also follow me on threads or Twitter, where I go into the football archaeology name. And then, or if you have the Substack app, you'll get it in your feed that way as well. Well, lots of different ways.

Whatever works for you. Yeah, that's a great variety. And, you know, no excuse not to be able to get it, whether you're on the go or at home or want to catch it a couple of days later or a week later or a year later.

I find myself going back through some of the ones I read a year ago. And they're still interesting. They're evergreen, with their history and fascinating stuff.

And you do a great job. So I appreciate it. Well, I sometimes find myself going, oh, boy, I don't remember writing that one because I've got 800 of them out there now.

So something like that. So, yeah, I forget that I've even written on some of the topics. Yeah, it's a it's great, phenomenal pieces that you write there.

And they're very interesting. So we appreciate you coming on here each Tuesday and talking about one of them with us and sharing your knowledge and some football history. And we would like to talk to you again next Tuesday.

Very good. Thanks, Darin. Look forward to chatting.

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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Despite what people may have thought of him as a politician and President of the United States, Gerald Ford had great integrity and discipline. Perhaps this quality never shined as brightly as it did when he was the Michigan Wolverine's football team captain.

Timothy P. Brown joins us to tell the tale of the student having more integrity and conviction than the institution he played for.

Tim's original post can be found at Michigan Football, Gerald Ford, and Idealism.

-Transcription of Gerald Ford's Inegritty with Timothy Brown

Hey, it's Tuesday, and we have Tim Brown. Now, Tim, welcome to The Pigpen.

Hey, Darin.

Thank you much. Always, I look forward to my Tuesday evenings and sharing football time with you. Yeah, it's a great time and we have, you know, a great story this evening to share with everybody.

This is one that's, you know, it's almost 100 years old, but it's really pertinent to today's social environment that's going on around the world. And it's also about a former president. And I will let you set that up for you to take hold then.

Yeah. So, you know, this is one where I, you know, I guess the story is I kind of rag on the University of Michigan. And it's not so much them specifically, although this incident did involve them, certainly.

There were lots of people at fault here, you know. So this is, it's just, they're an example. And, you know, for a university, I think typically is, you know, reasonably stand up, you know, group of folks.

But so the whole thing here is it's about, you know, standing up for one principle, but not another. This occurred in 1934 when Jerry Ford was a senior and the captain of Michigan's football team, you know, played center. And so, and they were national champs in 33 and 34.

So, you know, this is, they were big time stuff. They enter the season though, and they lose to Michigan State, which is not a good thing. And then they, and they didn't even score.

They play the next week, and they play Chicago. They lose, and they don't score. So, in the third week of the season, they're playing Georgia Tech. And again, you know, at that point, there weren't a lot of intersectional games, but you know, this is one.

And so, but at the time, Georgia Tech had a rule in place that they did not play games against teams that had black players. Michigan had one black player, and his name was Willis Ward, who, it turned out, was Gerald Ford's good friend. So Ford and Ward were buddies and, you know, and they were both starters for the football team.

And so there was going to be, there was controversy, and this happened all the time when Northern teams were going to play Southern teams and Southern, that borderline, you know, moved about a bit, you know, so Missouri was, you know, didn't, didn't play, you know, teams with black players and there were others, you know, Kansas. As the week progressed, it became apparent that Michigan was not going to play Willis Ward. And so, you know, Gerald Ford is looking at it saying, look, I'm the captain of this team, and this is my teammate, and he's a friend.

If we're not going to play Willis Ward, then I'm not going to play either. So he goes into the, into the coach's office, Harry Kipke at the time, and he told him he was quitting the team and it was because of that specific issue. So, you know, he leaves and everything, and then kind of word gets around what's happening and this Willis Ward basically asked Ford to go ahead and play.

You know, he didn't want, you know, I mean, it, you know, it was a very noble gesture on his part, but he wanted, he didn't want the rest of his teammates to be hurt and Jerry Ford to be hurt because of this policy and the decision that the university administration made. So anyways, it turns out then that they, you know, Ford plays, and he was apparently rather fired up for the game, and they beat Georgia Tech 9-2. And it turned out to be Michigan's only win of the year.

You know, they lost the first two, they beat Georgia Tech, and then they lost the rest of the game of their season. So that's, you know, there's kind of that, but so the standing, you know, they didn't stand up for one principle. And then there was a little bit later in the year when Michigan's athletic department learned that there was somebody out there who was basically making bootleg programs.

So they would, you know, use last week's program or whatever names and numbers of all the players. And, you know, they'd sell programs outside the stadium, and Michigan didn't want to lose that money. So they notified these people that they were copywriting the rosters and player numbers so that they could potentially, you know, go after them, you know, from a copyright infringement standpoint, which apparently, you know, led to them stopping selling programs.

So, you know, on the one hand, hey, Michigan has certainly had the right to do that. But, you know, they're chasing this money-oriented issue and out of, well, somewhat out of principle, but they didn't follow up on a more important principle earlier in the year. So it's just, you know, it's an example of just people being kind of two-faced, saying one thing, doing another, you know, that kind of thing.

And so, and the other side of it is, I mean, the broader theme is, you know, a lot of times we, people kind of, you know, if you're out of college and you've been working for a while and you've seen the world and you're one, you know, you have that kind of an attitude, it's easy to take this perspective that these idealistic college students are just, you know, kind of don't know what they're talking about. They haven't really been out there. And yet here's one where this college kid named Gerald Ford was far wiser than these administrators, whether it was Fielding Yost, the AD, or whomever it was at the time.

He demonstrated a hell of a lot more wisdom than his supposed elders, who were supposed to teach him something at the university. So that's just a bit, you know. But another thing that I take from that is, you know, you have, here you have the only man that served as president that was not elected some 40 years later, you know, or 40 years earlier, had the integrity as a teenager, probably, or early 20s to stand up for the rights of somebody else and, you know, make a, you know, sacrifice himself to do so.

And that gives me a whole new respect for Gerald Ford. Not that I disrespected him before, but that's quite a testament to his fortitude over his lifetime. So.

Yeah. And I think, you know, generally, you agree, disagree with him on political issues and things like that. I think most people felt, you know, he was an honorable man, right?

And he kind of played fair and square and all those kinds of things. And so, you know, this is just an early illustration, like you said, of him, of him doing that, you know, basically is what, what was he, 21 or 22 or something like that at the time. Yeah.

If we only had honest politicians like that these days, it's a better place. Don't go hoping for things you're never going to get. That's true.

That's true. Tim, you know, that's one of your great tidbits from back in February. And if you would, if you could share with the audience where they, too, could learn your tidbits on a daily basis?

Yeah. So, you know, you can find me on my website, footballarchaeology.com. I use the same name on Twitter. It's not the com part, just football archaeology.

So, you know, if you want to follow me on either, either mechanism, do so. And you can subscribe on football archaeology and that, you know, gets an email into your inbox every night. And then, you know, I've got a couple of books out there.

If you like the kind of stuff I write about, then you can find those on Amazon and most of the other, you know, major platforms. Okay. And on Amazon, they want to search under your full name, Timothy P. Brown.

Yeah. Timothy P. Brown or, or look for, you know, one of my book titles, like How Football Became Football. And you'll, if you search for that, you'll, it'll pop up this first thing that shows up.

And I can highly recommend, you know, the books too, because they are some great pieces of work and you learn a lot from them as a football, a person interested in football history. So I recommend those. So Tim Brown, thank you very much from footballarchaeology.com. And we will talk to you again next Tuesday.

Very good, sir. Look forward to it. Thanks.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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Some football seasons stand out for the reasons of championships or amazing play. Other like the one we will discuss in this edition is for reasons of happenstance or some otherworldly event that affects football.

The tale of the very odd season of 1905 where there were very few Seniors eligible to play football due to a new guideline in college football. Timothy P Brown breaks it down and tells the details.

Based on Tim's Tidbit EThe Year of Living Seniorlessly.

-Transcribed A Year With No Seniors with Timothy Brown


Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes, PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, and welcome to another edition where we get to talk to Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology.com about some very interesting and unique features of football history. And Tim's got a real dandy tonight. Tim, welcome back, and glad to have you here.

Thank you, sir. Darin, look forward to chatting once again. Let's see where we go.

Yeah, this one, which is tonight and we're going to go to, is one of your recent tidbits. It really concerns the college game, and I guess eligibility is the general scope of it.

And I'll let you take it away from here. Yeah, so this one is called the Year of Living Seniorlessly. It's supposed to be a takeoff on the movie A Year of Living Dangerously, which was from the 80s.

So, if you didn't get that really clever little play on words. I was in high school and college during the 80s. I don't remember much of them.

But yeah, we'll talk about that some other time. Okay. So anyways, so the gist of this is that you know, I mean, everybody's familiar.

There was this big crisis in football in the early, early in the, you know, after the turn of the century, it kind of culminated in 1905. You know, demand for new rules and, you know, dramatic changes to the game. And so I think generally people think of that and talk about it in terms of changes to the game as played on the field.

And while, you know, there were certainly a lot of changes that occurred from 1906 through 1912 in that regard. Part of that struggle and issue was not just on the field of play. It was also the commercialization of the game and eligibility standards.

And so, you know, these had all been things that had been, you know, issues that had been addressed since probably the mid-80s or early 90s. But, you know, they just hadn't. They were still, you know, it was still out there, and it was still an issue that not everybody was satisfied with the solutions that had been presented. But, you know, it's like we've talked before about the IFA rules started in 1876.

And, you know, those were rules only made up by, you know, at most six or seven schools. And but everybody followed their rules. You know, I mean, it wasn't even like a formal thing.

Everybody just followed, those were the football rules. And, but the IFA also had a whole set of, they had a constitution that set out commercialization and eligibility rules. And most other schools didn't follow that.

That was kind of a separate gig. So, you know, in the late 90s or so, when the Big Ten or the Western Conference and what's Big Ten got started, they developed a lot of rules along the same lines. And, but the whole 1905 crisis, you know, kind of brought things to a head, and they were looking to make things stricter.

So, the Big Ten adopted rules. You know, one of the rules was that for 1906, Big Ten teams would only play five games a year. And that athletes would only have three years of eligibility.

Okay. It now seems like, okay, well, freshmen are eligible again. But, you know, if you're old enough, you remember when, you know, freshmen weren't eligible, you know, for football, basketball, and maybe another, maybe baseball.

So they adopted that rule, but when they did it, they made it retroactive. And so what that meant was that going, at least they did it in like early, say January of 1906, that meant that seniors who were planning to play baseball and run track at those, at the Big Ten schools, if they had done so as freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, suddenly they weren't eligible. It also meant that the freshmen weren't going to be eligible, assuming they wanted to compete as sophomores, juniors, and seniors.

So you were in a situation where you were only going to be represented by two classes. And so that's actually what happened that spring, but kind of, you know, cooler heads prevailed by the time fall rolled around, and they allowed it. They kept the three-year eligibility rule, but they did not make it retroactive. So those who were already in school were kind of grandfathered.

So, seniors did get to play in 1906, but freshmen typically did not. And so, you know, the year of living sensorless really only applied to the spring. And by fall, you know, things kind of turned around, and they were eligible to play, but, you know, they just did a lot of, but by 1907 or for the 1907 season, they said, okay, you can play seven games a year.

Then, they made the three-year eligibility apply only to football, baseball, and track. Basketball was not, you know, a big deal at the time. And they had a couple of other rules.

I mean, one of them that I thought was really silly was they did not allow their scrub or reserve team to play. Previously, they could play two games a year against outside opponents. And they scrapped that, which to me, of all the people, you know, freshmen need to play somebody else, you know, and the reserves and scrubs.

So, anyway, that's kind of just one of those things you can't imagine. Now, I mean, a rule that was retroactive, you know, as far as eligibility concerned, just craziness, you know, but that's what the faculties wanted. And so that's what they got back in 1906.

Now, was it that, refresh my memory, was it that that made Michigan leave the Western Conference or the Big Ten for a period of time? Was it the fire game? You know, that, you know, that was just one more thing, one more log on the fire. Michigan had, Michigan had a very successful program prior to that. And they pissed off a lot of people.

They, you know, they stopped, you know, back then, teams would have these feuds; Harvard and Princeton had a feud where they wouldn't play one another, you know, for like a dozen years and things like that. Harvard or Michigan had that kind of situation with a bunch of different schools. All of a sudden, they said, oh, we're not gonna play you because X, Y, or Z. So, it was just one of those things or one of the things that certainly didn't help the situation.

And so they left the conference in 1907 for the 1907 season. And they got back in, in either 17 or 18. So they were gone, you know, for 10, 11 years.

Yeah, it's, it's still shocking when you, one of the first teams you think about, when you think about the Big Ten, it's probably Michigan, Ohio State, Wisconsin, you know, Michigan State, having one of those big guys leave, you know. Well, you know, it's funny you mentioned Ohio State because they were nothing, you know, at that period, they were nothing. They just, they were like a, you know, they, they were late, you know, getting into the conference.

And they just weren't very successful until, you know, mid-teens, then they started having some, you know, some really good teams. But, you know, that's one of those teams you, you just kind of assume Ohio State has always been there. They've always been good because, in living memory, they certainly have been right.

And, but, you know, they were kind of a little bit of Johnny come lately, you know, to the Big Ten. Nothing like a Penn State or Nebraska, and now the West Coast teams, but nevertheless, even Michigan State, Michigan State was, you know, after the war. So.

Well, that is good stuff, as always, Tim, and we definitely appreciate it. Now, you have your daily tidbits that come out each and every day. And you have some other great posts that you put up on your website.

Maybe give some information to folks on how they can find you and get your information daily. Yeah, it's really simple. Go to footballarchaeology.com. Just subscribe; that'll lead to you getting an email in your inbox every night.

And, you know, pile them up, let them gestate for a little bit or read at that moment, and, you know, kind of whatever suits your fancy. If you don't want it, if you don't want emails, and, you know, the only other thing you can obviously visit the site whenever, or follow me on Twitter. And with Twitter, you have a one in 4 billion chance of ever seeing anything I post there because that's just the nature of Twitter these days.

It's like the lottery. So, if you really want to read any of this stuff, subscribe because Twitter is probably not going to do you any good. Well, I can make a recommendation.

If you want to follow Tim on Twitter, or you want to follow us on Twitter, you can set the notification bell. So every time that something posts, unfortunately, when you reply to things that other people post or retweet, you're going to get that notification as well. But so you can pick your poise in there, different ways to get the information.

So, Tim, we really appreciate you coming on and talking about this great subject from football history once again, and we'd like to talk to you again next week.

Well, enjoy it as always, and I look forward to the coming week.

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.

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How important is the kick off right after the half in football? Can the game be better served by starting a half in a different way? Would this break tradition and ruin the game?

These questions were posed to rules makers long ago as well as in the modern era. Timothy P. Brown examines a session of thought along these lines from his Tidbit, Getting A Kick Out Of The Second Half.

-Transcription of the Elimination of the 2nd Half Kick with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And we are going to go in a really historic mode here and go with Timothy P. Brown and his FootballArcheology.com daily tidbits. He has one from January that we're going to talk about the kickoffs starting the second half.

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Darin, thank you. Appreciate being here and looking forward to chatting once again this evening.

Yeah, it's, you know, an interesting topic that you are talking about. We know, you know, traditionally in football, I can't think of a football game where I've ever had anything else besides unless you get some exotic like the original XFL where you start the game in each half with a kickoff, and the second half is no exception. And, you know, you've got some interesting story from the past on the second-half kickoff that we'd love to hear about.

Yeah, so this is, you know, this story, and I think, to put it in context, you kind of have to start from the standpoint that football is a game, and all games are just made up. It's got a made-up set of rules that are totally arbitrary. You know, if we decided tomorrow that a touchdown was going to be worth 24 points, boom, we make the change.

And that's what it is. It's just everything about the game is arbitrary. So, you know, basketball, you could give people two steps per dribble or use a 12 foot high basket.

Baseball could be three balls and two strikes. You know, I mean, so anything is negotiable. So, for various reasons, there have been times when people wanted to get rid of the kickoff in the second half.

And, you know, football had a kickoff in the second half because soccer or rugby had one. And, you know, that's kind of the only reason we, you know, we had it. And there's been suggestions to get rid of it for safety reasons.

You know, Amos Alonzo Stag, you know, argued for it. You know, go back in the day. But so there periodically, you know, this is what is an idea that kind of came up time and again and just never happened.

So it came up in 1898. It came up in 1928. It came up in the 30s a couple of times, but it just never happened because what they were one of the ideas that people throughout there was, instead of kicking off in the second half, just put the ball back where it was at the end of the first half.

And the team that had possession just takes possession and just carries on because, you know, kind of the thinking was halftime's really just to allow the players to rest. So, just put the ball back where it was. Right.

So it's almost like ending in the first quarter, going into the second quarter, the third quarter, and going into the fourth quarter. Yeah, exactly. Right.

So that's actually a great, you know, that's a great kind of analogy. I mean, we had the quarter system come in later on, too. Right.

But anyways, so, you know, but so if you think about it, just, you know, one of the fun things to play with this kind of what how would it change the game strategy? You know, if we adopted, you know, if next year for college football, we said, you know what, we're not going to kick off in the second half anymore. We're going to put the ball wherever it was spotted at the end of the first half. So if you're if you're on offense, how does that change your thinking about what you're doing at the end of the first half? You know, if you have it on the 48 or the 38, you're probably not going to try a long field goal just because time's running out.

You know, you're not going to be as risky, perhaps in your play calling, you know, because, you know, and both, you know, in certain situations, you might also be willing to, you know, if if you turn the ball over either on downs or otherwise, you know, you still got your opponent deep in their end zone. So even if they start the second half with the ball, they're down on the two or on the 10 or 15, whatever it may be. So just, you know, some of those kinds of things.

It's just kind of interesting to think about how that would change the game. You know, I mean, like if you're trying to manage the clock. At the end of the first half, you know, there's really no reason to manage the clock very much, right? It would definitely take an exciting element out of the game because there's that panic and urgency at the end of each half, you know, the end of the game, definitely. But at the end of the first half, there's that urgency to, hey, I got to get in field goal range or go into that two-minute or four-minute offense to get down there.

And there's an excitement that really puts you on the edge of your seat, so to speak. And, you know, that would be definitely an element that would probably be taken away that I don't I think some a lot of football traditionalists would be up in arms if they said, as you said, college football is going to no second-half kickoff. You know what I think? Well, OK, but the flip side of that.

And so, I mean, we know that this whole thing, this excitement, has evolved, right? Because, you know, there were times like the whole two-minute drill. That's, you know, that didn't really come about to the late 50s, early 60s. So, you know, some of this stuff has evolved.

Also, different approaches may have evolved. The other side of it is imagine the first half ends, and I'm on offense, and I've got the ball on your two-yard line. OK, well, half ends, we go into our locker rooms, and then we come back out on the field.

And now, the whole time, you're sitting there thinking, damn, they've got the ball on the two. And I'm like, who, we've got the ball, you know? So, I mean, there would be a whole lot of other kinds of anticipation during halftime when thinking about what you're going to do. How are you going to respond? You know, what play am I going to call? What defense are you going to try to call, you know, against it? You know, so I don't know.

I think there's some there, you know, that could potentially be interesting things. But the other side of it is some of the same kind of dissatisfaction with, you know, with kind of the way how the half ended. You know, there were times when I've written an article about this, too, but there have been times when people proposed getting rid of the clock entirely.

And instead of playing for 15 minutes, they would play 20 play quarters. So whoever got the ball, you know, if they had a 19-play drive, well, then the other team would only get one play that quarter. And they were actually, you know, there were some test games, you know, using that in the, I want to say, like 22, 23 eras.

Some people argued that the teams should be given five downs inside the 20 because they wanted to give them a chance to score. Right. So anyway, and then other people even like Pop Warner argued for giving teams a point for every first down.

You know, so, you know, I don't know. These are all kind of bizarre little. Well, we think they're bizarre because we're used to a certain set of rules, but.

All three of those or and the, you know, the change in our elimination of the kickoff makes sense to it's just. A different idea. Yeah, I can remember back in my officiating days, and this is pretty recent, probably like 15 or 20 years ago, where you had the traditional second-half coin toss when it really wasn't a coin toss.

It's just the captains that come out and make their choices. But this was before they had a deferment. You could defer the first half kickoff.

You only had to take the ball or, you know, which end of the field. Those are two choices back in high school in those days. So, about the time they had a deferment, they came up with eliminating that second-half conference of the captain of the team who lost the first-half coin toss to decide what they should do.

So you would know what they do is you go when you go in the locker room to grab the teams, the officials that go in there, you ask the coach, hey, you know, you want the ball, right? And, you know, usually you don't want to give them a choice. So they make a wrong choice. And you don't really have the kids make the choices because that really goes bonkers and sometimes upside down.

Kids just didn't understand that. And that's really what happened, why they did that with a deferment rule because the first couple of years of the deferment, kids would come out there, and their coach would say, if we win the toss, we want to defer, so we can have the second off kickoff. So the kids would come out when the coin toss and say, we want to defend that goal because that's what coach told us.

And they really that's what you want to do. Yeah, the coach says, I'm like, OK, and you go to the other team. Yeah, I'll take those.

They get the ball, both halves. So that's something that came to my mind when you're talking about eliminating the second-half kickoff because there's sort of a parody and fairness to that. OK, you get you won the coin toss, and you get the kickoff in the first half.

But in the second half, the other team gets it to sort of level that out with, you know, as best you can to have the, you know, even amount of chances to score, I guess, is, you know, it doesn't really work out that way very often. But at least on paper, it sounds pretty good, sounds pretty fair. And I'm just sitting there thinking, man, if they did something like you're talking, if that would have ever taken place, how important would that opening kick opening coin toss be? I mean, nobody would. There wouldn't be deferment anymore because you wouldn't have a second-half option, and nobody would pick a goal.

You would say, hey, I want the ball. There's no doubt about it. You'd be on offense first if you won.

Right. But, you know, originally in football. You know, just like, you know, if you watch a soccer match today, the team that starts the game by kicking the ball, they keep possession of it.

And that's the way football is, too. You know, you, the kicking team, just dribbled it a couple of feet and then picked it up and tossed it to one of their buddies. Right.

I mean, the original flying wedge was what that was all about. You dribble, dribble, kick it a couple of feet, and then the wedge closes on the guy who's the kicker, and they start running down the field. You know, so, you know, that a lot of that stuff, you know, I mean, at one point, it would have been crazy to say, well, you got to kick the ball at least 10 yards.

But, you know, that took like two decades or something for that group to come into play. So, you know, the kickoff is not always what, you know, what it is today. The other thing that comes to my mind, I guess, in comparison, is sort of what basketball did with the tip-off.

I remember we used to have a tip off both halves. Every time, you know, joint possession, you'd have a tip off. Now they have the possession arrows.

You really have that one tip-off; just alternate back and forth. Again, to try to put some parody in there. But yeah, that's a that's a that's a really good analogy.

But, you know, football also used to switch directions every time a team scored. You know, really? Wow. Yeah.

That's back, you know, the 1800s. But, you know, that's what they did. Well, you scored, and you switched.

That's an officiating nightmare there, especially with us officials that they have back in. Wow. That's something very interesting stuff.

That's interesting. I'm glad it didn't happen that way. I'm glad it is the way it is.

I'm more you're just you're just I love the way it is. Yeah, I know. I got to be more flexible there.

I'm pretty rigid about that kind of stuff. But great, great stuff. I love to hear history like that.

That's something you don't hear every day. And I haven't heard heard before. So very interesting.

So, Tim, you have these tidbits that come out each and every day. And I'm sure the listeners would love to know how they can to read about your tidbits. So why don't you please share that information with them? Well, I'm going to defer that to the next podcast.

OK, well, that while we're not having a second-half one. So sorry you lost your choice. OK, so yeah.

So, you know, if you're interested, if you want to make sure you get it every day or at least see it every day, you just go to my website, footballarchaeology.com. You can subscribe. And what will happen, you'll get an email every every night, seven o'clock Eastern with basically an email newsletter kind of format with the story. Alternatively, you can go to the site and read it, or you can follow me on Twitter at Football Archaeology.

OK, ladies and gentlemen, Timothy P. Brown, footballarchaeology.com. Make sure you check out his site, sign up for his tidbits, and listen to him every Tuesday on pigskindispatch.com. Tim, thanks again for joining us. Hey, very good. Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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

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

-Transcribed Conversation on Football Pants History with Timothy Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darin Hayes
Yeah, I think you're right.

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

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

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

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

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