Harvard and The Flying Wedge and Horse's Neck
Lorin Deland, a Bostonian and student of military tactics, borrowed from military tacticians of the late 1800s by creating football plays using miniature figures set up on a tabletop football field. One output of his tabletop generalship was the Flying Wedge, which remains among the game’s most famous designed plays. Harvard sprung the Flying Wedge on Yale when they kicked off to start the second half of their game in 1892. — www.footballarchaeology.com
Timothy P. Brown has an excellent write-up on the tactics of Harvard coach Lorin Deland's Flying Wedge and Horse's Neck scheme of designed plays against rival Yale.
Shooting Down The Flying Wedge
Lorin Deland developed the flying wedge, which Harvard showed for the first time in the 1892 Harvard-Yale game. As football was played at the time, kickoffs occurred at the start of each half and following each score. Unlike today, the team that had been scored on did the kicking, but they retained possession by kicking the ball a few inches or feet (like soccer) before picking it up and running with it (unlike soccer). Deland’s innovation was to have nine of the kicker’s teammates align in — www.footballarchaeology.com
Timothy P Brown of Football Archaeology describes the rise and demise of the Flying Wedge from the gridiron. Created by Harvard Coach Lorin Deland, the wedge at its inception was to use the mass formation to pound brutally through the opposition, particularly rival Yale, in a tight formation of humanity.
