Experiments in Football at Fairmont in 1905

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-Transcription of the 1905 Fairmont Experiment with Timothy Brown

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

Hey, Darin. Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's kind of interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.