Football’s origin story is that Princeton and Rutgers played the first game in 1869. That game involved 25 players per side kicking and batting a round ball with the ultimate aim of kicking the ball between two posts at either end of a field at Rutgers. The team met again a week later on a Princeton field with goals at either end. — www.footballarchaeology.com
Football Archaeology's Timothy Brown shares the story of an interesting field equipment predicament that occurred in a 1974 college football game.
It is an odd case of game management versus fandom and how the outcome of a game was at stake.
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Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on the Missing Goal Post
Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal for positive football history, and welcome to another Tuesday where we get to go to footballarchaeology.com's Timothy P. Brown, pick his brain a little bit, and talk about one of his recent tidbits. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.
Hey, thanks, Darin. Looking forward to talking again and talking about something that goes missing. Yeah, and we've been missing you since last week, but that's not the missing that we're going to be talking about today.
You're going to talk about a recent tidbit you titled, The Case of the Missing Goalposts.
It sounds like a Sherlock Holmes theater here for footballarchaeology.com. I can get that in my mouth, right?
Well, I was a Hardy Boys guy as a kid, so everything was The Case of the Treasure Chest. I think Nancy drew, too, but I wasn't into Nancy. Yeah, so this one, The Case of the Missing Goalposts, goes back to the old, I should say, Princeton and Rutgers.
They played the first intercollegiate soccer games in 1869. Note, I did say soccer there, but then eventually they started playing football, gridiron football. They're very close together geographically, and so they played 60-some times, whatever it was, over the years.
Princeton totally dominated the match or the matchups, but starting in the 60s, Rutgers started winning a lot. Then, they became the dominant team. It's somewhere along the lines in the 60s that, back then, there were a lot of... Nowadays, hardly anybody tears down the goalposts because they used to... Number one, they used to be constructed of primary wood, so they're easier to tear down.
We didn't have the same level of security, and there were a lot of those. The other thing was that a little bit later on, when goalposts got torn down, a couple of people got injured, and then they sued the universities and so on. Anyway, it's easier to get into Fort Knox now than it is to tear down some goalposts.
They just made it nearly impossible to tear down a goalpost. Back in the 60s, it was very common, 50s as well. People just tore them down all the time.
What happened in the Princeton and Rutgers series was that no matter where the game was being played, the winning team and their fans tore down the goalposts. Then, there were a couple of occasions where they tore them down before the game was over. That happened in 1974 when Rutgers scored a touchdown earlier in the game.
They didn't make the extra points. They were leading six nothing with three and a half minutes left in the fourth quarter. Princeton gets the ball and they start driving.
They drive all the way down. Partly during the time that they're driving, the Rutgers fans come onto the field and tear down the goalposts at both ends. Now the field doesn't have goalposts.
With 22 seconds left, Princeton scores. It's 6-6. They've got an opportunity to go for the extra point or the two-point conversion.
They want to go for the extra point, but there's no goalposts to kick towards. The officiating crew gets together, and then they bring the coaches in, and they're having a conversation. The Princeton AD tells the referee that they've got a spare goalpost sitting on the stands, and they can have it up in five minutes.
Somehow, that got lost in the translation, and the referee didn't hear that. He basically thought they could start building a new goalpost in five minutes. They start looking at whether they should go over to a practice facility outside the stadium. The referee didn't want to go there because they were already having control issues.
He's like, I don't even know how far away this practice facility is. Then, Princeton volunteered their cheerleaders, had one cheerleader mount and stand on the shoulders of another cheerleader, and held the crossbar in place. Then they'd attempt to kick.
I'm just imagining an errant kick, like the double doink, and taking a cheerleader out. Yeah, it's a risk to the profession. Ultimately, the ref just knows, Princeton, it's on your home field.
You're responsible for field security. It doesn't matter who tore the things down. No goalposts, you have to go for two.
So Princeton goes for two. They don't make it. So the game ends in a 6-6 tie.
But basically, after that, that game is 74. In 75, the NCAA had a requirement that facilities had to have a spare set of goalposts that could be put up rapidly if they fell down during the game. But again, it was this kind of stuff that kind of encouraged the adoption of the, some people call it the fork of a slingshot style, single post goalpost and then fortified with depleted uranium or something.
They make those things, titanium, whatever it is. Those things do not come down. Except for that Fanville commercial and Dr. Pepper commercial a couple of years ago, where Brian Bosworth is the cop, and he's looking for the missing goalposts.
One guy has a satellite dish up on it, and the other one across the street is a swing set, and he can't find the slingshot goalpost. Well, I know that a lot of people are fans of the Dr. Pepper commercials. I don't count in that group.
I just said it because I had the reference of the missing goalpost. That's actually pretty funny when you watch it. Kind of clever.
Yeah. Actually, some of them are pretty good. Yeah.
But that's just something that sounds so foreign. It sounds like something maybe would happen in 1911, but in 1974, this is modern-era football and a goalpost for two major colleges playing each other. That's just crazy.
It's unbelievable that within 50 years ago. Yeah. It's like anything else.
Until something happens, you don't make the rules, or you don't make the investment. It's just easier. Back then it was kind of like, well, yeah, the kids are going to tear them down.
So let's make them cheap because they're going to tear them down anyway. And then somebody went the other direction and said, I'm going to build me a fine goalpost. So that's what we have today.
Yeah. The next thing you know, we're going to have bands out on the field before the game's over. Oh wait, that did happen, too.
Yeah. Yeah. Oh boy.
Tim, that is some great stuff. And we always enjoy your tidbits each and every day for stories just like this and learn something new from 50 years ago or a hundred and some years ago. And we really appreciate that.
And there are folks out there who would like to get in on the action, too, and read your tidbits each and every day. Maybe you could give them some information to share. Sure.
The best way to get to the tidbits is to go to www.footballarchaeology.com and subscribe. You can subscribe for free, and then you'll get an email every day with that day's story. You can also get the Substack app or follow
Football Archaeology.
You can also follow me on threads or on Twitter. And I post on both of those locations every day. All right.
Well, Timothy P. Brown, footballarchaeology.com. We really appreciate you. And we will talk to you again next Tuesday.
Very good.Thank you, sir.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
