Six-Man Football and its Origin and History

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Our friend historian Timothy P. Brown recently wrote about the exciting variation of high school football played in less populated areas where each team field six players rather than the normal eleven.

Born in the heart of the Great Depression, six-man football emerged as a testament to American ingenuity and the unwavering spirit of small-town communities. Its story is one of adaptation, resilience, and the enduring passion for the gridiron.

-From Necessity to Innovation:

In 1933, the harsh realities of the Depression hit small Nebraska towns like Chester hard. With dwindling student populations, many schools struggled to field full eleven-man football teams. Enter Stephen Epler, a resourceful superintendent who saw an opportunity amidst the hardship. Inspired by basketball and tennis, he envisioned a modified version of football played with six players on each side, allowing even the smallest schools to compete.

-Birth of a Game:

Epler's brainchild quickly gained traction. The first six-man game was played on a crisp September night in 1934, drawing a thousand spectators to witness the clash between the combined teams of Hardy-Chester and Belvidere-Alexandria. The game, a 19-19 tie, proved the concept viable, and six-man football began its ascent across the plains.

-Spreading the Game:

Word of the innovative game spread like wildfire. Texas adopted six-man in 1938, followed by states like Oklahoma, Kansas, and Montana. Soon, the gridiron echoed with the cheers of six-man fans from coast to coast.

-Six-Man Football 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 once again, it's Tuesday, and we love to go into that footballarcheology.com in the mind of Timothy P. Brown, its author, to talk about some great football that might be off a little bit on the beaten path of what we normally get to discuss in the realm of football. But Tim brings it to us so eloquently each and every day with his daily tidbits.

Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen. Darin, hey, thank you. Thanks for having me back.

And I'm not sure about the eloquence thing, but I definitely like to kind of chase down odd tales. It was on my Word of the Day calendar, so I had to throw it in there somewhere. Well, you used it perfectly.

Okay, I'm glad I pronounced it correctly. That's off to a good start.

That's good. Before I fumble some other words during this, that's the way it usually works out. But Tim, you had one back in mid-January, a tidbit that came out daily that talked about six-man football and some of the origins of that style of play.

And I'd love it if you could chat about that a little bit. Yeah, so one of the things that I like thinking about is how the game can be played differently. So maybe a year and a half, two years ago, I wrote a story about how touch football and flag football developed.

And then you have the Canadian game and whatever. There's different to play this game, the same generic game. And so what was happening is the origins of six-man football go back to the 1930s, so countries in the depression.

And we were still a much more rural country. But not everybody had working vehicles, and there weren't two cars in the household or anything like that. And so people just couldn't get around as easily.

And so the combination of factors led to the fact that there were lots and lots of very small high schools in the country. And so, while schools wanted to have organized athletics for their students, just the sheer numbers didn't always make sense for that to happen. And especially when it came to football.

So I'm going to cite a couple of numbers just because I think kind of reinforces the case. But six-man football was developed by a teacher and coach at a high school in Nebraska, a guy named Stephen Epler. And so Nebraska at the time had 505 high schools, but only 218 or 43% played football.

And so the problem was a lot of them just had about 300 schools with fewer than 100 students. So when you think about that many schools with less than 100 students, then just to get 11 guys, I mean, to scrimmage, you'd need 22. So you need half of the school, 50 kids, 50 males presumably.

And then half of them, you'd want to be out there for practice every day. And it just didn't work out. And it wasn't, you know, Nebraska wasn't alone.

It was like at the time there were 24,000 high schools in the country, 18,000 played basketball, but only 8,000 played football. So it kind of just kind of showed there was an appetite for sports, but football needed a lot of equipment relative to other sports, especially basketball. And the numbers just weren't there for a lot of schools.

So this guy devised a game in this like 33 or 34, I believe it was. So he devises a game with six players, you know, so they played on a field that was 80 by 40. And then like they kick off from the 20.

Teams had to have three players on the line of scrimmage. That meant, and then they had, you know, a quarterback and, you know, two backs. And, like, the quarterback could take the snap, but he had to get rid of it, you know, kind of like the old style of football where the quarterback had a lateral or, you know, pass it to somebody.

And then, you know, initially, the center wasn't eligible, and even the quarterback wasn't necessarily eligible, but, you know, that got resolved pretty quickly. So basically, he had a game where every player was out and became eligible for the pass. Everybody could, you know, you could come up with some kind of play where everybody could run with it.

Everybody was needed on defense, you know, and, you know, in effect, what you had was a center, two ends and three backs. I mean, that's really kind of the way the game was played. So you got rid of four of the real skill positions, the offensive linemen, and then, you know, they just went off and played.

And then the other side of it was that they had, you know, money, which was a real issue because of the cost of the equipment. So a lot of the sporting goods manufacturers, I mean, you know, Epler wanted to devise a game where you didn't need much equipment. At the time, not everybody wore helmets anyway.

And so, and then the sporting goods manufacturers basically came out with a whole line of equipment, and a number of them did this, you know, kind of using lower quality materials to make the helmets, you know, less padding, using canvas rather than moleskin or a lower grade leather, you know, so kind of anything they could do to cut the cost, they did so. But, you know, you look at their catalogs from the 30s, they're just, you know, there's three, four, five pages of just six-man football gear that they sold. So, you know, it ended up that this game became very popular, you know, and it was played in, you know, like 40 of the states eventually, you know, had enough teams to play.

And, you know, so they had high school officials and coaches, organizations, everything, you know, included the six-man game. And then, you know, eventually, I think, you know, there were some places where six men, they were big enough, the school started consolidating, you know, you'd have these schools, and they're named after like the four villages or whatever, you know, a lot of rural schools are like that. And so, they end up, you know, so then there was an eight-man game and a seven-man game, you know, there have been variations, and there still are, you know, teams play, I think, in high school right now, it's anywhere from nine to six-man, you know, games.

I think Michigan, I think we've got eight. Yeah, I think that's still, I know, in the National Federation rule book, at least six years ago, when I got my last copy of it when I was still officiating, there's still a section of back for eight-man football, which is very popular in the Midwest, like you said, Oklahoma, Texas, probably Nebraska, where there's a little bit more rural than up north and east and far west. So, yeah.

And like in Michigan, the upper peninsula, I think, is where a fair amount of that football is played because they just, it's just more difficult to get to other schools, too. Yeah, that's understandable. So, yeah.

So, I don't know, it's just one of those things that's just an interesting slice that gave kids the ability to play football under fundamentally similar conditions, you know, by reducing the fewer guys on a smaller field, the six-man, the original six-man game, there was each player had 10% more square footage than in the traditional 11 man game. And if you compare that, you know, when you include end zones, Canadian football has 40% more space than American football, you know? So, the six-man game was pretty comparable, in many respects, to playing regulation football. So, it's pretty cool.

Yeah. Definitely some cool stuff. Now, I don't know if you've heard this before, but somebody was telling me, somebody, I had on the show probably about a year ago, and I'm trying to place my, I can't remember exactly who was telling me, but they were telling me some of the roots of the eight-man football were from playing on the naval ships because they had limited space and, you know, limited people that could play.

And they were, I think, aircraft carriers or something. They were playing some kind of ball there, and they reformatted, you know, the number of players to fit that. But I don't remember the details; I don't know if you ever heard that or not.

Yeah. Yeah. I've never heard that.

I mean, I've done a lot of, you know, research and writing on military football. And, you know, typically, they just waited until they got into port, you know, and they had all the land, you know, that they needed. But, you know, in the Pacific, you know, a lot of, you know, kind of recreational islands that, you know, troops kind of, you know, went and recovered in Iran, and they had big football leagues and everything going on there, you know, right, you know, during the middle of the war.

So, and there were big teams playing in Hawaii and everything. So anyways, yeah, I've never heard the story. It doesn't mean it, you know, I'll have to look it up and I'll shoot you something on it.

Cause I know, I know I got it somewhere, but look that up. Well, yeah, I'll definitely follow it up too. It sounds interesting.

Yeah. But Tim, before we let you go here, we appreciate the history on six man football and some of the aspects of it. Why don't you share with folks where they can get your daily tidbits like this, like six man football for some of these unique items associated with football each and every day too, so they can enjoy them.

Sure. So I publish every day, seven o'clock Eastern on footballarchaeology.com. And if you subscribe, so you can subscribe for free. I'm more than happy to for the paid subscriptions, too, but you know, you can subscribe for free; check it out.

And basically what's going to happen is you would get an email every day with the story. You can still click on it and go online, or you can go directly to the site to view the today's story or any of the, the archive of stories. The other option is to follow me on Twitter.

And I'm just, you know, still footballarchaeology on Twitter. There's an English guy that has, you know, soccer related stuff using more or less the same name, but mine, football and archeology are merged together. So, you know, you'll find me.

A green logo with a leather helmet on it. That's like 1918 leather helmets embedded in it. It's always good stuff, folks.

It's worth a great read every day at 7 PM. And it's usually a pretty short read, you know, usually a minute or two, maybe tops. So, some great images and quotes and all kinds of great stuff to go along with the great story.

So Tim, we really thank you for joining us here and hope to talk to you again next week. Okay. Very good.

Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.