The Curious Case of the Two-Yard Penalty A Bizarre Footnote in Football History

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Penalties are a regular occurrence in football, a constant tug-of-war between offense and defense. But sometimes, amidst the yellow flags and frustrated shouts, a penalty emerges that defies logic and leaves everyone scratching their heads. Today, we delve into one such oddity – the curious case of the two-yard penalty in American football history.

This podcast episode and article explore a specific instance where a very unusual penalty enforcement resulted in a mere two-yard loss. We'll dissect the situation, analyze the rule that led to such a peculiar outcome, and explore the reactions of players, coaches, and fans to this bizarre moment on the gridiron.

Was it a simple mistake by the officials? Did the specific situation create an unforeseen loophole? Perhaps it was a turning point in the evolution of penalty enforcement. Join us as we unearth the story behind the two-yard penalty, a historical footnote that serves as a reminder of the unexpected twists and turns that can occur in the ever-evolving world of football. So, buckle up and get ready for a lighthearted yet fascinating exploration of a truly odd penalty in football history!

-Transcripption of Football's 2-Yard Penalty with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends, Darren Hayes and PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. It is Tuesday, and we are going to go into an archaeological dig that is a part of the great history of the gridiron. And our friend Timothy P. Brown of football archaeology is leading the way.

And we're going to talk about one of his recent tidbits on penalty enforcement, which is sort of an odd yardage. Tim, welcome to The Pig Pen. Hey, good evening, Darren.

Good to see you as always. And to hear your dulcet voice. Dulcet.

Well, that's one of the higher compliments. Usually, people say something else about my voice, especially family members. I don't know what's going on with that.

So I'll take that. I only have to listen to you a couple of times. That's true.

That's true. Well, Tim, you had a really fascinating tidbit back a couple of months ago, and it's on a very odd penalty yardage and under some special circumstances in football history that I think maybe we'd like to hear about this story. Yeah, so this is, you know, everybody knows that 1906 is a big year in terms of changing football rules, introduced forward pass, forward progress, you know, really is kind of fully, well, not fully developed, but pretty well developed that year.

You know, the onside kick from scrimmage, you know, I mean, there were just a host of different rule changes. However, one thing that people don't pay much attention to is the rule that limited captains to calling three timeouts per half. Until then, captains could call as many timeouts as they wanted.

There was no rule. But by kind of tradition and practice, and, you know, people did the right thing, they didn't call many timeouts. I mean, they basically called a timeout for injury.

And then occasionally, if they needed, if they needed, you know, just they needed a rest. You know, and this is, again, back when coaches couldn't coach the players during the game, their teammates couldn't yell instructions to them, nothing. It was, you know, you're out there on your own as a quarterback.

So, when they introduced that rule in 1906 if a team had called three timeouts or had had those timeouts called for them by the referee if they called a fourth timeout, they incurred a two-yard penalty. So, you know, this is one where, as far as I know, this is the only two-yard penalty in football history. And there was a caveat that you could, if you had called three, and you had a player injury, there could be another timeout without penalty.

So there could be a fourth due to injury. So, you know, it wasn't called very often, but it was called in 1906 in a game in Indiana that was beating Notre Dame, you know, 12-0 late in the game. And Notre Dame called a fourth timeout due to injury, but the referee penalized.

Now, you know, it's unknown at this time, you know, based on newspaper reports, was it because the ref just made an error, just didn't understand the rule, or because he thought the player was feigning an injury, right? So, one way or another, he calls it. And then it kind of, you know, I mean, at least in terms of newspaper reports, there's not, there's virtually no mention of these two-yard penalties for another 15 years or so. But then, in the early 20s, teams started huddling between plays.

And there were a lot of referees who didn't like teams huddling. They wanted them to keep, you know, immediately lining up on the line, calling the plays at the line, and, you know, executing. So, some of the referees started penalizing teams for huddling.

And again, this is one of these things; it's a little bit unclear exactly how they justified it, but it is likely that what they were doing was, you know, a team could huddle three times if they wanted to, but if they huddled a fourth time, in effect, the referee was interpreting that as you're taking a timeout, whether you call it or not. I'm basically treating this as a timeout when you huddle. And so the fourth time they huddle, boom, they get a penalty.

And so, you know, so that kind of sucked. And, like, you know, Penn got penalized six times against Alabama in 1922. So, in one game, they got six two-yard penalties.

So then you sit back and go, how big a deal is a two-yard penalty? You know, it's just not that big of a deal. And so what teams started doing then is to just say, if I need a break, I'm calling an extra penalty. I don't care.

You know, what am I going to do? Lose two yards? Yeah. Hell yeah. I mean, especially if you're down, whether you got to go two yards or 22 yards, what's the difference? Yeah.

So then, obviously, the refs and the rule makers didn't like that. So in 1924, they gave teams four timeouts per half, but then the fifth one would be a five-yard loss. And you know, same with six, seven, eight.

So, you know, that was the end of the two-yard penalty. But other than in 1930, 31, and that period, at that point, if there was a penalty on an extra point, it was committed by the offense. The offense lost the ball, and, you know, you went to the kickoff process.

They didn't get a chance to score, but the defense committed a penalty. Then the offense was credited with having made the extra point. And so they changed that in like 31.

And so they just changed it so that whatever penalties were incurred, the refs walked off whatever the typical, you know, whatever penalty yards they would have done during regular play. So, halfway to the goal line, or you had a 15-yard penalty, you got moved back to the 17, you know, whatever it was at the time. So yeah, the two-yard penalty led to a fairly short life.

Yeah. I always wonder because usually the penalty is that it fits the bill for whatever the foul was, you know, and they try to balance that out, and they've tweaked things around a little bit. You know, maybe they over-penalized certain things over the years, but a two-yard penalty, as we said earlier, is really no. There's no penalty to it.

You know, it's a big deal. The other thing I found interesting when I started officiating in the late 80s was when teams were just now starting to go to no-huddle. You know, Jim Kelly and the Bills were having some success at the pro level, and it was going right down to levels. And there were some older officials, especially umpires, who like to have time to set that ball, get, you know, set, you know, seven yards off the ball behind the linebackers.

So they're in a safe place. Well, they have these teams going up the line. They're having to drop that ball down and beat feet and get out of there before they get smoked, you know? And if the referee wasn't, was blown ready for play too early, that ball's getting snapped and things.

So, I can remember people and officials standing up at meetings. You know, when you have big rules meetings with the local coaches and all the local officials, when you have all the new rules, you have the same interpretation. So we're all on the same page; at least, that's what we did in Pennsylvania at the time. And, you know, there's, there's referees saying, Hey, you know, there should be a penalty for this.

You know, what do you mean? No, you aren't huddling. So it's funny how, you know, what is it 50, 60 years later, you know, we're, we're looking the exact opposite way. We're expecting teams to huddle.

And when they don't, we get mad. Yeah. Well, you know I've got a, I haven't written it yet, but I'm going to do a tidbit on I'm sure you've seen the, it's a 1903 two or three minute film of Yale and Princeton playing.

And so it's the first instance in which a football team has been captured playing football. And so it, it, that little film document, and you can find anybody can find it on YouTube. If you just put in a 1903 Princeton, Yale football movie or something like that, you'll find it right away.

And, like, the first part of it just shows guys running around and coming out of the locker rooms or whatever. But once you get into the actual play, you know, they execute a play and immediately get on the ball, running the quarterback call signals, boom, and run another play. And so, you know, that's just evidence of how they did that at the time.

And that's because that's what they did in rugby. You know, you, somebody, you know, got tackled or whatever, they set the ball down and boom, you just get going again, you know, you line up and play. And so there was no rule about that.

You know, the rule about 25 seconds or 30 seconds didn't come into play until 1926 or so because of huddling. Right. I mean, they wanted to make sure that the pace of play remained somewhat normal.

But until then, it was all just tradition. You know, you, that's how you play football. You got up and you, you know, you played, you know, it's kind of like pitch count or, you know, the pitch clock kind of a thing, you know, it's gotten so crazy that now they need to, you know, they need to have a timer to stop players from, you know, rubbing their nuts for, for two minutes up there at the plate.

All right. So it's, if you think about it, those are really two kinds of interesting, it's an interesting parallel, the pitch clock versus the, you know, the ready for play and, you know, 25 seconds, 30 seconds, whatever it is, you know, depending on the league. You're right.

There's another early film. It's got to be that same, and I think it's 1903. Also, there's a Michigan film out there.

Right, right. Same thing. But of course, that's the point a minute team of, you know, of Fielding Yoast going on there too.

So, but I can remember there's one play in there where the guy gets hurt, and he's at the bottom of the pile, and they're in such a hurry to keep the game going. They just drag him by his legs off the sideline, and he goes off a second later. And that happened all the time, you know, just because, you know, because there was no substitution at that point, you know, guys would be laying there on the side of the, you know, in the backfield just, you know, they could, they'd lay there for a minute or two and played, continue, you know, just nuts.

Yeah. I keep meaning, I got to load up some of those, those YouTubes of that, that we'll put them on the site here in the next couple of weeks. So they're interesting to see.

And so listeners, you can, you can check them out there or, you know, go to, I know Library of Congress has them, YouTube has them. They're public domain. So they're real easy to get to.

So well, Tim, that's a that's a fascinating story on this two-yard penalty and the history of it. And you know, it's evolution, and thank God it's riddance out of the game of football. And you know, you have a lot of different little stories like this that are sort of off the beaten path, but really vital parts of football history that were important in the era that they happened.

And we sure are glad that you're going back and looking at these, researching them, and giving all the facts each and every night on something. So if you could, maybe you could share with the listeners how they could, you know, share in these tidbits that you put out each night also. Yeah, sure.

Thanks. Yeah. I mean, it's my site is footballarchaeology.com. You can also follow me on Twitter at footballarchaeology.

So, you know, on Twitter, it's going to be kind of hit or miss whether you see what I post or not. Whereas in, you know, if you subscribe on the website, you'll get an email every night with that night's post. And then obviously you can always just go to the site and there is a search function there.

If there's a specific topic in football history that you're interested in, just go in there and put in the keywords. See if you find anything. If you don't, shoot me in the message and I'll, you know, maybe it's out there and you just didn't find it or it didn't get, you know, it didn't enter the right words, but happy to always looking for topics, always looking for new things to or old things to research.

Right. The new and old things. All right.

Timothy P. Brown, footballarchaeology.com. Make sure you check out his site and his tidbits each and every day and listen to him each and every Tuesday right here on pigskindispatch.com. Tim, thanks a lot. And we will talk to you again next week. Great.

Thank you again, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.