Football History

Pop Warner, was a legendary college football coach whose name became synonymous with youth football. His impressive career spanned 44 years (1895-1938) during which he amassed a whopping 319 wins, a record that stood until the 1980s.

He was known for his innovative offensive schemes that dominated the first half of the 20th century. While coaching greats like Jim Thorpe at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Warner left a lasting mark on the game by introducing the huddle, numbered jerseys, and the spiral punt. His most significant contribution outside of coaching, however, came in 1934 when he co-founded the Pop Warner Little Scholars youth football organization, a program that continues to introduce young athletes to the sport today.

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The almost-forgotten game of 1912 between Army and Carlisle may have truly shaped the game and the world!

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One of the top experts in early football rules history, Timothy P. Brown joins us on the discussion to celebrate Pop Warner to give some input on his brother Bill, a famous gridiron coach and player in his own right.. Timothy Brown's FootballArchaeology.com has a daily football factoid that he shares that are really quite interesting in a short read. They preserve football history uniquely, and we are quite happy that Tim has agreed to join us each week to go over some of his Today's Tidbits. Click that link, and you can subscribe for free to receive them yourself each evening.

Here is a link to Tim's original post. The Other Warner Brother and Chemawa Indian School.

-Transcription of the Other Warner Brother with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes at pigskindispatch.com. Welcome, once again, to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

Welcome to Tuesday. We are going on an archeological dig into football history with our friend Timothy P. Brown of footballarcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Thank you. I'm looking forward to talking about the Warner Brothers, not the cartoon guys. Oh, well, I was getting ready my Bugs Bunny stuff out to talk about that. You can use it if you want.

I'm just... That's not what I'm here to talk about. Oh, okay. I came to the wrong show.

All right. No, but your topic is much more interesting than the Warner Brothers, which makes films and cartoons. We're talking about some great innovators in football and the Warner Brothers of football coaching and playing days of the early 20th century.

So you have a topic that you talked about, February 6th was your tidbit, and you're actually talking about Pop Warner, his brother, Bill, who's a little bit lesser known, and it's a great and interesting story that we'd love to have you share with us. So, I mean, I kind of always liked the brother combinations. There's a number of brothers and even cousins who are active, especially in coaching nowadays, but who've been very successful.

As a kid growing up, Hank Aaron and his brother, Tommy, were a brother combination that I think may still hold the record for most home runs by a set of brothers, but anyway. But this is one where, like, Pop Warner, everybody knows Pop Warner. Even if you don't really know much about him or you're just barely a fan because of his influence on youth football, Pop Warner's side of things, and even somebody who ignores football history is going to have heard his name.

But so Pop was the older brother, and they grew up in Western New York State, and they ended up going to Cornell. So, both of them went to Cornell, both were linemen, and Bill was considered a pretty big guy, or I should say Pop was considered a pretty big guy, but Bill was bigger, and he was better. He was a first-team All-American his senior year, and then he graduated from Cornell.

As was fairly common at the time, the preceding year's captain coached the next year's team. And so he graduated in 03 from Cornell and then coached in the fall of 03. And so then he, I don't know exactly how it worked out, but for one reason or another, he left Cornell, but at the same time, his brother was leaving, who had coached Cornell previously, and his brother was coming back to Cornell from Carlisle.

So, he did Pop coach Cornell twice and Carlisle twice, two different stints. So anyways, Bill leaves and his brother comes in. And so, Bill then goes to Sherman Institute, which they call Indian Schools out in California.

For 04, he's at North Carolina in 05, he was at Colgate for 06 and 07, he goes back to Sherman in 08, goes to St. Louis University in 09, and then he's at Oregon in 1910 and 1911. So, back then, a lot of coaches had full-time jobs, they weren't on campus. Part of the reason they were only there at Indian School for a year was they got hired for one year, and then they'd go back to whatever they did.

So, both of them lawyered up during the off-season. But interestingly, both of them had connections at Indian Schools, right? I mean, they were both Cornell and at the Indian Schools, but Bill never had a Jim Thorpe playing for him, so he didn't get quite the notoriety of Pop. And Bill, I think, also just, you know, he kind of got out of coaching a little bit earlier.

You know, Pop worked forever. And then, you know, so the story then, you know, so he was, Bill stayed out in Oregon and, you know, basically was a lawyer in a town out there. And then for, you know, for whatever reason, in 1917, he ends up picking up at another Indian School, Chemiwa, which is, you know, over on the, he was living more towards eastern Oregon, and he ended up, Chemiwa's over on the west side of the state.

And, you know, they had been, you know, they used to play a lot of, you know, college teams. You know, the Northwest especially didn't have that many colleges. So, you know, there were some pretty good athletic clubs like Multnomah.

And then during the war, because this was 1917, there were all kinds of military bases that they could play, or even National Guard units, you know, whatever it was. So that's kind of who they played. But, you know, he coached this Indian team again.

And he ends up with a 1, 2, and 3 record, which, you know, you don't have those too much anymore. And, you know, I think they scored like 25 points the whole season or something like that. You know, because they had a couple of nothing, nothing shutouts.

But then he just went back. And, you know, his brother was, Pop was still coaching. You know, he'd left Carlisle and gone to Pitt.

He was at Pitt for a long time. And so then Pop had, he left Pitt after the 23 season and took over at Stanford. So then Bill at least had the opportunity to work with his brother a little bit.

You know, all he really did was he scouted when he would scout like the Oregon, Oregon State, Montana, Washington, Washington State, you know, those teams. He would scout them for, you know, for Bill and for Stanford. So, you know, he kept his, kept himself in football at least from, say, 24 to 32.

Well, while Bill was on the West Coast. But the other thing that's just kind of interesting about it was that it's just, Chemiwa is still open, you know, it's a, and it's the longest serving school dedicated to educating North American or Native Americans. So it's now just a high school, you know, back even like Carlisle was this real mix of kind of, you know, a lot of them, a lot of the emphasis tended to be on like trades and manual arts and things like that.

And so they had; they covered both high school and college curricula. That was pretty typical of Haskell in Kansas, which was the same kind of way. A lot of the Indian schools, you know, had that kind of curriculum. So, but anyways, they, you know, they played some decent football, and Bill helped them, led them to a one, two, and three records, which, as I said, got to give them credit for that because, you know.

Yeah. You don't hear that. I don't think I've ever heard of a coach having a one--, two-, and three-record or a team.

That's amazing for football, especially, you know, six games have three ties, but a different game back in that era. Now I have; I'm pretty sure that Bill and Pop got to play a professional season, or at least a few games together, on the same team they had for two years back in 1902 and 1903. In the first year, 1902, they had the World Series of football, which was an indoor game at Madison Square Garden, sort of during the holidays to help with festivities.

The manager of the Madison Square Garden wanted to make a couple of bucks and, you know, put some fannies in the seats to have some revenue coming in, so they had this world series of football. So they invited four or five teams, and they were trying to get 1902.

There was the original NFL, which was a three team league of, uh, you know, two from Pittsburgh or two from Philadelphia for the baseball teams, the athletics and the Phillies each had a football team sponsored. And there was a team from Pittsburgh to Pittsburgh stars. They were trying to get those teams to come in, but they, they wouldn't, uh, they, they couldn't make it.

So they were members of those teams that went to this world series of football. So the Philadelphia athletics actually would a team, they formed, they made it be the New York Philadelphians. It's been called or the New York, the New York team, they call it.

They were sort of the favorites. They want everybody to roof flexors in New York city. And they thought they were just going to dominate this thing.

Everybody is involved with it. Well, a team from Syracuse, uh, an all-star team from Syracuse, which had both Pop and Bill Warner on that team, came in and ended up winning the tournament. They beat New York and like the second round and, you know, just, uh, went on from there, but Pop ended up getting hurt in one of those early games.

I think it might've been a game against the New York Philadelphians and a guy that, uh, for them, so for the next game, uh, Syracuse was sort of scrambling to try to find a tackle. Cause they, you know, like we talked about, uh, you know, before tackles were very important at that time. And that's what pop was.

And so they got, uh, from the New York team that lost, they got Blondie Wallace, who was, uh, sort of an enigma figure of early professional football. He ended up playing for Syracuse after losing to New York. So, but, uh, it was great to see that.

I'm pretty sure I know Pop is playing that team. I'm pretty sure Bill did too on that 1902, uh, world's football team. Yeah.

I hadn't thought about that before. You know, he was still in college at the time. Right. Um, so, you know, who knows, you know, who knows if he played under his own name or an assumed name or how it worked, but I think it's in the newspapers as he has it down as his name, you know, and it, you know, of course, Glenn Warner for pop Warner.

So yeah. It was so interesting, too. You know, you think about them in the coaching realm, but they were pretty, pretty big-time players back that day, too. Yeah.

Before they're coaching pop was not the most financially responsible man. He had some gambling issues. So he, uh, he probably needed a couple of extra bucks somehow playing in this plane in that, uh, in the tournament.

Yeah. Uh, well, it's sort of a programming note. Um, we were going to try to have something special, uh, chasing down a good friend of the program.

Uh, Jeffrey Miller, uh, authors wrote a bunch of different books, including a book on pop Warner. And April 5th is Pop Warner's birthday. We're trying to put together a nice little episode where Jeff comes on.

We pay tribute to Pop Warner. Uh, but in Jeff's book, something I didn't realize it sort of starts off. Uh, they grew up; the brothers grew up in Springville.

The whole family was there in Springville, which was sort of Southeast of Buffalo. And they all of a sudden packed up when, uh, pop was of high school age, like early high school age. And they moved to Texas.

And so they had a big ranch down there, and the boys worked on the farm, and that's how they got big and big and strong. I guess that doing the ranching work is what Jeff attributes it to in the story. And, uh, they pop back to New York to visit some buddies, uh, during pretty great before Thanksgiving time. And, uh, the guys got him involved in playing some football, and, uh, he was having a good time doing that and getting a couple of bucks.

And he told his father, he, you know, wired back and said, Hey, I need, I need some money because I, uh, want to stay up here. And he's like, your father's like, what do you want to stay up there for? So he had to make up an excuse. He said cause I want to go to school.

I want to become a lawyer. You always want me to become a lawyer. So the father sends him money.

He has some more fun with it. And he's like, Oh crap, I can't go back to my dad and tell him that. So he went and entered into Cornell's law school.

That's how I ended up going to college. So that was kind of interesting. Yeah.

Well, he's, he did a few other things where like his first year coaching, uh, he was coaching both Iowa state and, uh, Auburn. Cause they, cause they're right next to each other, uh, geographically. Oh yeah.

Yeah. It's an easy commute. And, uh, but you know, he, he basically, he coached Iowa State from like, uh, mid-August till towards the end of September and then moved down to Auburn where he kind of had his primary contract, I guess.

And, but there's a story in there where like, you know, he did continue by telegram, he coached Iowa state, but at some point, he took, took Iowa state out to like Montana to, to Butte and they, he gambled on the outcome of the game. And, you know, it didn't sound like it was a fair match, but one way or another, he lost his money. So, he had to keep coaching both places in order to make up for it.

Yeah. Yeah. There are some interesting rabbit hole stories you can go down to with the legends of the game, like Pop Warner and Bill Warner.

So definitely we could talk all day about them. There's some, some great, interesting things, but, uh, yeah, so stay tuned. Uh, we'll have more on, on pop here on some of these, I'm sure some more football archeology.com visits and, uh, hopefully with Jeff Miller too, on April 5th.

Yeah. Well, the Pop Warner thing sounds fun. That'll, that'll be a great episode.

Yeah. Yeah, sure. Well, um, well, Tim, why don't you share with us, this, this came out of one of your tidbits.

It comes out each and every day at about 7.00 PM Eastern. Uh, why don't you share with us how the listeners, too, can get involved in and read your tidbits each and every day? Sure. Uh, just, you know, go to the, uh, so my site is football archeology.com. You just gotta make sure you spell archeology correctly.

A R C H A E O L O G Y. And then, um, yeah, so if you, if you subscribe, you'll get an email every, every night at seven Eastern with the story that day story, but you can also just go to the site anytime you want there. You know, you can search by topic to find old articles. Um, and if you're not, you know if you prefer not to get an email every night, you can also follow me on Twitter at Football Archeology.

And, um, so anyways, you can subscribe, you can just hit the site whenever you want to, or you can follow me on, on Twitter. It's definitely worth the while to take that 10 seconds to sign up for it because it's a fantastic and you'll have some great football information each and every day, uh, at 7:00 PM. So, uh, I highly recommend it.

So Tim, thank you once again for joining us and sharing your knowledge and your stories, uh, from football archeology.com and your tidbits and, uh, for joining us.

Hey, very good. Thank you once again, and look forward to seeing you and talking next week.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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Knockoffs and copy cat manufacturing are each nefarious elements of open Capitalism and industry. There have even been many times that football equipment and ideas have been copied and sold.

Timothy Brown examines some cases of Bootleg footballs,on a recent Tidbit he wrote on his Football Archaeology website, It all comes from his original article titled: Bootleg Footballs and Changing Specifications, concerning the 1925-1926 GoldSmith catalog and the "Slim Jim" ball. Tim shared the story with us on the podcast.

-Transcription of Bootleged Footballs 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 the portal that we're going to go back in time and look at some great football archaeology, some great old stuff that our friend Timothy P. Brown of FootballArchaeology.com is going to share with us from one of his recent tidbits. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Darin, thank you. Looking forward to chatting about bootleg footballs. It's kind of an interesting idea or issue. Everybody talks about bootlegs, but this is a different deal.

These are bootleg footballs. When I first saw that, I was picturing a football full of illegal bathtub gin back in the prohibition days, but after I read it, I was straightened out right away. Sorry, the way my mind works, but why don't you explain to us the story of bootleg footballs? Yeah, well, so just following up on your comment, so the bootleg initially, the first bootleg was Pop Warner at Stanford.

He had a fake, so he basically ran a fake Statue of Liberty and the fullback because he was running a double wing at the time with a fullback getting a direct snap. He faked the Statue of Liberty to the wing coming around from right to left, and then the fullback ran to the right, and everybody went with the, you know, chased the right wing who was running to the left, and he just, the fullback ran into the end zone. So, that's where the original bootleg came from, and it had, you know, the name came from bootleg gin, bootleg rum, you know, so it was prohibition time, and you know, so that's where the name originates.

So, it's the idea of fake and illegal and inappropriate, and so during the same era, one of the things that was happening to teams were, you know, some teams were choosing to pass more often than others, and so some of the, you know, back then there were lots of different companies manufacturing footballs, and so some of those manufacturers began making balls that were, you know, the ball had changed, I think it was 1912, maybe I'm off on that, but, you know, somewhere in that area, the ball had been slimmed down from the big fat rugby ball. So, it had been slimmed down, but it was still bigger than what we're used to today, so it's remained difficult to throw. Typically, only guys with big hands could really throw it effectively, and so they, some of the manufacturers, started producing slimmer balls, slimmer footballs that didn't really meet the game specifications, because the game, you know, by then they had specified it's got to be, you know, you know, there was tolerance, but it had to be this much around this length, and so they started producing these balls, and obviously, if you were a running team, you looked at the slim balls of the, what is this doing here on the field, because I don't need it, you know, my team is going to run the ball, we're not going to go crazy and pass it 12 times a game like some of these passing teams.

So, you know, they, you know, it became a controversy, and so, you know, it kind of went back and forth for a while, and then eventually the, you know, the things, they changed the rules basically in 1934 to make, to change the regulations on the ball specifications, so the ball would be about an inch thinner around the girth, but, you know, so one of the things that, you know, sometimes it doesn't seem to make as big a difference, but, you know, you know, you have to realize that the ball in the night before the mid-1920s was not only a bigger, fatter ball, but it's kind of a different ball too, and by that I mean that at that, until the mid-20s, when they, when somebody invented the internal valves, if the ball deflated, and they did so regularly, because they just didn't have the quality control on these rubber bladders that were inside the ball, when the ball deflated, you had to unlace the ball, pull the bladder out, inflate it, much like you would a balloon, I mean, there was like a nipple kind of thing sticking off from the bladder, and you inflated that, and then you tied it off to keep the air inside the bladder, and then you stuffed it back inside the ball, and then you took this leather lacing that was comparable to the lacing, you know, any baseball glove today, you know, it's a flexible lacing, and you weave it in and out with the different fingers, and you know, the, but you know, so that's basically what the lacing was on a football back then, you know, now it's this really hard, it's polyvinyl chloride, this hard plastic, it's stuff we make plumbing pipes out of, you know, that's a stiff material, and so, but back then, it was the same laces that were on a foot, you know, in a baseball glove, right, and so it was fairly flexible, and it could only be as tight, the lacing on a football was only as tight as the guy who tied it together when they reinflated it, so, you know, quality control and standardization just weren't part of that picture, you know, at the time, so it's just one of those things where, you know, we kind of, it's easy to lose sight of the difference at the time, but so, you know, the ability for a quarterback to throw that, you know, to throw a spiral and flick their wrist, you know, and, you know, flick it over to get a nice tight spiral, it was just much harder to do, because these laces barely stuck up over the leather on the surface of the ball, right, and so once they, once it had the internal valve, and that became, you know, the late, the second half of the 20s was kind of a transition period where some balls had it and some didn't, but when they, you know, if you think about a football now in lacing, they, there's the laces that go, I'll call them, you know, perpendicular to the length of the ball, right, but then there's two laces that are underneath those perpendicular laces that kind of go back and forth, right, does that make sense? I don't know if you can picture that, but so under, so putting the lacing underneath the perpendicular laces raised the profile above the surface of the ball, and because they no longer had to replace the ball, they could make that lacing stiffer, even before they used plastics, they could make the lacing stiffer, and therefore, it was easier for the quarterback to grip the ball, to throw a spiral, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so anyways, I mean, it's one of these things where there's a lot of parts of football blocking, you know, what we call blocking now was interference originally, that was illegal, and then guys started doing it, and they didn't call it, so then it became part of the game. The bootleg footballs, people started using them, they were illegal, but they kind of let it go, and then eventually, they changed the rules to reflect that, right, so there's a lot of parts of football where people did stuff that was against the rules or against the sportsmanship standards of the time, and eventually, people kind of said, oh, yeah, let's just let that go, and it became part of the rules, so bootleg footballs are the reason people throw long, tight spirals 60, 70 yards downfield nowadays. Hey, that, you know, fascinating stuff, your story of you telling us, you know, with the vulcanized rubber bladders, you know, pulling those out and blowing them up, it took me back to some things I read, I believe, from the rugby days, where they still used an actual pig's bladder, and the poor soul that had to unlace it and blow up that rotting pig's bladder, put their lips on that and blow up the ball, that poor sucker had to be the worst job you could have, I think, on a football field.

Well, and, you know, I mean, talk about the pig's bladder, but the, you know, a lot of people think that the reason football is played in the fall is because, you know, people had piglets that they raised all summer, you know, spring and all summer long, and then they slaughtered them in the fall, and what comes along with slaughtering a pig? Well, you have pig's bladders available all of a celebration. They have this kicking game where you try to kick this pig's bladder from your town into the next, or your village into the next, and that's where this football kicking game originated. And eventually, people started covering that pig's bladder with a leather cover to make it, you know, more sustainable or, you know, just to last longer.

But, you know, that's the origins of the game, right? So, it's kind of crazy, you know, kind of how it's all evolved. It's like every other technology; things become more uniform and consistent. But, yeah, that's where the game starts.

A lesson within the lesson. That's good stuff. And I'm sealing up my envelope right now from these advertisements for Goldsmith that you have on your website on this post to get my $10 football.

So, the F5 and the X5. So, I'm going to get one of each for ten bucks. Well, hey, you know, one of the images, so, I mean, for those who are just listening and haven't seen the post, this would be a fun one to go look at, just because there's a number of images from period catalogs that show footballs.

And there's one from D&M, which was a big manufacturer supplier at the time. They had a football they called the Slim Jim. And it was slimmer than the standard ball.

And they're advertising. It's right there in their catalog. There's no secret about it.

But it was slimmer than the specifications required it to be. Well, now you're making me hungry for a meat product that comes in plastic now. So, talk about Slim Jim.

Check-in with Nancy Pelosi. I think she's got some. She was eating some, well, you know, long story.

Hey, Tim, this has been another great lesson in helping us to understand the game of football, where it came from some of the intricacies and equipment, and just the history of the game and how the folks before us had to play with less than what we see today on TV and what the players play on a high school level even. We really appreciate you digging up this research and sharing it with us each week and evening. You can read it on your phone or computer.

Tim has a great way of delivering that message. And, Tim, why don't you share the information with us right now? Sure. So, footballarchaeology.com. You can just go out there and click on any link, and all of them are going to provide an opportunity to subscribe.

So, if you want to subscribe, it just guarantees that you get it every day. You don't have to read it every day. You can save them up and read them on the weekend, whatever.

But it'll be delivered to your inbox at 7 o'clock Eastern every night. And then alternatively, you can follow me on Twitter at Football Archaeology. And if you don't like either of those options, just go out and check out Football Archaeology anytime you want.

And you can see the most recent article just listed out there in order of how they were posted. All right. Tim Brown, footballarchaeology.com. Thank you, once again, for sharing these stories and this information.

And we'll talk to you again next week. Very good. Look forward to it, Darin.

Thank you.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

Warren Rogan takes his Sports Forgotten Heroes podcast to new places to seek past athletes' memories and accomplishments. Claude "Buddy" Young (1926-2003) was a trailblazing African American athlete who left his mark on both college and professional football. Nicknamed the "Bronze Bullet" for his exceptional speed and acceleration, Young's career was a testament to talent, perseverance, and the fight for racial equality in sports.

College Standout:

A world-class sprinter, Young's athleticism translated seamlessly to football at the University of Illinois.
He earned the nickname "Bronze Bullet" for his electrifying runs, leading the Illini to a Big Ten Championship in 1946.
Young set the Big Ten single-season rushing record (later tied) and was named an All-American.
Pro Pioneer:

Despite facing racial discrimination, Young entered the NFL in 1947, playing for the New York Giants.
He established himself as a versatile threat, excelling as a running back, receiver, and kick returner.
Young racked up over 4,000 rushing yards and 2,000 receiving yards in his nine-year professional career.
He became one of the first African Americans to achieve significant success in the NFL.
Beyond the Field:

After retiring from playing, Young remained involved in football as an assistant coach and then an assistant commissioner for the NFL.
He worked to diversify the league and address racial inequities, paving the way for future generations of players.
Young was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1984 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1993.
Legacy:

Buddy Young's athletic prowess and unwavering spirit in the face of adversity made him a legend of the game. He not only excelled on the field, but also used his platform to advocate for equality and pave the way for future generations of African American athletes in football.

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Pop Warner is one of the most well-known names for early football coaching. The innovator contributed much to the game in its early years.

Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology sat down with us to chat about the first season that Glenn Pop Warner coached at team. It was at his alma mater and it was a significant season.

This conversation is based on Tim's original Tidbit titled: Warner and the Inexperienced Cornell Eleven.

-Transcribed Conversation on Pop Warner's 1sy Season with Timothy Brown[b]

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 talking about football history, we are going into football archaeology mode because it's Tuesday, and Timothy P. Brown is here to visit with us once again to talk about one of his fantastic posts that he puts out each and every day.

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hello, Darin. Thanks for having me back. Looking forward to chatting once again.

This every Tuesday is really quite remarkable. Love hearing about your tidbits. You know, it's good to see your tidbits each and every day, but having a conversation about them once a week is really an amazing thing. Takes you a little bit more in-depth. You have Some other great facts through your research on some of these tidbits.

And today, you're going to talk about one of my favorite people in football, Glenn Pop Warner, who was born probably about an hour away from where I live, south of Buffalo, not too far from Erie. And, you know, I love Pop Warner stories, and he has so many great ones. He coached all over the country. So this one's a really interesting one from one of his early years that I love to hear about.

Yeah. Yeah. I think Pop Warner is just a fascinating character.

And so, you know, love him as well. But so, yeah, I think this is, this is another one of these where, you know, we bring certain assumptions to our view of football here in the 2020s that just were not the case back in the 1890s when this story is based. And so the key point here is that with Pop Warner being one of the guys like this, but, you know, before 1900 for sure.

And then even after that, a lot of people, a lot of, you know, young men ended up on college campuses who had never played football before and yet who went out for the football team. So, you know, if you lived out East and you were going to Harvard or Yale or something like that, well, chances are you probably attended some prep school, and they had a long history of football. You know, they started playing fairly early on, but if you were from, you know, small-town Kansas or Minnesota, they might've played and they might not, you know, I mean, there were certain, there was certainly football going on in the smallest and remotest of towns, but there was a lot of places where they just, they just weren't playing yet.

So, you know, you'd be aware of the game, it'd be in your local newspaper, but you may not have ever played. And so many top-notch athletes showed up on campus, not having any football experience. And so part of the coach's job was to figure out how to get those guys to join the team and try.

And so, you know, we've talked in the past about the alums who would come back and help coach. And a lot of that was they were teaching entirely, you know, they were teaching guys who had never played the game before. How do you block? How do you tackle it? How do you get out of your stance? All the stuff that, you know, most people now learn in youth football, or as freshmen in high school or sophomores in high school, whatever it may be, you know, they were, they had to pick up those skills as freshmen in college.

So, you know, the article is basically about him and the challenge of, you know, trying to get, at he was coaching at Cornell. He was; he had gone to Cornell and played for four years. And then I think he was gone for a year and came back at the time that, you know, this story occurred, but, you know, he's trying to figure out how do I get all these guys to join and then to get them schooled up in order to, you know, to feel the good team.

And so, you know, he was commenting that a lot of times back then, they used to call it the talent level, but they would call it the material. We have fine material, but it's inexperienced, right? And so that was his thing. And, you know, another piece of that was that it was just interesting. In that particular year, he had an athlete who had played center in the past, and he was considering having the guy play left halfback or right halfback.

And it was like, okay, how many times today in a college setting do you have one player, and you're going? Should I play him at center or halfback? Right? I mean, that just doesn't happen nowadays. You know, the body types of morphed and training and all that kind of stuff. But back then, I mean, that was just a kind of normal everyday thing.

Unfortunately for the guy, he ended up playing center. But, you know, yeah, so, you know, I think it's just that, you know, our thinking, you know, now we live in this world where these kids are recruited, you know, I mean, they're heavily recruited, and they've, you know, there's a game film, you know, there's plenty of film on every high school kid that's out there, you know, nowadays. And so, you know, but then it was like, you just, you called for, you know, he had tryouts, you called for everybody to come and join the team.

And it was whoever was there; it was there, right? And, you know, you would often have some guy who was a star fullback or tackle the previous year that, for whatever reason, financial or whatever, just didn't show up the next year. You know, the coaches wouldn't know necessarily, you know, they wouldn't have a whole lot of advance notice and just be like, oh, Bill didn't show up this year. So we got to find somebody else to play tackle.

You know, it's just the kind of manpower planning and depth charts that we think of today. Well, it might be turning back to that with the transfer portal. It seems like somebody's leaving constantly on teams, and new people are coming in.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a whole other story.

I mean, you know, just for one, I'm all for it. I mean, I may not like what it's doing to the game, but for the individual kids, I'm all for it. You know, I'm glad they get to go wherever they can go.

So, but yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, the, the, the center versus halfback thing is interesting just cause, you know, a lot of times, you know, centers were pretty good athletes back then, you know, meaning, you know, they were more like halfback or fullback type guys. A lot of times, teams pulled centers or, you know, expected them to do some special stuff. Um, you know, so they had to be pretty darn good athletes, but not a whole lot of, uh, not a whole lot of guys shifting from O line to the backfield these days, high school level.

Sure. Right. But it was a single-platoon football back in that era, too.

So, you know, they could use their athleticism at the center on defense, which we call a nose guard today, uh, you know, shooting gaps or whatever they had to do wording off to get a tackle. So, and it takes some certain athleticism to, uh, you know, rules were different than to, to get the ball snapped without getting your head knocked off too. I'm sure you had to be pretty quick at that.

So I can see where the transition is. That was a fascinating point, but it was something I really took out of that. It's sort of, uh, you know, like I said, I, uh, I like to read about pop Warner and I don't know that I've ever remembered this story and it's sort of, uh, you know, his humble beginnings, you know, I'm, you know, most of us are used to pop Warner, you know, developing, you know, a complicated single wing offense and the double wing and all these innovations he brought into football.

But just to sit there and think about the man, uh, you know, taking, having to take football, the very fundamentals and teach somebody that's not familiar with the game and, you know, put them out there on a Saturday to play as a, maybe a starting center or halfback or whatever. Uh, you know, it's just kind of an interesting aspect of the guy of the band, and probably all coaches at that time had to do something like that, or they couldn't, you know, have their schemes on play until they got the people up to speed. So, yeah.

Well, and I, but to your point, I think the fact that, um, Cornell wasn't the only school in that position, right? I mean, all their opponents, or any of their opponents anyway, were in the same kind of situation where, you know, they had a bunch of guys that had never played before. So, and, you know, I mean, that was one of the reasons why the freshmen rule, you know, worked to their advantage. Um, but, uh, you know, yeah, so it's, um, you know, Warner was just, uh, you know, he grew up in, like, as you said, I can't think of the name of the town, but a small town, you know, Western New York.

Springville, New York. Yeah. And, uh, and he was just a big dude, you know? I mean, he was, so he showed up on campus, and they were like, Hey, he started his first game, you know, and he didn't know what he was doing.

Uh, but he started just cause he was just, you know, pretty thick, you know, assorted guy, maybe not the tallest man in the world, but you know, big, thick dude. And so they, you become a lineman that way. Yeah.

I'm going to have to look it up. Cause I, you know, you may just make me think, I think Park H. Davis is in that same area. He's from Jamestown, New York, which is not too far.

I wonder if they ended up ever playing against each other. If they were in, maybe they weren't in the same years of, uh, playing high school. Yeah. I think Davis, well, Davis would have been at Princeton in the 1880s, right? In the early nineties.

Oh yeah. Maybe he's quite a bit older than Warner. Yeah.

Cause, you know, Warner showed up at Cornell at like 91, 92, something that range. Um, so I think, you know, Davis is just that much, um, just that much older. Cause he was, he was coaching Lafayette when, um, Fielding Yost, you know, was the ringer for him, you know, That's, that's true.

Yeah. He's probably 15 years older than Warner probably. Well, there goes that fantasy of seeing those two head-to-head.

I love the stories about, you know, guys who grew up in the same areas or, um, you know, even if it's cross sports, but you know, guys who knew one another or, you know, those kinds of stories and, you know, just the connections that you just normally don't think about. So it's just, it's kind of fun. So, you know, real, real fascinating, you know, from Cornell, the Carlisle, the Pitt, the Stanford, you know, Pop Warner was all across the country and had a lot of success everywhere he went and pretty interesting guy and pretty humble guy to sit there and pick out athletes and teach them how to play the game.

So I guess, uh, it's very aptly named the, uh, the junior football today. Most of them are called Pop Warner football. So very interesting.

Another great tidbit, Tim, we really appreciate that. And, uh, that you share these with us each and every day and the listeners, uh, you know, there's a way for you to, to pick up on Tim's Tidbits and get a copy of them sent to you too. And Tim will explain that to us right now.

Yeah. Uh, if you're, if you're interested, just go to footballarchaeology.com and, uh, down at the bottom of most of the pages, you know, just to, you can, um, click on it and subscribe. And if you subscribe, you're going to get an email every evening at seven o'clock and then a couple, a couple of others here and there.

Um, you know, basically, it's just whatever, whatever got published that day shows up in your inbox. And so you can read them at your leisure. Um, I also, uh, I'm still putting out everything I post on Twitter.

And so if that's your way of receiving, you know, various forms of news like this, then, um, you know, follow me on Twitter. But you know, the best thing is probably just to do them, to subscribe and make your life easier and more, much, much more pleasant. Yeah.

And it's a great site—footballarchaeology.com — and it's also a great conduit to some of Tim's books. He has his most recent one, how to hike with some football terminology, and one of my standbys, how football became football.

It's a great read, especially learning about early college football. I highly recommend both those books to anybody interested in football history because Tim does a great job on them. So, Hey, Tim, thanks a lot for joining us here again.

And, uh, and we'll talk to you again next Tuesday. Okay. Looking forward to it.

Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

Sometimes when you round the corner at a location you have visited many times before, you see something new. A similar feeling occurs when encountering a story that sheds new light on an old topic you’ve researched in the past. The other day, however, I found an article about Carlisle’s hidden ball trick, when Pop Warner had football-shaped brown patches sewn on the front of Carlisle’s uniforms for their 1902 game at Harvard. When Harvard kicked off, Carlisle retrieved the ball before the — www.footballarchaeology.com

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Ever wondered why quarterbacks wear the number 12 and running backs rock the digit 28? Today's episode dives into the fascinating origin story of American football jersey numbers. We'll travel back in time, uncovering the surprising reasons these numbers were first stitched onto jerseys, and how they evolved into the iconic system we know today. Get ready for a journey through gridiron history, filled with unexpected twists, forgotten rules, and the stories of the legendary players who cemented the tradition of numbered jerseys in the game we love. So, buckle up, grab your favorite jersey (with its number!), and join us as we unveil the fascinating tale behind football jersey numbers!

The early beginnings and origins of the uniform numbers on players are explored in this Football Archaeology feature.

-[b]Transcribed Conversation on Player Number Origins 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. You know what it is. It's footballarchaeology.com day. And Timothy P. Brown of footballarchaeology.com is here to talk about another interesting tidbit he's had out recently. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Darin, how are you? Good to see you. I hope I've got your number tonight.

Well, you got my number. I don't know what the origin of that number is, but I think we're going to find out some of the origins of some player numbers. You had a recent tidbit on that very subject.

And it's something, you know, again, we've talked about this before in other episodes that we've talked about. Some things that we just don't appreciate all the time. You know, what the player number does on the jersey, you know, it's it's identifies the player.

It's almost like their name, you know, for a lot of places. For example, when you see the number 12 out there on a New England jersey, you're probably thinking of Tom Brady. First thing, you know, just but we associate that number with the player.

But it goes back into some things that are beyond that even. And I'd sure like to know the origins of these player numbers. Yeah.

So so some of this this one, you know, I've written about the origins of player numbers a bunch of times in the past. And but I was trying. Well, I was I did an article recently about the the hidden ball trick that the Carlisle executed against Harvard in 1903.

And just in doing that research, reading an article, there was a comment made. And so just to kind of reset the stage on that, you know, what happened is that the. Carlisle.

So, you know, brown patches on the front of their jerseys that match the color of the ball. And so that they could, you know, have their back, who didn't get the ball or whomever else kind of hunched over, act like they're carrying the ball. And, you know, the defense would be confused.

So and so, then they did that. But then they also, in that game, you know, they basically executed this play where there was a. On the kickoff, they were receiving a second-half kickoff, but anyway, they're receiving the kickoff. The Carlisle players go back to form a wedge, and the guy who gets the ball or, you know, who caught the ball.

You know, he kind of gathers the wedge in that web and stuffs the ball in the back under the shirt in the back of one of his teammates who had this elastic band at the bottom of his jersey. So the ball would stay there, you know, under the shirt. And so then they then they boom, they all scatter in different directions.

And this guy who's a was a guard or a tackle who doesn't look like a guy who you would give the ball to starts running upfield, acting like he's going to block, you know, for one of his teammates. And so because he's acting like he's blocking, all the Harvard guys are avoiding him. And he just takes off, runs down the field, and scores a touchdown.

So, you know, that's kind of everybody, you know, I'd been aware of that story and all that kind of thing. And he probably looked like Quasimodo running down the field, too. That's right.

The guy had no idea what to do. But there was a comment made in one of the articles about the game where the guy said, you know, the reporter said it would be great if all the players had numbers; we would have known who this guy was as he was running down the field. And so I thought, OK, I'd never come across that before.

And this is a 1903 game. So it's just got me to go back one more time to look at, OK, when, when did, as I had previously come across Amos Alonzo Stagg calling for numbers in 1901. So, two years before this Harvard-Carlisle game, I just figured, OK, I'll go again.

Can I find anybody else mentioning player numbers? And so then I ended up finding a 1904 reference. And I'm sorry, an 1894 reference from the Harvard-Yale game where some guy along the sidelines must have been some influential alum who said that you know, the players should be numbered. His comment was that the average observer finds as many differences in individuals as in a flock of blackbirds.

So, the first time I heard that reference. But, you know, but the point was that you know, you couldn't tell players apart half the time back then because they didn't have numbers. You know, they, they all kind of, the nature of the game, everybody bunched together.

It's hard to tell who was who, you know, who got the ball, who advanced it, who made the tackle. So, you know, people then, you know, people like Stagg started promoting using numbers. But the challenge and the pushback that they got was people saying, you know, there were basically three main challenges.

One was that they said if you number the players, which they'd started to do in baseball, and I think at first, it actually occurred in rugby in New Zealand. But if you number the players, then that promotes individualism. Football is a team sport.

And so we don't want to promote individuals. So it's this idealistic argument. There was also, from a coaching standpoint, a lot of coaches said, I don't want to number my players because that makes it easier for scouts or for the opposing player to identify who was who.

And to quickly figure out, OK, this is Smith's best running back. You have to watch out for Smith, and you have to make sure you know where Smith is lining up in the playoffs. Now, that all seems kind of dumb. I mean, I get it, but especially from the opposing player's standpoint, no one was wearing numbers on the front of their jerseys; it was only on their backs.

So the opposing players couldn't see them when they lined up anyways, you know, so, so that, you know, but that was, you know, that was the main challenge. And then there was also, you know, people also would say, well, football is for these college players, it's a college sport, you know, there's none of this pro stuff yet or very little of it. And so it's not for the fans.

We don't want to change the game, we don't want to do things in the game to make fans happy; everything should be to make the players happy. Now, you know, as money increasingly got involved in things, and the fans were paying for the players, there are professional marketers of the gridiron just running off the podcast right now.

But, you know, that was a very common sentiment. So anyways, so then it. You know that, as far as I've been able to research, the earliest game in which players have war numbers, and it was a picture in the newspaper, and I published the picture a bunch of times, was a 1905 Iowa State at Drake game on Thanksgiving Day, and both teams were numbers and then, you know, over the next four or five years pit.

As far as I know, Pitt was the second team. They like to claim they were the first because they ignore the night, the Iowa State v. Drake game. Wichita State in 1908. Pitt was the first team in 1909. As far as I can tell, they were the first team to wear them for all games because a lot of times, the team would say I'll wear them, but only if the opponent wears the pit was like no, we're wearing them.

Part of their motivation was that they loved selling scorecards. So there's money involved, right?

Right. And then, in 1909, Michigan and Marquette formed, and then the same year, Cincinnati was too late for them, so those were, as far as I know, the whatever six or seven earliest examples of teams and/or games were. You know, players were numbers.

Yeah, you've done a great job of telling us that, and as you said, you've had a bunch of other fascinating posts on the numbers and some of their intricacies. We'll try to throw some of those links into the pigskin dispatch for this episode. So people can go back and enjoy some of that work with the alphanumerical and all the other crazy Roman numeral numbers. Yeah, four-digit numbers, and we'll put some of those up to so people can enjoy because there's a lot to do with the numbers on jerseys, and it's a lot of fun, so we appreciate that you're doing that and doing the research on it.

You do research on some aspects of football, like every day. It's what you have: plucking things out of the air all over the place and taking us on a wild ride. Sometimes, you have themes like these numbers, but they usually spare my part. Where can people enjoy your tidbits each day? Just go to football archaeology calm.

You can subscribe there. If you subscribe, you'll get an email every night at seven o'clock Eastern with that, you know, that day's episode, and you know there are people who read them five minutes after I publish them, there are other people who, you know, I can just tell by, you know, certain patterns that I can see in the data. Some people like storm up, and they read them on the weekend, so at least you know you have them. If you get the email, you have them. Otherwise, you can follow me on Twitter, Threads, or the subject platform.

All right, Timothy Brown of footballarchaeology.com we thank you very much, sir, for joining us here and we will talk to you again next Tuesday. Very good. Thanks as always.

Love the football jersey designs and evolution wait till you check out the History of American Football Jersey.

-Football Jersey Frequently Asked Questions

-What are American football jerseys made of? Modern jerseys are a mix of synthetic fibers such as polyester or a blend of different materials such asspandex, for more check out our in-depth study ofThe Make up and Materials of Football Jerseys.

-What are some of the unique football jerseys in history? Gridiron jerseys with logos on the front were some what of fad once upon a time. Check this story titled Football Jerseys with Emblems.

-Whose college football jersey was the first to be retured? Red Grange's Number 77 Ilinois Illini jersey was the first college uni to be shelved in 1925. There were a couple more about the same time and we chatted with a college football expert historian help divulge College Football and its First Retired Jerseys.

-Who are some of the most famous NFL players at each jersey number? From Red Grange's jersey number 77 to Tom Brady's iconic number 12, a slew of NFL players made their digits proud. Want to know more? You are in the right place as we covered all 100 jersey numbers and the best to wear each:About Football By Numbers.

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Timothy P. Brown was the question Who Invented The Hidden Ball Trick, And When? and then answers it in the Football Archaeology.

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Timothy Brown takes the Football Archaeology to the legendary Carlisle Indian School teams and their tendency under multiple head coaches to travel great distances to play games against top competition.

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A football Archaeology salute to the team of the Butte Football Club Miners.