Football History

Dr. Tony Collins Is one of the most revered experts and historians in the disciplines of football globally, especially in the different types of Rugby Football. We had the honor of having a discussion with Tony along with one of America's foremost experts on the early origins of our brand of football in North America, Timoty P. Brown of Football Archaeology. Tony sheds light on so many items in the relationship and shared history of these football games and what each has given to the other.

Transcript of the Discussion between Tony Collins, Timothy Brown, and Darin Hayes

Darin Hayes
Welcome to a special edition of The Pigpen, where we will discuss the great history of football, not just American football. We'll go back much further than that. To help me along the way, we've got a couple of guests. I think possibly this first one—we can't even give them the title of guests anymore—Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Timothy Brown
Thanks, Darin. Glad to be back here and especially looking forward to this conversation.

Darin Hayes
Tim, you approached me a few weeks ago and said you had contact with someone very special, an expert in football history who is slightly different from what we normally talk about. Maybe you could give us a brief synopsis of that.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, so, you know, as if, you know, those who read my blog regularly know that I've been doing a series on the original rules of football. So, from 1876, the original rules of gridiron football. And in doing that, you know, football was Rugby at that point. And so, I am trying to get a better understanding of Rugby. I had been doing additional research and came across Tony Collins, now Professor emeritus, in the UK at a university. He's, you know, Tony, you'll be able to tell us otherwise, but I think you're kind of the foremost authority globally on the origins of these various games we call football. And so anyways, because I'd come across some of this information, we eventually, you know, I eventually, or we kind of reached out to each other connected and had a conversation and just thought it'd be great to have Tony on here with you and let your guests kind of get a different flavor of the games that we love across the world.

Darin Hayes
The listeners, we are in for a real treat today because, as Tim said, Tony is an expert, but just listen to his bio line. Now, he is from the UK. He's a social historian specializing in the history of sports. Professor Collins is well-accredited as a Meritus Professor of History at De Montfort University, a research fellow at the Institute of Sports Humanities, and, in 2018, a visiting professor at Beijing Sports University. In 2020, Dr. Collins had his works come out and do some great things. In 1999, he had his first book, Rugby's Great Split, which won the Aberdare Prize for Sports History Book of the Year. He followed that up with some other prestigious books that won that same prestigious award: A Rugby League in the 20th Century Britain in 2007, A Social History of English Rugby Union in 2010, The Oval World, A Global History of Rugby in 2016, and A Social History of English Rugby Union was also the winner of the 2015 World in Union Award for the Best Academic Book on Rugby Union. To his credit, his other works are Sport and Capitalist Society in 2013 and How Football Began, How the World's Football Codes Were Born 2018. Tony Collins, welcome to the Big Ben.

Dr. Tony Collins
Well, thanks for having me on. It's an honor to be here. I only hope I can live up to your billing, which is fantastic. So, thanks very much. I am also listening to the podcast and an avid reader of Tim's blog, so it's great to be here.

Darin Hayes
Well, I think we both speak for Tim. We both thank you for that. It's quite an honor to have you on here and to have you look at some of our work, too. So Tony, maybe you could just give us a real brief. You know, we saw all your accreditations in your books. How did you get to this point where you were such an expert on Rugby?

Dr. Tony Collins
Well, I guess, like most people, this has two aspects. So I was born, bred, and raised in a northern England port city called Hull, one of the few cities in the north of England where the major sport is rugby league football, which was the breakaway from rugby union. So, I kind of grew up involved in the culture and the heritage of rugby league from a very early age. I think possibly you guys as well. My father took me to matches; his father took him. So there's a long tradition there. So I was very interested in why this was so important to us. But also, when I went to university, one of the things that interested me very much was the social history of Britain and the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And that's precisely when all the different football codes started and became popular. So, I've been very lucky that I've been able to combine my interest in sports alongside a kind of scholarly academic interest in social history. I've kind of been lucky to be able to combine those two things.

Darin Hayes
Did you play the game when you were younger?

Dr. Tony Collins
well, very badly, which is why I became a historian. Yeah, but I'd say sports on the field was never. I discovered it very quickly, and it was not my strong point, so I guess sports off the field became a substitute for that. But no, I mean, I'm also involved in the heritage of Ruby Lakes. I've worked a lot with the Ruby League authorities and clubs on the heritage of game-organizing exhibitions and things like that. So I'm still involved in the sport's everyday life.

Darin Hayes
Okay. Now, I think I'm going to represent in this conversation. I'm unsure if Tim and I can be an equal representation, but we are the common American lovers of football and football history. And to tell you the truth, I know very little about the rugby game. I've seen a few games played. I don't know that I understand it. Uh, I'm not sure I, you know, I know a brief history of it. And so, as a representative of my fellow, common or here in America, not knowing the sport, maybe you could just give us a brief history of Rugby.

Dr. Tony Collins
Well, like all the different games that became modern football games, its roots are in this kind of pre-industrial society before people lived in towns and working factories and lived on the land. Many football-style games were played where the ball was kicked past and thrown to reach a goal, which is the basis of all the football games we know today. Rugby itself emerged, as the name implies, from an elite private school in the English Midlands, Rugby School in the town of Rugby. And it's... Rugby schools in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s became a kind of flagship of the British elite private school system. And one of the things that made it that was the importance that it placed on sport, both football in the winter and cricket in... It was another sport we won't get time to get into, which we won't get into now. In, you know, cricket was the summer game, Rugby was that Rugby and football was the winter game. One of the interesting things that happened was that it gave Rugby a massive advantage over the other football games played at other elite schools. So, all the elite English schools had their version of football. Some listeners may have heard of places and elite institutions like Eaton and Harrow. They also had their versions of football. But Rugby became popular beyond its school because of the popularity of a book called Tom Brown School Days, which you may have heard of. It came out in 1857 and was a massive, massive bestseller. A kind of the equivalent of Harry Potter, but without the magic. A football match played under rugby rules was at the core of Tom Brown School Days. And the popularity of the book meant that you know, people, not just in Britain, but people in the English-speaking world, decided that, you know, rugby football was an important part of a young man's education. So the game had a kind of moral importance, not just a... It wasn't just a recreation or an entertainment. So I had this moral, educative importance. And that meant that other schools took it up and also that, you know, people in the general public read the book and wanted to play the game. And, you know, that's also the case in the States. I mean, Tom Brown's School Days sold something like a quarter of a million copies in the States, and perhaps most famously, Teddy Roosevelt said that this is one of two books that every red-blooded American boy should read. So the game became popular on the back of Tom Brown School Days. And that led to the basis for its spread around the English-speaking world.

Darin Hayes
Okay, that clears it up, and that's probably, like you say, how it came across the pond here and over to the States. Now, Tim, I know you have a series of questions that you'd like to talk to and ask Tony about, you know, taking it up from that point where Rugby is in the States and, you know, sort of the transformation into what we know is the game of American football.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, and I guess I'd like to back it up just a bit because that is one thing I think about. So I've read, you know, Tony's book, how football began. And for me, the fascinating thing about it is that there was a stew of different folk games that, over time, some of them became more formalized, like Rugby, you know, developed established rules in the association game. So, just wondering if, you know, Tony, if you could talk a little bit about kind of what that looked like in England, this, you know, mishmash or stew of games, and then how it starts diverting or diverging into some of the different football codes that we know today.

Dr. Tony Collins
Sure, yeah. Well, there are two aspects to it. First, as I've just mentioned, the elite private schools in England each had their code of football rules, but there were also regional variations. So there were games of football played with widely varying rules, most of which resemble Rugby in the handling as well, and kicking of the ball was allowed. But it wasn't until the early 1860s when groups of young, well-to-do professional men who had left private school decided to continue playing football as adults and started to form their clothes. Still, one of their problems was that they'd all been to different schools, and they couldn't play; they didn't have a common set of rules by which to play the game. So they'd have this very unacceptable situation where the home team always played under its rules whenever a match was played, which meant that the home team won every time. So it's not very interesting for the players. So, in 1863, a meeting was called in London to try and form an organization that would come up with one set of rules that would unite all the different football clubs and schools to play the game under one set of rules, which led to the formation of the Football Association. However, it wasn't successful, and there was lots of infighting, politicking, and rivalry. The Football Association was founded in 1863, but several clubs were involved in the discussions which preferred a more handling code of football and left the Football Association eventually, in 1871, they formed the Rugby Football Union, which was the game that organized the clubs who based their rules on the rules of rugby school. So, those two organizations really set the agenda for the consolidation and codification of the two different sets of rules. One of the big things that helped soccer under the Football Association was the fact that the Football Association started a national knockout cup competition in 1871, the FA Cup, which soon became very popular and had great prestige. That meant that if you wanted to enter the cup and stand a chance of winning, you had to understand their rules and play them to a high standard. So, that started a differentiation between the two codes, meaning that clubs had to pick one side. You couldn't play both codes and expect to be successful in them. So, the consolidation of both codes was based on the need for competition with other clubs on a serious and well-regulated basis.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, interesting. So while that was going on in the UK, over here on the western side of the water, both in Canada and the US, the same kind of situation, elite young men were playing local codes. But then they started adopting both soccer rules and rugby rules. My understanding is that I probably get most listeners to know that we picked up Rugby through McGill University. And I think the first rugby game in Canada was British soldiers stationed there, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, that's right. I think in the 1860s, perhaps, but clubs were certainly being formed in Canada in the 1860s. Canada had a much closer link at that point. It's still part of the British Empire with the British. So, more football information flowed between the two countries than might have been between the States and Britain.

Timothy Brown
Yeah. And then, so then we end up with a, you know, kind of a mirror situation where we've got local, you know, basically to play one another, you know, you had to come up with a common set of rules because we face the same situation, whoever made up the rules won the game, you know, you know, so for us, it ends up that, you know, football emerges, you know, at the time. So, you know, this is kind of similar or taking off of what Darren said, where, you know, most Americans think of, of Rugby, the way it's played today, you know, not the way it was played in the 1870s. And so, can you describe how, maybe, association, football or soccer, and Rugby, those two games were played compared to your understanding of American football in the 18th, as American football started breaking away? What were those games like?

Dr. Tony Collins
Well, by the time we get to do it with soccer first, I think it's the easiest. By the time we get to the mid-1870s, soccer is not too different from today's. The rules have been consolidated. In the early years of soccer, incidentally, outfield players could catch the ball and knock it down with their hands. At one point in the mid-1860s, there was a provision in the rules to allow the scoring of rouges and touchdowns, allowing people to attempt to score a goal. So, the idea is that soccer has always been a game that's being played with the feet. It's not it's not quite right. But certainly, by the time you get to the 1870s, it's 11 11 players; no outfield player could touch the ball with their hands. Only the goalie could touch the ball with their hands. So it didn't change much of the well between then and now. However, Rugby was very different from what you see today in rugby union or rugby league. Firstly, the teams were 20 aside. This differs from today's 15, aside from rugby union, and 13, aside from rugby league. Of those 20 players, 15 were forwards, and the game was essentially a succession of scrums. And a couple of interesting things, I think, from the point of view of the links with football. Firstly, how the game was organized differed from how it was organized when a play was tackled. So before 1878, when a play was tackled, and his forward motion was stopped, he wrapped to his feet and waited for the other forwards in the scrum to gather around him. Then, he would place the ball on the ground and shout down, and each side would attempt to kick the ball through the other side. And I think the fact the player had to shout down when the ball was in play is the origin of football's system of downs. So that's quite interesting. The other very different thing is when you see a rugby game today, and the ball is put into the scrum, the ball always emerges at the back of the out of the back of the scrum. The idea is for the falls to heal the ball backward so it comes out and then be put in play by being passed to the backs. That wasn't the case in Rugby in the 1870s when it first reached America. The idea then was that the ball was in the scrum, and the forwards kicked the ball forward, tried to break through the opposing forward pack, and then dribbled the ball downfield. Eventually, it would come to hand. And there may be some passing, and the game's object was to score a goal. Tries, which were very important now to the game, again, were the same as touchdowns; tries were precisely what the name implied. Touching the ball down over the goal line allowed you to try to kick a goal, and only goals counted in the score. So again, there was no point system. As in soccer today, it was simply a question of which team scored the most goals. So the game was, in a sense, unrecognizable from what it is today. Mass scrummage in very long scrummage in not much lateral passing, not much kicking out of hand other than to try and gain territory to set up another scrum. But it was a scrum that was the core of the game. And that, I think, proved to be the, if you like, the pivot around which the other football games developed; it was by rejecting the importance of the scrum and the dominance of the forward pack and the reliance on the kicking of goals, which led to, in a sense, Rugby fracturing into the four different games that we have today.

Darin Hayes
Now, if I could ask a follow-up question on that, Tony, now you said that, you know, back in that era, there were attempts at scoring, but there was no scoring. So what was the purpose of the try if it was just the scored goals?

Dr. Tony Collins
Well, if you touched the ball down over the goal line and scored a try, you were allowed a kick at goal, a relatively unhindered kick at goal. In rugby rules, the rule was that you touched the ball down over the line, and then you had to throw the ball back out from the goal line to your kicker, who would then attempt to kick a goal. The rugby union abandoned that rule because it was too complex and also became quite dangerous. It allowed the kicker simply to take a kick at goal from the point at which the try scorer crossed the goal line. But it wasn't until 1886 that tries had any value in the scoring system, and even then, tries were worth one point, and a goal was worth three points. And the drop goal, which I think Doug Flutey was the last person to try in the NFL. I might be wrong, but a drop goal in those days was worth four points. So, that was the most valuable way of scoring up until the 1940s in rugby union.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, just for the listeners, a drop goal is, an American would call it, a drop kick. Yeah, but yeah, it's a goal from a kick. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And so yeah, it's really what you've described as fascinating because, from a scoring standpoint, that was football early on because football was Rugby, right? And so, and I think the one thing that surprised me intrigued me in, you know, reading some of your, your, you know, your website, your book is just the whole, you know, I always had the impression of Rugby being much more free-flowing game. So when I thought of football and adopted rugby rules, it still looked like the Rugby we know today, rather than the scrumming mauling kind of game you describe. And so I, we had an earlier conversation, but you know, when, about this, but when, when Americans change football to use 15, and then 11 players, that dramatically impacted the nature of play. And could you talk about that a bit?

Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, and I think this is one of, again, one of the pivotal moments in the history of Rugby and football. So there was, as you might imagine, a lot of dissatisfaction with how Rugby was played because it's not much of a spectacle just to see 30 guys pushing and shoving a ball, which you rarely see anyway in that type of game. So there was pressure to reduce the size of teams and make the game more interesting and free-floating, partly in response to soccer, which doesn't have scrims as much more open game. So in 1875, the Rugby Football Union, the governing body, reduced the number of players in the team to 15 in response to that. Then, it changed the actual tackle law in 1878, which stated that if a player was tackled, he had to release the ball immediately. So, the old style scrimmage in which players would just line up, the ball would be declared down, and then the pushing would change rapidly. And that meant that the ball could come into play much more quickly.
Nevertheless, there was still debate about how Rugby developed over the next ten years and the constant centrality of the scrum. And we can say this in America and Canada: football in those countries moved away quite quickly from the scrum. And incidentally, one of the things that will be interesting in your thoughts is that the Canadians were the first footballers to seriously discuss getting rid of the scrum in 1875. They held a football conference in Toronto where they criticized the importance of the scrum and said it was a blight on the game, eventually leading to them adopting a more open formation. But that was also true within Rugby in Britain and Australia because there were lots of complaints about the importance of scrummaging, the fact that the game wasn't more open, the fact that goals were regarded as more important than tries, which certainly people in the north of England, south Wales, and Australia in Rugby felt that tries are much more important and much more interesting for spectators and also much more scientific in the way they use the term scientific in those days. So, this general dissatisfaction with the dominance of scrum in Rugby could also be found in Rugby itself. And so many of the reasons for the changes brought into American football, obviously most notably by Walter Camp, were responses to problems that were similarly being grappled with, obviously in Canada, but also within Rugby itself. This was one of the breakaways that led to the formation of the Rugby League in 1895, which again moved away from having so many scrums and reduced the number of players on the pitch to make the game more open and attractive. So's that late 1870s period when football started to become football as we know it, which is also a crucial period for the subsequent development of Rugby and the way Rugby itself split into two sports.

Timothy Brown
Yeah. And, you know, in an earlier conversation, we had talked about how when football, you know, in a game of 20 or 15 on a side, it was easier, in a sense, to keep the ball in the scrum. Once you have only 11 players, you start dropping some of them back off, off the line. So you have fewer forwards. Now, all of a sudden, it's easier for that ball to get out of there, right? And to heal it back. And so then that leads to the passing and openness. So, if I understood correctly, in many respects, American football, or possibly Canadian Rugby at the time, generated that openness or was the first to generate that kind of open game, as opposed to the scrummy, mauling game of the past.

Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, I think that's true. As we've discussed before, I think adopting 11 aside teams meant that even if you wanted to have scrummage similar to what you had in Rugby, it's very difficult because you haven't got enough players. As soon as you start to kick the ball forward, the ball will come out with the scrum, and if you kick it forward, your opponents will get possession. If you're trying to hold it in the scrum, as was a common tactic within Rugby, you don't have the numbers to keep the ball in the scrum for long. It will come out, so I think that immediately raises the question of what you do and how you control the ball, which, you know, football is solved by the snapback. Canadian football had a similar thing with what they call a scrum. Eventually, in rugby league, they also introduced what was called the play of the ball, which is a similar type of thing and still is a similar type of thing to the original snap in football, where the ball was rolled back with the foot by the center to the quarterback. If you watch Game of Rugby League today, you'll see that when a player is tackled, he stands up, puts the ball, and then uses his foot to roll it back to what rugby league calls the dummy half, but it's equivalent to a quarterback.

Timothy Brown
So, can you distinguish between the Rugby Union and the Rugby League for the typical American?

Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, it's a big question that takes two minutes. All right. That's the toughest challenge to that one. There are essentially two aspects to it. It essentially revolved around the question of payment for players. The leaders of Rugby, the Rugby Football Union, were committed to the amateur ideal in the north of England, where the game of Rugby was very popular amongst industrial workers and became a mass spectator sport. And at one point, it was more popular than soccer. Players had to take time off work to play the game and train, so they lost wages. And so clubs in the north started a campaign to allow players to be paid broken time payments, compensation for having to take time off work. The leaders of the Ruby Union said, no, this is equivalent to professionalism; we're not having it. Eventually, they started to ban players and suspend clubs. That led to the strongest clubs in the north of England deciding enough was enough and that we wanted to have a game where players were allowed to be paid. It's a spectator sport, and we think the players should be paid the same way as other entities. In 1895, they broke away to form what was initially called the Northern Union but later became known as the Rugby League. The other aspect of that split I just hinted at earlier is that there was also a different conception of how the game should be played. The clubs in the north didn't like the emphasis on scrimmaging and wanted to emphasize the scoring of tries, which they felt were more spectacular, scientific, and modern. They also wanted to make the game more open because of the threat from soccer. I mean, soccer was becoming, you know, essentially a juggernaut that was taking over everything. And so they wanted to be able to respond by making Rugby as attractive as possible. And so it's those two elements, the desire to pay players and the desire to have a more open, spectacular game that moved away from the traditional rugby scrimmaging that led to the creation of rugby league. A similar process occurred in Australia, where the game is now dominant in eastern Australia. The National Rugby League is probably the biggest club rugby competition of any rugby code worldwide. It's played in New Zealand, France, and many other countries. Rugby Union is still the biggest form and the most popular. The World Cup starts in France in a couple of months. And it's still a game of all the professional classes, more middle-class elements of society. Rugby League, wherever it's played, is very much a blue-collar sport. It's it's very easily distinguishable. The two constituencies of rugby union and rugby league are very different. So it's a combination of differences on and social differences off the pitch. And I think, in a sense, the rugby league probably has more in common with football than the rugby union. A famous Australian rugby league coach once said football and Rugby are the same sport but with different rules. We don't have the ball, and you've got to tackle hard. When you have the ball, you must run hard and score tries or touchdowns.

Timothy Brown
that is interesting. And I love the, you know, the, you know, it's the US had an analogous situation, you know, you talked before about, you know, the kind of the moral aspect of, of playing Rugby and, you know, kind of the rough and tough sport, the muscular Christianity issue. And so that's kind of the elite approach. And then you've got the spectator-oriented, professional, industrial focus. And so, you know, those same tensions played out in America between the elite universities playing football and the guys in Pennsylvania and Ohio and the leagues that they played, you know, in an industrial game of football.

Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, very similar. I remember years ago, in the 1980s, when British TV started broadcasting football and the NFL had an exhibition match with the Buffalo Bills at Wembley in the mid-1980s. Frank Gifford came over to England and, for English viewers, described the Bills as being very similar to one of the Northern Rugby League teams because they come from a similar industrial town that isn't doing too well. And that's the same, you know, that pretty much sums up where Rugby League's played in the UK.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, interesting. Another thing that intrigues me is, in American football, you know, because we had some rural changes, mostly the nature of tackling. Then, we've allowed blocking since very early on. And so our game ended up becoming this mass and momentum, very rough physical game, lots and lots of injuries, and ultimately deaths as well. And so, did other football codes go through similar kinds of experiences? And, you know, if so, how do they resolve it? How do they adjust their rules to try to remedy the situation?

Dr. Tony Collins
That's a really interesting question because this debate took place from the 1880s until the beginning of the First World War in 1914 across British sports. It was about the dangers of playing football, whether soccer or Rugby. Interestingly enough, the medical profession seemed to agree that soccer was more dangerous than Rugby because of the danger of broken legs. But there was nothing like the great crisis in the middle of the 1900s that confronted football. However, the only similar thing took place in 1870. There was a bit of a human cry, if you like, public consternation about deaths playing Rugby at schools. One of the reasons why the Rugby Football Union was formed in 1871 was to organize the game and make its rules safer. There was the Times, you know, the famous London Times newspaper, the main newspaper in Britain. Well, it still is today. The Times had a kind of campaign against the point of Rugby because it carried lists of young men who had broken legs, broken collarbones, and who had even died playing the game. One of the motivating factors for forming the Rugby Union was to make the game safer and the rules a bit safer. So you can see very strange things in the first set of the Rugby Union rules, such as you can't use iron plates or steel toe caps on football boats, which was quite common in schools because hacking, kicking opponent shins, was an accepted part of the game in schools and was seen as a way of demonstrating your hardness. Not only being able to kick but also taking hacks symbolized how hard you are, your masculinity, and your fitness. But obviously, that led to great dangers, particularly when people fell over and could get kicked in the head with iron boots and things like that. So one of the things that the Rugby Union did when the Rugby Football Union was formed in 1871 was to make the game much safer, ban hacking, and outlaw the use of fortified boots. So that's the nearest thing that occurred, but there isn't the same number of deaths as what started to happen in football with the mass plays. And there's never the same type of outcry that you got in 1905, 1906, when the president called the heads of colleges to try and figure out what to do about stopping football from becoming so violent.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, well, one of the things that's interesting, you know, is that I've always said I'm going to write an article about it; it just takes so much work. But, you know, a number of the deaths in the, let's just call it 1895 to 1905, and even the next ten years, a lot of those deaths are, were not things that somebody would die from today. You know, it was, you know, literally scratches on the football field that got infected. Or, you know, you mentioned broken legs, you know, broken legs at one time could be a death sentence, you know, that's not the case anymore. You know, and so that's part of it, they were the crushed skulls and those kinds of things that were directly the result of the nature of the play, which is why they changed some of those things. But yeah, it's, you know, that whole, a lot of the safety issues wouldn't be safety issues anymore. You know, just because of the advances of modern medicine.

Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, I think you're right. And I think the other thing is that there's, as occasionally occurred in England, a bit of a moral panic about football for various reasons. So the numbers of deaths without wishing to downplay the personal tragedy, it's easy for the number of deaths to be exaggerated. I mean, for example, in the early 1890s, there was a London newspaper, the Paramount Gazette, that campaigned against football and compiled this list of 70-odd players who we claimed had been killed playing Rugby in the north of England in just three years, which, you know, if that was true, that would be a national scandal. Almost one player is being killed every week of the season. But, when you look back at the figures, they're not particularly robust. Some happen after matches, and some of them are things that, as you say, could have happened in any walk of life. People get sepsis from scratch, often broken fingers and things like that, which are not peculiar to football or peculiar to Rugby in this case. So, I think it's worth treating figures of deaths with something of a pinch of salt. That's not to downplay or decry them or say there's anything fake about them. But it's not quite as straightforward as I think the history books tell us at the moment.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, I think this is quite incredible and eye-opening to me, again, wearing that cap of the average American football fan. We consider Rugby a more brutal sport because of our perception today. In our football, we wear helmets, shoulder pads, and all kinds of protection. You look at these rugby players, who are pretty much just going out there with a shirt and shorts from our perspective and making a lot of contacts like you would in the game of football. So, I think it's incredible that the deaths and injuries weren't as prevalent in early Rugby as in American football.

Dr. Tony Collins
I think the other thing is that sometimes when football and rugby fans get together, you get this debate, which is the toughest. And the fact is, they're both different. I mean, one of the things I think that makes football is a game of short bursts. And so much emphasis is placed on yardage, which means there's much more force and impact in tackles than what you normally get within Rugby. But you've got to tackle and run with the ball, usually for a full 80 minutes, which, you know, footballs don't do. So that is the difference, as I say, with all football cards when people try to say, my game's better than yours, my game's tougher than yours, or anything. Each one has its challenges, and each one has its strengths. So it's, they're not, it's not worth comparing it in any way, I don't think.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, the other thing is Rugby doesn't allow interfering or blocking. Yeah, right. And so, while, you know, that just dramatically changes the nature of the game, the amount of contact, even if it's not, is the high-impact contact that you always see in, you know, from a tackle. Yeah. But you know, I know Rugby has its concussion issues, similar to one football face.

Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah.

Darin Hayes
Go ahead, Jim.

Timothy Brown
Well, okay, I'll jump in. So, just wondering, did any other games that, at different points, allow the armoring of players, you know, the padding and, you know, football from early on had, you know, no hard surface or no hard materials? Hence, no iron, no, I believe it's called Gouda perch, or Gouda perch, you know, it's synthetic from Indonesian trees, right? Like a tar plastic sort of substance. That rule existed for a long time, so helmets were fairly soft until the 20s. But then obviously, football went away from that, you know, with the plastic helmets and harder leather. But did any other games have a period where they started allowing more padding? Or is it? Has it pretty much been? You're on your own, baby.

Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, kind of. I mean, for a long time, players in both games of Rugby, and one or two still lose it, wear what are called scrum caps, which are kind of like the old-fashioned leather helmets but made of much thinner material partly because it was believed that, for a long time, that would stop the dangers of concussion and head clashes. However, there's no evidence that they do. Scientists have claimed that giving players extra confidence makes them less aware of safety issues and head concerts. In the 1980s and 1990s, rugby league players wore thin shoulder pads underneath their shirts. There is nothing on the scale of football players' shoulder pads. But by and large, the rugby courts have stayed clear of that type of protective or offensive body wear. I think primarily because, in an 80-minute game, players are effectively playing both ways in football. So, carrying extra weight would not be a good thing.

Darin Hayes
No, go ahead, Tim.

Timothy Brown
I just have a quick comment: Just say, like, you know, in the 1910s, especially, there was a big movement to shed pads, and the game was going to be a speed game. So get rid of all paying it. And, you know, you're kind of looked down upon if you protect yourself with padding, and things went back the other direction. But so similar, a similar thing happened.

Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, I mean, just one quick note on that: what's interesting is that in the very early years of Rugby, the 1860s and 1870s, when hacking was still used, was still part of the game, to where shingards were seen as a sign of weakness. And there are a lot of stories where players would go on to the pitch wearing shin guards, and they'd be told either you take them off or we're going to kick them off, and often they end up worse for wear.

Darin Hayes
Interesting. Now, if I could, gentlemen, I just want to catapult us more to the modern times here and look at some of the differences between Rugby, football, both in the Union and the rugby league, and what we know, you know, in America. And I guess one of the things that, you know, football, our modern football, we are a society that just loves statistics. Baseball started over a century ago, and football looks for ways to get statistics to get fans more involved. Today, it's evolved into, you know, fantasy football and various things. Are there statistics important to the game of Rugby that folks keep track of today?

Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, but not in the same way. I think one of the things that's very striking about football, and really, I think American sport, is the emphasis that there has been on statistics for a very long time. There's a little bit of it now, but for most of its history, the only statistics that mattered in terms of players were who scored the most tries in the season, who scored the most tries in the career, who scored the most goals. And individual accomplishments like that. So, in terms of measuring yardage, tackles made, kickoff returns, you name it, anything that any football fan knows off the top of their head, those things don't exist to any great extent in any of the other games. The rise of data analytics has meant that there's more of that now, even in soccer, which is much harder to keep any detailed stats. And certainly, in the two Ruby games, you can now find, if you want to go and find details of the yardage players have made, tackles they've made, tackle busts they've made, then you can find them. And they're certainly used by the coaching staff.

Darin Hayes
Okay. And I guess the other more modern question I have for you is from the UK, you know, from an American perspective, when we talk about the game of football, there's only one thing. It's, you know, the gridiron, it's American football, and we know that you folks in England are, when you talk about football, well, it could be a variety of things. So how would, if somebody's sitting there reading the London Times or any of the other periodicals over there and somebody mentions the game of football, how do they differentiate between all these different games that are considered football?

Dr. Tony Collins
Well, that's a really interesting question because it is a real problem when you look at reports of the various types of football in the 19th century in the newspapers. After all, it's assumed by and large that you will know which type of football is being referred to. So I think the basic rule of thumb in this is that whichever sport got to a place first, whichever, you know, whichever football code got to a place first, that is the one that is normally called football. So yeah, as I mentioned at the top of the show, I come from a town called Hull, and rugby league was the most important spot there. So my grandfather, who was born in 1907, always called it football. Whereas you go to other places and football, football means soccer. By and large now in England, then if you talk about football, people assume you're referring to soccer, and you get this, which, you know, I guess you may have had as well that soccer fans will say, how can it be football if it's not played with the feet? However, the other football codes are played with the feet, not to the same extent as soccer. Also, the nickname soccer is a very English invention anywhere because it comes from the word association, the SOC in association. When these games were played in the elite private schools, association football would be referred to as soccer and rugby football would be referred to as Rugby. So that's the origin of the two names. So it's, I'll tell you, the worst place to go there if you go to Australia, where there are four major football codes. Australian rules football, another oval ball code derived from rugby school. You have rugby football, rugby league football, and association football. Figuring out which code a person is referring to when they talk about football can sometimes be quite difficult. So yeah, I think the key thing here is, when in Rome, do as the Romans do, and whatever their locals refer to as football, that's football.

Darin Hayes
Interesting, go ahead.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, your question raised an interesting question for me. You know, it's one of the things that we get into, especially in football. I think, you know because the game has changed so dramatically. I mean, to some extent, baseball is still baseball, right? But football has changed so dramatically from how it was back in the day. And so the goats are the greatest of all time; all kinds of arguments become very difficult because comparing a player from one time to another is tough, and you've got recency bias, etc. Does the same thing occur in Rugby? I mean, do people feel like they can go back and say somebody who played who was a star of 1910? You know, how does he compare to a player from the 1980s versus, you know, the 2020s?

Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, it's a really difficult issue. I've been involved in panels where you decide who's the greatest player ever. It's pretty impossible because, obviously, as a historian, I've got a much greater knowledge of plays in the past than a regular fan. Naturally, your bias is towards players you've seen play and have had an impact that is still felt today. It's an incredibly difficult thing. As you said, when I first started watching football and British TV in the 1980s, it's a very different game today when I watch it than what it was when I was watching Mike Dick as Chicago Bears when Super Bowl in 1985. That's true of the other games, as well. I mean, Ruby Union has changed a tremendous amount. Not least, in the past 40 years, it's gone from being a purely amateur sport to being a fully professional one. It's changed its rules to become, in a sense, a little bit closer to Ruby League. There's more emphasis on the scoring of tries and less emphasis on scrums, but its principles are still the same.
Again, Ruby League has changed very much. I think one of the interesting things is football's impact on the other football codes. American football has impacted the other football codes, particularly the Ruby codes. I think Canada is an obvious example of what originally Canadian Rugby was. It slowly transformed itself, partly under the influence of what was going on south of the border, to become a 12-a-side three-game gridiron. But I think when you look at the Ruby League, it has also been influenced heavily by football over the years. For example, unlike Ruby Union, you only have a limited number of tackles to score.
Originally, in 1966, there was an unlimited number of tackles, similar to the problem that faced football in the 1880s before three downs were brought in. Seems to just hang on to the ball as long as they could, particularly if they got into the lead. That was changed in 1966 when the Ruby League authorities brought in the system of what you would call four downs; we call four tackles. Then, that was changed to open the game up a bit more to six tackles in the early 1970s. I was struck by something you wrote, Tim, at the weekend about Eddie Kokums at Wisconsin, who proposed five or six downs without any outage requirement, which is essentially the system that Ruby League plays today. You have the ball six times, and if you don't do anything if you don't score, you turn it over to the other side. Even though we're in the 21st century, the games have never been further apart; there's still a little influence going backward and forwards. Pete Carroll at the Seahawks is a big fan of Ruby tackling. There are links between the sports and the different types of football in the 1870s and 1880s, but there's still a little residue today.

Darin Hayes
Now, I guess, I mean, it's fascinating, um, our modern times, now I know we've seen it in the NFL, even, even, uh, recently where some former, uh, legends of the game of Rugby have come across in the United States and tried their hand at American football, trying out for, uh, you know, an NFL team. I know for a while there, we, in the NFL, had some players from Europe put on a practice squad to develop them. Still, I haven't heard other than maybe a kicker, uh, making it into American football from one of the other, um, items of football rugby or whatever is, has it, anything ever gone the other way where an American football player has become something substantial in the game of Rugby.

Dr. Tony Collins
There's a couple of footballs. One was Al Kirkland, who I think played semi-pro football. I don't think he's ever drafted in the NFL, but he came over and had quite a long career in the British Rugby League. There was a more short-lived guy called Manfred Moore who went to play Rugby League in Australia in the 1970s. I think they played for the Saints; I'm not sure. I'd have to check that one out. Interestingly enough, the most influential football player who came to play Rugby, to play rugby union was Pete Dawkins, who came to Cambridge University in the late 1950s. I think he was a Heisman Trophy winner.

Timothy Brown
from our army.

Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, and yeah, and Pete Dawkins was the man who introduced the spiral throw in Ruby Union when the ball goes out of bounds or into touch, as we call it. It comes back into play through the lineup when the two sets of forwards line up alongside each other, and balls are thrown back in, and they lift and try and get the ball and put it out to the pass. For a long time, the ball was thrown in like soccer over the head and sometimes under the arm upwards and over. Still, when he came to Cambridge, it was Pete Dawkins who introduced the torpedo pass, the spiral pass to the line out, and that's the system used throughout Ruby Union now for bringing the ball back into play in a line out. So yeah, Pete Dawkins has probably been the most influential American footballer ever to play Rugby. It's because what he introduced into the game in the 1950s is still prevalent today.

Darin Hayes
Tim, do you have any further follow-up questions to ask Tony?

Timothy Brown
Uh, no, I, you know, I mean, partly interested. I mean, I, we could stand here all afternoon. But, uh, I just wanted to say this is like, you know, I don't know, Darren, from your perspective, but certainly from my perspective, this is the greatest of all time session for the podcast. I mean, I just, like, this has been fascinating. It's so much fun to hear your perspective on these things, Tony. It's, it's fun. Very much appreciate it.

Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, me too. It's really enjoyable because I think one of the problems that we have as football historians is that it's very easy to get tunnel vision. And so, you know, you just look at your football. And I think these types of discussions when you step back and then think, well, there's a lot in common here. And certainly, you know, certainly in the history and the origins that, you know, we're of the same parentage. But even today, how problems are dealt with, the way innovations are brought into the game, I think there's a lot that, well, I think there's a lot of the games can learn each other on the pitch, but also as historians, I think there's a lot of value from discussions like this and long may they continue.

Darin Hayes
I agree. Now, Tony, before we let you go, let's let the listeners know who may be interested in picking up one of your books, any of your other projects, your podcast, or your websites. Maybe you could just give us some idea how to get in touch with some of your work.

Dr. Tony Collins
Sure, yeah, thanks. My website is www.tonycollins.org, and you can get an extensive preview of how football began from the website by clicking on the cover. I also have a podcast, which has been a bit quiet this year because I'm working on another project, but that's been running for four or five years now, which covers a lot of the stuff we've talked about today. It looks at the history of Rugby, a little bit of football history, and certainly a lot about how they relate and are intertwined. So that's where you can find links to that at tonycollins .org, but also, you know, if you go to www .rubbyreloaded .com, that'll take you straight to episodes of the podcast. So yeah, that's where you can find me, and hopefully, the podcast will. I plan to get the podcast back up and running in the next couple of months, and we'll be doing many more of these very interesting discussions. Hopefully, I can reciprocate and have you guys on the show.

Darin Hayes
That would be very, very intriguing. I can't speak for Tim, but I'd be delighted to do that.

Timothy Brown
I also just wanted to say, you know, I've got a copy of it, and part of the reason we initially connected was because I've read how football began. And just so readers or listeners know, it kind of, it goes back to some of the beginnings that Tony described here, but then also, you know, kind of on a country by country or code by code basis, it goes through, you know, Canadian football kind of, what's the story there? How did it evolve and break away from this, uh, you know, stew of games that occurred? And so anyways, if you're, if you're in Australia, if you're in Canada, wherever, you know, there's portions of this book that are directly applicable to your world and then others that are very much global and just fascinating.

Darin Hayes
Yeah. Uh, most definitely now, you know, I can't tell you enough how thankful we are and honored to have you on here, Tony, and have this great discussion with us. I feel almost like, uh, it's sort of a family reunion of sorts of, you know, meeting some of the second and third cousins and different genres of football together and uniting them. And, uh, this is, uh, triumphant. I feel pretty, pretty honored to have this happen here. So, we thank you for that, and we thank you for your time and for sharing your knowledge. Yeah.

Dr. Tony Collins
Thanks, guys; it's been a blast; I've enjoyed it.

Timothy Brown
It's been great talking because, yeah, yeah, right back at you.

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Have you ever wondered how and why a football looks the way it does? What about the grainy texture, the color or the stripes? Our friend Author Timothy Brown has the answers.

Discover the secrets behind the ball's shape, size, and materials, and learn how technological advancements have transformed the game. Brown offers a unique perspective on the football's cultural significance and its impact on society throughout history.

Join us as Tim discusses his latest groundbreaking work, The History of the Football. In this captivating conversation.

We also have a podcast audio version of the discussion found at:
The History of the Football with Timothy Brown or you can find it on your favorite podcast provider in the Pigskin Dispatch Podcast.

---

The ability to change direction on a dime, explode past defenders, and leave them grasping at air – these are the hallmarks of a truly agile football player. But how did these skills develop throughout the game's history? And how can modern players hone their footwork for peak performance?

No time for a video? Check out the Agility Drill Podcast version

Join us as we delve into the world of football agility drills with renowned football historian Timothy Brown. Mr. Brown's deep knowledge of the game's past sheds light on how training methods have evolved, offering valuable insights for players and coaches alike. In this exclusive interview, he'll be sharing:

-Historical Drills: Explore the agility drills used by legendary players of the past, and see how they've shaped modern training techniques.

-Drill Evolution: Learn how agility drills have adapted to the ever-changing demands of the modern game.

So, lace up your cleats and prepare to elevate your game. With Mr. Brown's expert guidance, you'll be well on your way to developing the lightning-fast footwork that separates the good from the great on the gridiron.

-Timothy Brown Box Aglity Drills

I've got an image that shows one of the early agility drills. And what this is, this shows, it was a 1921 Kansas State team. And, you know, they're, they're working out and they're trying to become more agile.

So nowadays, there's, you know, we have all these agility drills, and people run through ropes, or they, you know, but for a long time, people ran through tires, or in this case, they ran through wooden boxes. And, you know, it's same kind of thing as we asked players to do today, you're running through an obstacle course, sometimes they have these boxes, you know, pushed off to the right and left. And they got to do, you know, run with high knees, and they're double stepping or whatever, you know, whatever the coach told them that they needed to do.

So it was a way, not so much. Well, certainly it helped from a conditioning standpoint, but a lot of it was just trying to build agility. And, and, you know, kind of looseness of the step and the ability to cut and change direction.

But at the time, the best that they could come up with was either old car tires, or wooden boxes like this. And you know, you have to look at this and say, how many guys tripped on these things, and scuffed up their shins or broke a leg or whatever. And so, you know, it turned out that there was a guy named Joe, I believe it's pronounced Paupa.

He had coached the Chicago's Navy Peer Team during World War One. But he and he was a guy who in the 40s, who invited who invented what he called the runner training apparatus. But those are the ropes that we all know and love and that we probably ran through, you know, high-stepping at some point in our career, even if we were linemen.

So that he was the guy who invented the ropes. But you know, you think there's a lot of training devices and steps that people do nowadays. But they originated with obstacles like these boxes or tires, and then ultimately ropes.

And now there are ladders and, you know, different devices, all trying to get people to become more agile, lift their feet, and do other things.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

---

When you think you have heard it all, a football story like this is revealed! It's so strange you won't believe it, but this oddity occurred in the game a century ago when things were just a bit different.

I have heard of many strange situations that occurred during football games throughout the ages. Ill weather, lost balls, and even nonplayers and vehicles out on the field of play; however, when I read the Football Archaeology.com Tidbit titled Punting From Behind A Barbed Wire Fence.

It may just take the cake for being the strangest.

I appreciate Timothy Brown for sharing his time, knowledge, and incredible story from yesteryear.

We present this video to preserve the legacy of American football history.

-Full Transcription of Conversation with Timothy Brown on Punting Behind Barbed Wire



TBrown_PuntBehindBarbedWire_1

⏰Wed, 05/01 04:44AM · 12mins

Transcript

Darin Hayes:
We have a great day planned for you today on this episode. Timothy P. Brown of footballarchaeology.com is joining us just like he does each and every Tuesday. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Timothy Brown:
Darin, thank you. How are you doing this evening?

Darin Hayes:
I am doing great. And how about you?

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, can't complain, can't complain. Gonna get out of town in a few days and get away for a week. So that's nothing for me.

Darin Hayes:
Well, that's great because this winter time, it's almost like, uh, you know, especially us up in the colder climates, uh, a bit of a prisoner, almost like we're behind a barbed wire fence. And, uh, I had to stretch for that one to segue into our topic tonight. That's why Tim is laughing because he recently wrote a post he titled Punning from behind a barbed wire fence; Tim, that sounds like a pretty risky business there. And, uh, maybe you could explain this title.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, so this is one where there's like multiple rules involved that were current in 1907 when this event occurred but are long, you know, long gone from the game. So it's one, you know, I came across, I've done a couple of different articles from a series that ran in the 1920s called the most spectacular play I've ever seen. And they went out, and they interviewed a bunch of people about, you know, the most spectacular play they ever saw. And so this guy named Bill or CW Street mentioned a play that he in a game he had participated in. So, you know, just to kind of set up the stage a little bit. This guy CW played at Auburn for two years and then at Washburn and Lee. It was during his senior year, Washington Lee, in 1907, that this game occurred. But you know, he then went on. He was a track and wrestling official. And I mean that both in terms of, you know, help, like officiating, but also kind of managing as part of the, you know, the US Olympic teams for both as an administrator and official type, but he also was the field judge for the 1929 Rose Bowl, which is the game when Roy, you know, the "Wrong Way Riegels" play. So he was on the field for that play. So anyway, he saw some spectacular plays. And that was, you know, the wrong way. Riegels wasn't one of them, although I guess it actually wouldn't have occurred by the time the articles came up. So

Darin Hayes:
He might have changed his mind after that play, right? Yeah.

Timothy Brown:
So, so what happened with this guy was he was the captain of the W and L team, and they were playing Bucknell close game, and at one point, Bucknell drove the ball down to the three-yard line, and then they, the W and L's, defense held so the ball was turned over on downs. So back in that time, you know, if you had the ball inside your 10, it was very common that you pumped it on first out. And so he's saying, yeah, that's what we're going to do. But in this particular instance, the, you know, back then they didn't have hash marks. So if the play ended over towards the sideline or the previous play ended over towards the sideline, that's where the next play started. And then this is 1907, so they didn't have end zones yet. They had a goal line but no end line, no end zones. And so, in a lot of locations, since the ball couldn't, the only way you could score a touchdown was to run the ball across the goal line. You could catch a pass, a forward pass in 1907. But if the ball in the air or bounding went across the goal line, it was a turnover. It was basically a touchback. So, basically, you didn't need the depth in the end zone. It was like all you needed was across the end zone. And so, as a result, they could fit playing fields into pretty tight spaces. And there might be a wall just beyond the end zone in a stadium like the Polo Grounds. So, in this case, on one side of the end zone, there was a barbed wire fence a little bit behind the end zone. And so the street asks the referee, can we move the ball over to the other side of the field so that we can punt? And the referee says, I understand why you want to do that, but no, you can't. That's not within the rules. We can't just move the ball through the other side of the field. So the streets are like, okay, we're playing by the rules. So I'm going to play by the rules, too. So what he does is he, he has his punt, he tells his punter to go on the other side, go through the gate, lock the gate, and then go on the other side of the barbed wire fence and stand there to be ready to take the snap. So that's what the punter does. So he's back there. He gets a snap, and the Bucknell defenders start racing toward him, but they stop before they get to the barbed wire fence, and they can't figure out how to get to the guy. In the meantime, his people are running him down the field. And he's just kind of waiting there, ready to, he's waiting to punt the ball until his teammates get downfield. And now, the other thing about the rules of the time was in 1906; they made the, you know, what they call for a while the quarterback kick or the onside punt. In 1906, they made it so that if you punted the ball, any one of your teammates could recover the ball and advance it. You know, they had as much right as the return man. So by the time he punted it, they had, you know, 10 of his teammates downfield than just one return man. So they ended up recovering the ball, you know, W and R, you know, recover the ball. Unfortunately, they ended up with the same guy who was the punter on another occasion; he was back to punt, stepped behind the end zone, or I should say behind the goal line and was tackled for a safety. So they end up losing the game two to nothing. But it is the only known game in which a punt was made from behind a barbed wire fence. If anybody else knows of any others, let me know.

Darin Hayes:
It introduces your chance of getting your kick blocked.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, yeah, that's great cup protection. You know, I've got a nice barbed wire fence in front of you.

Darin Hayes:
Think about the pressure on the long snapper, though. He's got to make sure he clears that fence or, you know, there could be some trouble there.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, they only used one ball at the time, so if that ball had popped. Thank you.

Darin Hayes:
Well, but even now, okay. Let's say he snaps that ball at the rules at that time, and it hits the wire, the fence, and drops it straight down. That's a loose ball, right? So you're going to have these guys going in for a fumble next to a barbed wire fence and trying to recover. Ooh, boy. Holy porcupines, Batman. That sounds like a bad one.

Timothy Brown:
Kind of a prickly situation.

Darin Hayes:
Yeah, that's for sure. Well, I'll tell you what, Tim, you, uh, you, you definitely, uh, go through it, and you will find some interesting ones. That's, that's a good one. I would have never even ever thought of, uh, that being, uh, you know, but if, yeah, but there's no, uh, no end zones, there's no out of bounds. So it probably goes on forever, too.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, it's an infinite end zone or infinite goal area.

Darin Hayes:
Very, very interesting. Really makes you think on that one. Uh, yeah.

Timothy Brown:
And again, I mean, there's the, you know, just the difference in the, you had the, the on-site punt, you know, you had the, the ball over, you know, without hash marks, the balls over near the sideline. There's no, no end zone. You know, it's just a lot of different rules, you know, in place.

Darin Hayes:
It's amazing how much the game has evolved, and I think we're probably all grateful for it, except for maybe the punters. Maybe they would still want the rule to be like you just described so they could have some extra protection.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, well, I'll do a little reading on the rule book tonight see if they have any any specific mentions barbed wire fences.

Darin Hayes:
Well, I wonder, I mean, I wonder if it would have, what would have happened? It's like some of the stadiums you described where the goal line was very close to the wall of possibly the stands. Yeah. Would the punter be able to stand in the stands if the snapper could get it up to where he was and kick from an elevated position or really? Yeah, presumably. Yeah.

Timothy Brown:
Um, you know, I mean, it's just like, you know, the one, you know, fumbles out of bounds, you know, they, the ball was not dead when it went out of bounds back then. So, you know, tumbling over water buckets, over cinder tracks, all that kind of stuff. And so, you know, and it was, you know, a little bit of the reason why they kept everybody seated along the sidelines was, I mean, it was by rule, they, you know, teams were limited to like two or three or five rules varied over the years, but you can only have a certain number of people standing along the sidelines. Everybody else had to be kneeling or seated. So, you know, that's why you see in the old photographs, everybody's sitting on the bench.

Darin Hayes:
Well, as a former sideline official, I'm so jealous of those times when everybody sat on a bench. It would have been lovely. Yeah. Wow. Well, great job, Tim, uh, you know, you have such interesting little pieces like that, uh, your tidbits on football archaeology .com. Why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about how they too can partake in, uh, enjoying, uh, football archaeology's, uh, information and content?

Timothy Brown:
Yep, so you just go to footballarcheology.com. I mean, obviously, you can just go there whenever you want, but if you want to subscribe, you can subscribe for free. That gives you access to about a third of the emails I send out; you'll get and get full access to the other article or to the article; the others, you can preview the article, and then it kind of cuts off on you. Then, the paid subscription is five bucks a month, and they're 50 bucks a year. You can do a seven-day trial for free, that kind of stuff. I also post on threads and Twitter. I'm not really active on threads; I just post there and then on Twitter, you know, a couple of times a week, I'm posting something in reaction to what somebody else has said and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, fun conversations occur out there on Twitter.

Darin Hayes:
His name is Timothy Brown:. Football archeology.com is his website. Tim, we really appreciate you joining us and telling us about this very interesting piece of football history, and love to do it again next week.

Timothy Brown:
Very good. Thank you.

---

The modern touchback rule in American football, where a ball fumbled out of the end zone results in possession for the receiving team at the 20-yard line, wasn't always the way it was. Its history reveals an interesting journey shaped by strategic considerations, safety concerns, and the ever-evolving nature of the game.

Timothy Brown of FootballArchaeology.com joins us to discuss this interesting but rare football event and its evolution in history.

Early Days and the Muffed Punt: In the early years of American football (late 19th century), recovering a fumble in the end zone, even if accidentally, awarded the recovering team a touchdown. This strategy, known as the "muffed punt," involved intentionally fumbling the ball just before crossing the goal line to score. It was a risky maneuver but potentially offered an advantage in scoring position.

Safety First: Introducing the Safety: Recognizing the dangers of this practice, a new rule was introduced in 1882, awarding the opposing team two points (later changed to one) for recovering a fumble in the end zone, effectively discouraging the "muffed punt" and prioritizing player safety.

Strategic Shifts and the Touchdown: However, the new rule also created a strategic conundrum. Teams facing fourth-and-long situations near their own end zone could intentionally fumble the ball out of bounds for a safety, essentially sacrificing two points to avoid a potential turnover and touchdown by the opponent. This led to the introduction of the "touchback" rule.

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The tipped pass is an exciting play that we see often in the pass-happy offenses of modern times and the athletes on both sides of the ball downfield. The rules we know today concerning the play were very much different than they are today. The video covers the early history of tipped pass rules in American football.

Darin Hayes, is interviewing Timothy Brown from Football Archaeology. Besides the video we have the audio on our podcast too. Brown discusses a time in football history, from 1907 to 1911, when a tipped pass was considered a fumble. This means that if a pass was tipped by a player from either team, the ball was live and could be recovered by either team. This rule was implemented to increase player safety, as the forward pass was a new and dangerous play at the time. However, the rule was eventually changed because it led to too many scrambles for the ball, which could be dangerous for the players.

The video also discusses other interesting facts about the early days of the forward pass, such as how teams would sometimes try to create a circle of players around the receiver to protect him from being tackled.

Modern rules concerning a tipped pass go along these lines. A pass tipped by a defender can be caught by anyone on the field, including a previously ineligible offensive player. Only an eligible offensive player or any defender can legally bring a tipped pass by the offense.


-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on When Tipped Passes Were Live Balls[b]

Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome again to The Pig Pen, your portal for positive football history. It is Tuesday, and we have another special treat: Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com will join us to discuss one of his most recent tidbits. And this one is recent and fresh.

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Hey, thank you, Darin. Yeah, this is a good one.

This is kind of one of the more bizarre rules or one that most people had no idea was out there because, you know, I just recently came across it. So, yeah, when I read it, I had no idea. You enlightened me.

And I thought I knew, you know, a lot about especially the rules and things like that, but this one caught me off guard. And you've titled it when tip passes were live balls as a little bit of a mystery, but also, you know, sells a point and just sounds odd to our modern year for football. So why don't you explain this to us a little bit? Yeah, so, as I tried to explain in the article itself, you know, with the forward pass, which had been around for a long time.

You know, it just was illegal. You know, if you threw a forward pass and what we would think of as forward lateral, you know, now, but if you did that, you lost possession of the ball. And then, in trying to, you know, open the game following the 1905 season, the rule makers made just a host of different changes to the game.

But one of them was a legalized forward pass. And, you know, the rule book for six only laid out six or seven rules related to the passing game. You know, they just couldn't see what this might become in the future.

And for them, they were thinking of forward laterals, this short little right in the area, kinds of, you know, not not the down downfield passing, which, you know, a couple of teams actually did in 1906. So they had just a really simple set of rules. But, you know, they were and mostly, you know, the game.

They risked the forward pass a lot. You know, if you threw an incomplete pass, it was a turnover and a spot foul. So it returned to the spot of the pass.

If the pass hit an ineligible receiver turnover, if the pass crossed the goal line on the fly, or if it bounced turnover. So, you know, things like that. And then you couldn't throw the ball until you were five yards to the left or the right of the center.

You know, so it was consistent with the checkerboard pattern field. And, you know, the first person to get the ball couldn't run until they were five yards left or right. So so anyways, you know, it just there were a lot of things, restrictions that just are inconceivable today.

But then, you know, they kind of went through a season and they decided to add a few rules. And one of them that they added in 1907 was that if the ball was in the air and touched an an eligible receiver, so an eligible offensive person or defense, then the ball and it it then hit the ground. That ball was locked.

So basically any kind of batted ball by a defender, but, you know, a tipped ball, a dropped ball, you know, from an offensive player, was essentially a fumble. And so, you know, there'd be a pass and somebody would tip, you know, try for it. They wouldn't get it, but they'd touch the ball.

So then, you know, the balls are rolling on, you know, like any kind of situation where there's a fumble, it's a mad scramble to get to the thing. And since the pass was probably a little bit more in the open field because it had to be five yards right or left, you know, all that kind of stuff. There were guys flying in all over the place, trying to get to that ball.

So so it's just one of the it's one of those rules. It just it seems so bizarre that they that they did that. And yet, you know, it was.

So the 1907 season, you know, it's always, you know, if you read through, you know, some of the commentaries, you'll just're reading like an old newspaper report of a game and saying, you know, the ball bounced off of Smith, and there was a mad scramble for the ball. And, you know, Pittsfield State recovered or, you know, whatever. And so then, you know, again, the whole rule of the game rule changes were supposed to be for player safety, and they recognized that there were too many scrambles.

So they made a change for 1908 where they said only the first offensive player that touches the ball. Can you recover it, right? So if you think about it, you know, the football rule that only you know, like if an offensive player touches the ball or touches a forward pass, then it has to have a defensive player touch that pass before an offense can then before a second offensive player can grab it. However, that originated in the 1908 rule, which was trying to eliminate some of the scrambles.

So and then, you know, so it remained in place until 1911, and then they then they cut the rule out. But so you had, you know, so you had seven, eight, nine. So you had a four year period where.

The tip ball was a fumble, you know, effectively. And the other thing that's just funny about that is, you know, talking about teams being unable to really conceive how to throw the pass and how, you know, how do you create a pass route if you've never seen anyone throw a forward pass before? And one of the things that teams did fairly frequently back then until, I think, it was maybe 32. The offensive lineman could go downfield on a pass.

One of the approaches that the teams took was to you'd send all your offensive linemen to the left or something. And then whoever the receiver was, you know, maybe an end, would get in the middle of those offensive linemen. They kind of form a circle around them.

And then they try to pass the ball to, you know, to the middle while the offensive line blocked. The difference is trying to get at him because, again, there was no pass interference yet. So it is probably while the quarterbacks get mauled by like five guys that aren't getting blocked because they often lose the line.

I mean, yeah. So it's just crazy when you think about, you know, what that had to be. You know, plus, you know, again, most guys weren't wearing numbers.

If they had numbers, it was only on the back of their jerseys. But even like Carlisle, as far as I can tell, Carlisle was the first school to paint their helmets. And they did it because they wanted to be able to identify who their players were, you know, in, you know, as they ran downfield, you know, for passes.

That old Glenn Warner was a clever guy. Well, he wasn't there yet. He wasn't.

He was OK. Yeah, he went back and forth between Cornell. You know, he started Cornell, went to Carlisle, and went back to Cornell.

And then he was back at Cornell or Carlisle in 07, but no six. One of the former players, you know, the coach. But they.

They had, well, one of the other things that teams did was like when they circle the guy, some lift them up in the air, like in a, you know, the rugby lineouts, you know, when they're tossing the ball in. And, you know, which was just a few years before, had still been away. One of the ways that football teams brought the ball in from the sideline, you know, from out of bounds, was the law.

Or they call it a fair as well. Anyways, they'd lift the guy up in the air and throw him the ball. But so it's just one of those things that just, again, made sense at the time, maybe, you know, I mean, they were just trying to make some up some things, you know.

But the idea of a tipped pass being effectively a fumble is just kind of bizarre. Yeah, you know, maybe four or five years ago, if you would have said that with the guy in the circle and everybody else, you know, helping him with the before the tush push and brotherly shove or whatever you call it, maybe we would have said, oh, you're out of your mind. That wouldn't happen.

But maybe it's a little bit more the normal activity we see in football these days, which I hope they get rid of because I hate it. But go back to the rule. I'm OK with it.

I'm OK. You don't like the tush pusher. No, I like when they used to have the rule, you know, you can't aid the runner.

You know, that's. Yeah, yeah. Let him know you can block guys in front of you.

You can't pull, push or otherwise move that runner, help them go. I I still I'm a traditionalist. I think that should be the maybe it's not so traditionalist.

Maybe they were helping the runner long before that rule, as you're saying. But yeah, the football I grew up with, you couldn't do it. Yeah, no, exactly.

I mean, it it it went away, you know. Quite a while ago, but I mean, it was part of the original game and then they then they got rid of it really as a player safety issue. I blame it.

I blame it on Matt Leinert and Reggie Bush against Notre Dame in 2005 or whenever it was. That's because they're like the next year that they changed. Right.

Right. Plus, they beat Notre Dame on that play. Yeah.

Well, well. But, you know, back in the day, they. You know what? At the time that they instituted, you know when they.

Said you couldn't aid the runner. Part of it was, you know, you only had three officials on the field. And so that call, you know, officials were reluctant to make the call.

Right. And so anyways, that's part of it. I'm kind of getting a little bit confused now, but anyway, so, you know, it was one of those things where the trying to force the officials to make the calls that that's actually one of the justifications for why they brought it back, because people, you know, nobody wants to make that call.

But yeah, that's true. That's true. But it's getting crazy.

Somebody's going to get hurt. That's my theory. And that's when the rule all of a sudden change and be banned again.

But I don't want somebody to get hurt. You know, it could be offense, defense, alignment, whatever. But somebody's going to get hurt.

But, Tim, you know, we love how you bring up some of these, you know, oddities of football and things, unique aspects or something maybe a team did, you know, a hundred years ago that we never heard of before. And including this rule here, you know, that's just part of football. And it's a great history.

And you do things like this each and every day that you write about and explain very thoroughly, and a lot of times with images that you find in old yearbooks and newspapers. And how can people share in these tidbits that you put on to see them as they're coming out? Real simple. Just go to footballarchaeology.com and subscribe.

Then you'll get an email. Alternatively, you can follow me on Twitter. You can also get the Substack app on threads or through the Substack app because, you know, my blog newsletter is on Substack, and you can follow me on Substack as well.

So, whatever floats your boat. All right. Well, his name is Timothy Brown.

Footballarchaeology.com is his website. And Tim, we appreciate you coming here this Tuesday. And we hope to talk to you again next Tuesday about some more great football.

Very good. Thank you, sir.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

The Draw Play in football is still used as an element of surprise at all levels of football. It is also quite a common play choice when a team is in the unen... — www.youtube.com

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The draw play – a staple of football offenses, a play that keeps defenses guessing. But where did it come from? Who first thought of faking a pass and then handing the ball off? Today, we're joined by renowned football historian Timothy Brown to crack open the dusty playbook and uncover the surprising origins of the draw play.

The story originates from a recent Tidbit of Tim's titled: The Origins of the Draw Play.

The Draw Play in football is still used as an element of surprise at all levels of football. It is also quite a common play choice when a team is in the unenviable position of third and really long as a way to garner some cheap, safe, and easy field position to set up the punting unit,

Timothy Brown joins us to talk about the origins and the purpose of the draw play in this episode.


-[b]Transcript of the Origins of the Draw Play with Timothy Brown

Darin Hayes
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 another Tuesday where we get to visit with our friend Timothy Brown of football archaeology dot com. Tim, welcome back to the pig pen.

Timothy Brown
Hey, Darin, I am looking forward to chatting, and hopefully, this discussion will not get too drawn out, if you know what I mean.

Darin Hayes
Oh, you are just the master of the Segway, and folks, these are not pre-rehearsed, So these are just as much a surprise to me as they are to you when they come out, but

Timothy Brown
They got it. Dad jokes are what make the world around.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, we are both dads and grandfathers, and we have the jokes coming at us. So, you know, so pardon our humor. But Tim is segueing into a title that his tidbit he's going to talk about tonight, which he had titled The Origins of the Draw Play, which is a very famous play. And when it's still common today in football. So, Tim, what do you get to tell us about the origins of the draw play?

Timothy Brown
Yeah, so well, I think part of what's fun about the draw play, like a lot of things in football, is kind of, you know, people always talk about, you know, the game, you know, football repeats itself that, you know, that there's this whole thing about, you know, well, we've seen and done that before. And, you know, in a lot of cases, that has been the case, but it always kind of comes back to, well, what do you mean, you know, so what is it about like today's draw play that you can see and spot in earlier versions of that play. And so that's kind of what this tidbit was about. And so, so, you know, like a lot of things, you know, I recently did a tidbit on homecoming. And the first homecoming, so in order to talk about that, you have to define, OK, well, what a homecoming is and what the elements of a homecoming are. So with the draw play, it's like, well, what's a draw play? And, you know, for me, it comes down to the draw play is a play in which it is a, it's a fake pass with a, with a, with a run that is, you know, a predetermined run. So it's not, you know, back in the day they used to, out of the, you know, single wing, double wing, and probably, you know, out of the Notre Dame, you know, and Minnesota boxes and all those kinds of things. You know they, they'd send a back out wide on a run-pass option, not the RPO we know today, but a run-pass option, where it was like, OK, you either run the ball, but if the guys open, throw at home. So that's an option that was still an option play whereas, you know, draw it's predetermined you call it, call it in the huddle, you're going to fake a pass, and then run it, you know, and it's an attempt to kind of take advantage of the pass rushers coming at you.

Darin Hayes
And what you're saying is that you're basically having your lineman pass block instead of the traditional run block where they're trying to go beyond the line of scrimmage. They're trying to stay on their side of the line of scrimmage and just protect but open a hole.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, I mean, back in the day, there wasn't that restriction on the linemen, you know, they could go downfield. Right. So I mean, some of that stuff gets a little bit mixed up. And even, you know, as far as I can tell, there wasn't a heck of a lot of difference between past blocking and around blocking back in the day. But you know, now in today's world, yes, 100%, right. But that's, you know, that's our, you know, 21st-century mind, defining, you know, what a draw play is. But back then, so the first, you know, I wrote this about Fritz Chrysler when he was coaching at Michigan. And he had drawn up a play for, you know, postseason or preseason guide that Grant let Rice was doing. And he basically had his single-wing tailback get the deep snap. And then he rolled out as it's drawn up anyways, he rolled out left, you know, kind of stood there for a second. And he had like, you know, the whole backside of the line, and the backs were out there starting to block for him. But a couple of them leaked out into the, you know, downfield. And then, you know, I mean, everything appeared that he was going to pass it, and then boom, he takes off. Right. So now that, you know, in my definition, it would be a draw play. Right. I mean, it's not what we think of today as a draw play because this is 1939. And then modern tee with a quarterback under center and then dropping, you know, kind of straight back, you know, backpedaling or, you know, turning and kind of carioca, but, you know, peddling back that first showed up in 1940, you know, a year later. So anyways, you know, it's one of those things where there's a lot of football references that say that that the draw play that we now think of, you know, tee quarterback, you know, backing out and then giving it to a fullback or a halfback. A lot of people say that that was, you know, one of the Chicago Bears plays. But it's not in the 1946 Chicago Bears playbook that, you know, Hallis and Shaughnessy and those guys wrote. So, you know, so then I'm going, OK, well, I don't believe it then. Right. Because they've got 80 plays there. So the first place that I saw the term draw play in newspapers anyway came in the 1950 Rose, not Rose Bowl, but Cotton Bowl. And so that was a game with, you know, two games or two teams you wouldn't expect to be in the Cotton Bowl today necessarily. But TCU, which, OK, you can believe TCU is in the Cotton Bowl, then Carnegie Tech. So, it's not a team that is going to show up in the cotton today. But you know, TCU had three top 10 NFL, you know, first-round picks the next year. One of them was an All-American quarterback, Davey O 'Brien, you know, who was a stud. I'm sorry, I'm messing that up. They had Tobin Roat, and Rice beat UNC. I'm mixing up which story I'm talking about. So Tobin Roat was a quarterback, and he, you know, operated out of the dropback tee. And then, you know, the other thing. So it was a low-scoring game, and he ends up, you know, basically, they won the game as a result of, you know, running a draw play, you know, and a draw play the way that we think of it today. But still, at the time, they didn't call it a draw play, or at least if they called it a draw play on the field or in practice, that didn't get communicated out to the wider world. Because the first time I found the term draw play in the newspapers, you know, came a few years later. And so it was a guy by the name was Dick Cullen, who was a Minneapolis sports writer. And he must have been a guy who was, well, I know for sure he was because I've read enough of the stuff. He was one of these sports writers who kind of got into the play, and the terminology is more of a technical sort of guy, you know, so if you think now about the like the color analysts that are on TV or radio, he was like, maybe a little bit more of a football expert who could provide that kind of, you know, input into the game. And because he's, you know, so draw play, you know, that shows up in his writing, you know, not too long, you know, after the Cotton Bowl. And then he's also, ironically, the first guy to use the term dropback quarterback, which isn't, you know, T formation play or T formation term, but that didn't show up until 1964. So it was, yep. You know, so the T was there in 1940, the modern T. And it's 24 years later before it shows up in print. Wow. And then, two years later, he's the first guy to use the term skill positions. So, you know, it's just one of those things. It's kind of cool that, you know, I started noticing, like, you know, when I wrote, I wrote a book called Hut Hut Hike about the origins of football terminology, and so he kept showing up, and it's like, OK, well, this guy, you know, I mean, he obviously is one of those guys who kind of liked that side of the game and wanted to educate his, his, uh, his audience, you know, his readers on what was happening and what was different about the game today than it had been the previous year.

Darin Hayes
OK. Well, I'm glad you mentioned Hutt Hutt Hike. Cause I was going to go right into that a little bit. With your Hutt Hutt Hike, uh, storytelling and your research on there, where, what does the draw play, where, where does the draw come from? Is it from drawing the defenders in to fool them?

Timothy Brown
You know, sometimes it's hard to tell that's my assumption. OK, it's that you're drawing, you know, you're drawing them into your trap.

Darin Hayes
OK.

Timothy Brown
Yeah. And that's even another like a trap, you know, that comes from originally that was it was called a mousetrap. You know, that you were the trap lady on somebody and then and, you know, hitting them from the side. But it was it was called a mousetrap, not a trap. And then they just shortened it because it took too long to see the mousetrap.

Darin Hayes
Oh, thank, thank God that our football forefathers were simple people like us and the naming, you know, you can like to dropback quarterback. OK. We can figure out where that came from. Uh, but yeah, but some of those things, like the trap play and the draw play, were our explanation. So, thank you for that. So.

Timothy Brown
Now, so sometimes, it's just fun. For example, dropback quarterback is one of those where you'd think, well, what did they call it in those 24 years? Like if you were teaching somebody, here's what I want you to do. I want you to backpedal. And a lot of times, they were just, you know, straight backpedaling back then. You know, so how did coaches describe it? Yeah, you know, I don't have. I've only got a handful of playbooks from the old days. Most of all, I'm dealing with newspaper articles to try to figure it out.

Darin Hayes
But think about that the first time a player's told to do that. You know, football is a game of moving forward. You know, when you're on offense, you're, you're, you're trying to go forward. And now you're, you have a coach telling you to retreat a little bit, to give up ground, uh, to make something happen. So that had to be kind of a wide, wide, eyes wide open type of situation.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, well, you mentioned the pass blocking. So, you know, the whole, you know, cup blocking, you know, that was, you know, you had to teach somebody to give ground, you know, and before that, what they used to do a lot of times is, you know, the center and tackles would meet the, you know, meet their guys, you know, straight up, and the guards would if they were covered, but if they weren't covered, you know, then they'd loop back and pick up the ends, you know, coming off the edges. And yeah, you can see the plate drawings from back then. And I mean, it's very clear what they're doing. But you just don't see that anymore. You know, that's just not, you know, the cup was a really interesting innovation because it was basically zone blocking, only you're doing it passively, you know, so it was really a, you know, kind of a revolutionary way to think about, you know, blocking.

Darin Hayes
Until the defense of coordinators was countered with stunts and all kinds of craziness.

Timothy Brown
But actually, it was because of the stunts that they started doing it, you know, because they were stunting and like what we now call blitzing, they called Red Dog back then, you know, they'd send somebody, you know. And, you know, for so long, it was just, you know, seven guys on the line of scrimmage, and they just come at you. So you had the man who was over you. But then once they started dropping backers, then they start, you know, they start doing twists, and they start, you know, there are all kinds of things that happened, but really, pass blocking is zone blocking, you know, but you're doing it passively. Whereas, you know, zone blocking on the run, you know, you're picking up an area, it's area blocking, you know, you're, and then there's more to it than that. But nevertheless, I mean, so it's really, I don't know, it's just one of those things that it's just this kind of a revolutionary way of thinking about it. And so sometimes, sometimes it's like it happens right away. Somebody devises a new scheme, and other times, they, you know, football, just took baby steps to get there, but it's fun. You know, to me, that's the fun thing: the whole evolution of the game and how it got from here to there.

Darin Hayes
And, as you said at the very beginning, it's sort of a cyclical thing. So you've seen, you know, in the last ten years, uh, elements of the single wing coming back with, uh, you know, what they're, you're calling the, um, uh, what are the pros calling it out the wildcat offenses that are coming out, which is really single wing concepts to it.

Timothy Brown
You know, I've seen a number of plays in the US field games. You know, they're running, and they're running the modern T, a straight T in the backfield. So it's just a change-up its way to, you know, challenge the, you know,

Darin Hayes
You sit there and think about some of these younger defensive coordinators and players. You know, they've never seen anything like the single wing. So it's a whole new offense to them and they got to figure out how to defend it. So I'm sure there are coaches going back through some old books and film and trying to figure out, hey, how'd they do this in the 1940s?

Timothy Brown
Yeah. And part of it is just, you know, so the game has gotten to be so much of a speed, speed game, spread them out the game, that, you know, you want to come at me with, you know, 11 men in the box, then that changes, you know, the kind of people I need on the defense, right? So, you know, I mean, it's just total, you know,

Darin Hayes
That even I'll skip them.

Timothy Brown
It's a lot of fun stuff.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, definitely. Well, Tim, since we talked about it a couple of times, so what do we give the opportunity to help people get their hands on a copy of Hike? Because it's really an interesting book.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, thank you. So, you know, it's out on Amazon. You know, my three books will be on Amazon soon. My fourth one will be on Amazon, but Yeah, so just you know, look for me, look at my name or look up Hut Hut Hike or how football became a football, and You know, If you can find my name, then all three of them are gonna be available, and worst case go to go to football archaeology calm, and you know that I've got you to know, the books list in different places on the site.

Darin Hayes
OK, excellent. Well, Tim, we really appreciate you bringing back this concept of the draw play, explaining it to us a little bit, telling us some of the history and the origins of it. And we'd love to talk to you again next week about another early football concept.

Timothy Brown
Very good. I look forward to it. Thanks.

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For decades, player numbers on football helmets were as iconic as the sport itself. However, their use has steadily declined in recent years. Let's delve into the history of this practice and the few remaining teams that cling to it.

Football Archaeology's Timothy Brown joins us in telling the history of the headgear emblem and its importance in football history. Tim's original Tidbit article with great images can be found at The Rise and Fall of Helmet Numbers.

You Can also find the podcast version of the discussion

In the early days of football, jerseys did not have numbers on them. Numbers were introduced to help fans and media identify players on the field. In the 1950s, with the invention of television, conferences required teams to put numbers on jerseys or helmets to better identify viewers. Since then, helmet numbers have become less important because TV screens have increased, and logos have become more popular.

From Humble Beginnings to Widespread Adoptio

While seemingly a simple design element, helmet numbers in American football play a surprisingly multifaceted role. From aiding player identification to fostering team unity and even impacting strategy, these numerals hold significance beyond mere decoration.

Helmet numbers' most basic function is clearly identifying players on the field. With multiple players wearing similar uniforms, these numbers allow coaches, referees, and spectators to distinguish between teammates and opponents. This is crucial for officiating calls, play recognition, and overall game flow.

Love the helmet designs and evolution wait till you check out the College Football helmet history of schools.

The early days of football helmets offered little protection, let alone space for numbers. As helmets evolved in the 1930s and 40s, teams experimented with various methods of putting numbers on the outside. By the 1950s, displaying player numbers on helmets' backs became common. It provided better visibility for referees and fans, aiding in player identification.

The Rise and Fall of a Tradition

Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, player numbers on helmets remained a staple. However, several factors contributed to their decline.

In conclusion, helmet numbers in American football transcend mere decoration. They serve vital functions in player identification, fostering team spirit, and even influencing strategic decisions. As the game continues to evolve, the role of helmet numbers might expand further, offering new avenues for player expression and strategic innovation.

Here is the transcription of our conversation on helmet numbers:

Darin Hayes
Welcome once again to the Pigpen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to Tuesday. It's footballarchaeology.com's Timothy P. Brown day, and Tim has another one of his great tidbits. He was going to reveal some interesting history that maybe we don't remember or just have been forgotten. Tim, Welcome back to The Pigpen.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, thanks, Darin. This is a story about when somebody's number was up, right?

Darin Hayes
And somebody's number is up indeed. And up at the highest point, it can be worn, I would guess, because you titled this article a few not too long ago, The Rise and Fall of the Helmet Numbers, which is an interesting piece of history. So yeah, would you tell us a little bit about that story?

Timothy Brown
Yeah. So we've talked about this, you know, in the past about the elements of football that were there for the fan, as opposed to the players on the field or the coaches. And so the numbers that are on the backs and then later on fronts of jerseys were there for the fans, not because the players or the coaches wanted them, they were opposed to them in many cases. Still, they were for fans in the stands to figure out who is who and be able to attract, you know, who was Red Grange or whomever, right? So, similar changes were made when they were for the fans in the stands. Later, when the TV came along, they, you know, made one of the changes to use white jerseys for the road team in football, and then the home team would wear dark jerseys. Now, that wasn't so much for the players in the stand or the fans and the stands because they could tell a red jersey from a blue jersey. But they couldn't tell the difference on black and white television and small screens of the day. So that was the rationale for going to the road white and home dark jerseys. The other thing that happened at about that same time was that the NFL passed the Road Jersey rule in 1954; the NCAA didn't adopt it until 1983, after everybody did it. Really, yeah, that's just one of those, you know, just like they didn't, they didn't require face masks till 1993 or something like that. It was just one of those things everybody did, so they didn't need a rule until they finally put it in. But back in the mid-50s, from 53 to 54, the National Photographers Association represented photographers, and presumably, they were involved with TV cameramen and you folks like that. They requested schools and then conferences. They wanted them to put more numbers on uniforms to make it easier to identify who was who. So, you know, anybody who's actually watching this on YouTube, my background has a team from a 1910 era playing, and nobody's wearing jerseys or no one's wearing numbers, so it's hard to tell who's who. But even in the early 50s, you know, depending on how somebody is standing or getting tackled, you might not see the front or back of their jerseys well enough to see their numbers. And so they said, can you put more numbers on the jerseys and so or at least on uniforms? So in 1950, in 1955, Georgia Tech was the first team I identified with TV numbers on their uniform. What they did was they put numbers on the shoulder pads. On both shoulder pads, they've got numbers. A week later, West Virginia opened its season, and the team had numbers on its helmets. And so other teams put numbers on sleeves. But, you know, basically, what happened is, almost every conference required teams to put numbers, ideally on their helmets, but they would grandfather you, if you have had numbers on your shoulder pads or your sleeves, then you wouldn't have to put them on, on your helmet. And so from, you know, say 56 is when the conferences started implementing those rules from 56 till like the mid-sixties, if you look at photographs from those years, almost everybody has numbers, the side of their helmets, college teams and some of the proteins too, you, know that the old, uh, San Diego Chargers, AFL at the time, but they've got numbers and the lightning bolt on their helmets. So that, you know, that kind of thing was, was not an, you know, was fairly common.

Darin Hayes
It was shocking with that lightning bolt.

Timothy Brown
Ah, yes. Yes. That was pretty good. Only two dads could appreciate that joke. Yes, so I got a charge out of it. But so anyways, everybody starts putting these numbers on and but at this, you know, in the late 40s, you know, he had the Los Angeles Rams, you know, they painted the horns on their helmets, and so there was a slow shift to logos as you know rather than numbers and the helmets and so if you look at you, look college yearbooks or you know whatever during the 1960s, you start seeing more and more teams putting logos on their helmets. Another thing that happened in that area was that Wisconsin did it; I don't know what Vanderbilt did, but there are a couple of others. But in the 1960 time frame, several teams had logos, or they had numbers on the sides of their helmets, and then they would have the letter of the school, like Wisconsin W, Vanderbilt, had a V, seat on the front of the helmet, which was dumb looking, you know, it's a terrible look. You know? I mean, some people think it is cool, but I just think, yeah, kind of pig ugly. So, for a long time, it was like, why did they put these things on the front of their helmet? Well, because they had numbers on the sides. Right? Anyway, by the '60s, more and more teams were switching over to logos. And so a few, Alabama, put the numbers on the year before Bear got there. But then they've kept them all along. So for them, that's kind of a, you see that color, and you see the numbers on the side of the helmet, it's like, well, that's Bama,

Darin Hayes
right?

Timothy Brown
So it shouldn't be identifiable because they're more or less, you know, at least one of the few that does it, then it's tied to them. So anyway, it was kind of an interesting deal. Yeah.

Darin Hayes
Go ahead. If you had another point. Yeah,

Timothy Brown
I was just going to say, you know, that it wasn't logos, but I also think TV screens got bigger, so fans at home could see numbers better on slightly bigger screens. And so they just kind of like, we just don't need that anymore.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, now we can count nose hairs to identify the players.

Timothy Brown
Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, have you ever thought about this? And I don't know why I think about this, but you know, especially in what seems like the 1970s, A lot of the college and pros teams had probably an inch and a half or one-inch high number on the back of their helmets. If they had a stripe down the middle, it'd be a number you; the number one digit would be on each side of the stripe. The only thing I can think of is maybe to identify the player if their helmets are on a sideline. Hey, I'm 22. I'll grab my helmet because it doesn't help anything for TV or during the game or anything like that. But that's the only thing I can think of. Do you have any other thoughts on that?

Timothy Brown
Well, sometimes there are shots from, and if there's a pile or even like in a huddle situation, you would see the numbers at the back of their helmet. So, yeah, it's not uncommon. You know the Giants, you wouldn't have the number on the front of their helmets. But it is the same situation as you described on either side of the middle or the center stripe. But, and I meant to say this early on, but originally, there were numbers, like in the 30s, see this fairly often, see numbers on people's helmets, on the back, but they don't correspond to their jersey number. So, they appear to just have been like an inventory number that the equipment manager would paint down there so that he'd make sure that you got 27 back from, you know, whoever wore that helmet. But then it also, I'm sure, part of the rationale is that it helps people identify their helmets, but I mean, I always knew which helmet was mine. And I think everybody else did. There's just something about whatever the scars were or your face mask. You know you just,

Darin Hayes
You kind of recognize your nasty mouthpiece stuck in it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I don't want to pick up his helmet. I want that. Yeah. Very, very interesting. Again, you know another little aspect of football that we sometimes overlook, and we see Alabama play multiple times yearly. It's, you know, they're a popular draw to have on our televisions, but you never really think about, you know, why those numbers are on,. They did it, and they're cool because it is cool watching TV, and most of the time we had that sideline view And to know who number 17 is, you know, he's like quarterback especially the Alabama I think what they were like swapping quarterbacks a couple of years ago like one series would be one quarterback I think when Jalen hurts was there they did that, ya know and Uh, uh, Tua got hurt. They were bringing them in and out, you know, from each other. So, at least you knew who was taking the snap. Yeah.

Timothy Brown
And Bryant, when he was coaching, he was one of the guys; there weren't many teams that would do this, but if they played, say, Mississippi State, because their helmets at the time were they also had a maroon helmet. But when they played Mississippi State, Alabama would wear white helmets with the numbers on the side because he wanted the differentiation, especially for, you know, pass receivers. So I mean the original reason for painting helmets was to be able to identify I pass the receivers downfield. I mean, that happened in 1906, but. So, you know, back in the day, you'd see helmets were painted like the back of the helmet would be one color, the front of the helmet would be another. And it would only be the eligible receivers who had that. So anyway, there's some history behind Alabama's helmets, even if they look kind of plain. I mean, they've done, you know, they have done a little bit of their own thing.

Darin Hayes
They look quite lively compared to Penn State's helmets. But they're iconic—both helmets are iconic—and you can't picture that team wearing something else, you with any colors or logos on it. So yeah, very interesting.

Timothy Brown
I'm going to challenge Penn State. I'm going to tell them I'll donate half a billion dollars to them if they put logos on their helmets, and we'll see what they say.

Darin Hayes
Oh, I'm sure you'd put your football archaeology .com emblem on there if you want to. You donated that much to him, I am sure.

Timothy Brown
But I don't think you have to worry.

Darin Hayes
about that.

Timothy Brown
It just is it's a pittance.

Darin Hayes
Very interesting, Tim. I appreciate you sharing these little pieces of football history, these little nuggets, or tidbits, as you call them. And you have these on your website. You have almost a thousand of them, I believe you said. Maybe you could tell the listeners how they can share and take in some of this football history.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, just go to the website, football archaeology.com, and or Google it, and you'll find you find it. You can subscribe. You just submit your email. You subscribe for free. That gives you access to about a third of the content. Paid the subscription is five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year, and then that gives you access to everything that I publish, and I'll send you a copy of, you know, One of my books, and you get access to all the car archives and all that kind of stuff So, you're not just kind to the that's the deal. Whenever I publish a new story, I publish it or post it on threads and Twitter. So, if that works for you, then follow me on those.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, folks, it's a great deal. Like Tim said, if you subscribe, you even get a copy of one of his books, which is an excellent read to get some more information. So I highly recommend it, and I recommend you check with us each Tuesday because we get the benefit of having this gentleman join us to talk about some interesting football history. So Tim, we thank you for that, and we will talk to you again next Tuesday.

Timothy Brown
I thank you, sir. I look forward to it

-Frequently Asked Questions

-Who was the first player to wear a football helmet? We have your answer in our in-depth study ofthe first to wear a helmet.

-Why do some teams like Michigan and Delaware look so odd and similar? It's really uncanny isn't it that the Wolverines and Blue Hens look the same, check this out for a reason when helmets had wings.

-What do stickers on college football helmets mean? Some of them look really crazy but there is some goos reason for the extra adornments and we have the scoop Why all the stickers on some football helmets?.

---

Imagine getting all of your equipment at the beginning of the long football season. Shoulder pads, pants and pads, and of course a helmet. You look and the head piece looks a bit funny... it has no chinstrap. This is how it was in one era of football, and FootballArchaeology.com's Timothy Brown explains.

From Tim's original TidBit article: Football Helmets Without Chin Straps .

Timothy Brown, who runs the website footballarchaeology.org. The two discuss how early football helmets did not have chin straps. Instead, they had laces in the back to tighten around the noggin. These devices were not very effective in keeping the helmet on the player's head.

A company called Goldsmith, which was a major sporting goods manufacturer at the time, tried to fix this problem by creating a helmet with an adjustable back. However, this design did not work well and was soon abandoned.

In the 1970s, helmets with inflatable bladders were introduced. These helmets were more effective in conforming to the player's head, but they were still not as safe as today's helmets with chin straps.

The video concludes by mentioning that Timothy Brown's website, footballarchaeology.com, has more information about the history of football equipment.

-Full Transcript of the Episode on Helmets Without Chinstraps

Darin Hayes:
Welcome to Tuesday. Timothy P. Brown of FootballArchaeology.com is here to tell us a little bit about one of his recent tidbits. Uh, Tim, welcome back to the pig pen.

Timothy Brown:
Darin, thank you. Oh, it was a pleasure to be here and join you as we talk about old stuff, old football stuff.

Darin Hayes:
Yeah, most definitely, you had a recent tidbit that really caught my eye when it came out. I actually reread it a few days ago because it's just so fascinating. It's called the football helmet without chin straps, And it's, you know, something kind of peculiar that when we think of the football helmet, the chin straps are almost like an automatic part Of it in our day and age, and so it's very interesting what you wrote about, and I'd love to hear about it here in the podcast.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah. Well, so, you know, it's one of those funny things. Yeah, sometimes I've wondered, you know, how the name came about, like chin strap? I mean, now, chin straps are covering the chin, right? And then they connect up to the helmet with the two points on either side, but back, you know, that's really a post-1940 kind of look. Before that, that headgear, the wrestling-type headgear, and then, after that, you know, what we think of as leather helmets. For a long time, the strap kind of went from the ears and then looped under the jaw, not over the chin. Right? So, but I think they, I think, I think chin straps originated, I believe, on military helmets, and you know, so a lot of times they had them in military hats. So a lot of times they had those little straps, like kind of on the chin, a little bit below the mouth, that kind of thing. That's probably where that where the term came from. But anyway, so, you know, they had those original straps that were kind of elastic or cloth, they weren't, and they could tighten them. But, you know, they certainly weren't as good about, you know, keeping the helmet on the head as today's, you know, two or four-point, you know, chin straps do. Plus, the helmets are just tighter. So, you know, if you've got a leather helmet, you know, it can only conform to the head so much, right? I mean, if it's a little bit bigger, you've got it, you know, just nobody's had it shaped the same way, or no two people's are shaped the same way. So, you know, there's probably some little extra space here, little extra space there, in any given leather helmet. And so, you know, they used to come off. And so, so Goldsmith was, which was, you know, one of the original manufacturers of baseballs. They started back in 1875, and they were a big sporting goods manufacturer, at least till 1940. That's the last catalog I have of theirs. So, I'm not sure exactly how much longer they lasted. But so Goldsmith was trying to fix this problem. How do we keep helmets on? Because these little chin straps don't always work. So what they did was they got rid of the chin strap, which seems kind of dumb. They could have kept him, but they tried to make the size of the helmet adjustable. So they did that by putting it together like a drawstring system at the back of the helmet. And if you think about it, like, you know, we've all seen movies of like a Victorian woman who's getting her corset, you know, adjusted where they're pulling those straps and they're, you know, making her stomach, you know, look or make it look like she's got an 18-inch waist, you know, that kind of thing. So I mean, they basically had a system like that, or at least functionally, that was what it was supposed to do supposed to tighten the base of the helmet around the head. And so, but, you know, the fact of the matter is, it didn't work very well.

Darin Hayes:
You probably needed help getting your helmet on and off every time, I would assume.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, you know, I hadn't even thought about that. Yeah, it could be that. Yeah, you had to, you know, so it's what's funny that you mentioned that it's like, you know, back at that time, players, the front of their football pants, also had those like leather patches, the thighs and well, probably typically twice on the thighs on each thigh. They basically had drawstrings to tighten the thigh or tighten the pants so that they didn't move all around, and then they'd get protected by the thigh pads or the pants. So, you know, they didn't have really good elastic back then. So it's a matter of, you know, pulling laces of one form or another to try to get things to fit. So, you know, somehow, you know, they tried to do that with the helmet. But, you know, it was they were gone from the catalogs in about a year or two. So it tells me the thing just didn't work. The concept made sense. And in fact, you know, in the 70s, when people started, like, I think it was, I believe it was right now that did it first, but you know, they had the bladder helmets, where you pump air into it, and it conforms to your head, whatever the shape of it may be, you know, so they were trying to do that same thing. They just didn't have the means to do it at the time. And so, you know, good idea, bad execution. And so then that just disappeared. But I, you know, I still haven't figured out why you would get rid of the chin strap. So, even if you have this other cool thing going on, why get rid of the chin strap? Because I've never read anything about people being bothered by it, you know, like the nose guards. Yeah, that was big, you know, everybody, nobody liked wearing the nose guard because they had difficulty breathing and that kind of stuff. But chin strap, you know,

Darin Hayes:
Yeah, I mean, it's a natural place to secure because you sort of got that hook shape under your chin. You know, it's a good anchor point to tie it down to your head and get a little tension on there. That's that's weird. Thank you.

Timothy Brown:
So sometimes, you know, some of the stories, I mean, again, I like the stories where, you know, as football evolved, there were all these dead-end paths, right? Just like in, you know, animal species, right? And, you know, so for some of them, the thinking behind the path made sense; they just didn't have the tools, technology, or the right materials to make it happen at the time.

Darin Hayes:
Yeah, you, uh, very, very interesting story, but just you describing the back of that helmet and the core whole corset idea, it took me back to some time playing like a junior high ball, you know, we got sort of leftover pants and one year I had drawstring pants for football where you had to tie them up. Like you tie your shoe. What a pain in the ass that was every, every day for practice for game day. It just, especially when you're like, you know, 11, 12 years old, you know, you don't want to take your time to snap pants even, let alone, you know, sit on time and take them up and, and if you didn't tighten them up, then you had, you know, your, your jock and everything else was, you know, flopping, falling all over the place. And it was just a bad, bad design. Whoever designed those pants. I didn't enjoy those.

Timothy Brown:
Yeah, well, and again, it's one of those things that, depending on your age, you may not have as much experience with. But, you know, back in the day, there were a lot of people on the football field with, you know, white athletic tape wrapped around their thighs or around their knees to keep things in place. Right. And so I, you know, I've spotted that kind of thing going on back to the 20s and 30s. So people, you know, even back then, they were tapping the same problem.

Darin Hayes:
Oh, I didn't. I never thought about that. Yeah, I guess I guess you wouldn't be able to do it, too. Then I'm always sitting, sort of thinking like athletic tape and duct tape. You know, the fabric tape is more of a modern invention, but I guess they would have had that back then.

Timothy Brown:
And they had, if you look at the old catalogs, I can't tell you it was the exact same kind of tape, but they had athletic tape and illustrations like Walter Camp, the football guides, they had illustrations of how to tape an ankle, that kind of stuff going back pretty far.

Darin Hayes:
So, yeah, very interesting. Thank God that they have the chin straps, but even with chin straps, and I don't know about you, but when I played early on, I don't even think I saw a four-point chin strap until maybe I was in high school or something, I think it was sort of a, you know, the late seventies type innovation, I think, or at least became popular at the levels I played at then. But you see so many people with the four-point head strap chin straps, and they still come, their helmets still come flying off, especially the NFL level and big-time big-time college; it's unbelievable that those can come off. Cause once you have those helmets on, if they're done rubbery, I mean, it's hard to unsnap them when you do want to take it off, let alone have it come flying off in the middle of the game.

Timothy Brown:
I hate to tell you this, but some of those guys are stronger than you and your buddies were.

Darin Hayes:
I realize I'm still a

Timothy Brown:
has a little bit more force. Yes.

Darin Hayes:
Still, that's a lot of stuff to pop a helmet on us. It's amazing, Tim. That is a great story and a great piece of football history that we, you know, seldom get to appreciate something like that and what the sort of forefathers of football had to go through to do that, and you talk a lot about this kind of items on your website football archaeology calm and want you to tell people a little bit about it and how they can enjoy footballarchaeology.com

Timothy Brown:
So it's footballarchaeology.com. It's a sub-stack website. So, if you're familiar with sub-stack, you can find me there. I also post on Twitter and on threads, but the site itself is a subscription site. If you subscribe for free, you get access now to about a third of the stuff, and with paid subscriptions, which are basically five bucks a month or $50 a year, you have full access to everything, including the archives. So, if that's what you're into, then subscribe away.

Darin Hayes:
Well, excellent job as always, Tim, and if folks, make sure you take advantage of what Tim's saying because there is really a plethora of information on football history. We get to talk a little bit about it, you know, each week, but Tim has so much more in there. I think, what did you say? Do you have over a thousand articles in there right now?

Timothy Brown:
Not quite a thousand, but it's getting close.

Darin Hayes:
Yeah, wow. That's uh, you know, four digits there, guys. That's, uh, that's some good stuff to look at football history from different angles. So Tim, we really appreciate you coming on, and we would love to talk to you about more great football history next week. Thank you

Timothy Brown:
Pretty good; look forward to it. Thanks, Darin.

-Frequently Asked Questions

-Who was the first player to wear a football helmet? We have your answer in our in-depth study ofthe first to wear a helmet.

-What is the history of each college team and their helmet designs? Check out many of them with our series College Football helmet history of schools.

-How come some teams have player numbers on their helmets? We asked this question too and had a college football expert historian help divulge helmet numbers history.

-Why do some teams like Michigan and Delaware look so odd and similar? It's really uncanny isn't it that the Wolverines and Blue Hens look the same, check this out for a reason when helmets had wings.

-What do stickers on college football helmets mean? Some of them look really crazy but there is some goos reason for the extra adornments and we have the scoop Why all the stickers on some football helmets?.

---

We travel back almost 120 years and revel in a phenomenal play that changed the course of history in the gridiron realm.

Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology joins us to tell the saga of the 1905 Michigan Wolverines and Michigan's Goal Line Punt Return of 1905.

Michigan's Goal Line Punt Return of 1905

The 1905 Chicago Maroons and Michigan Wolverines clashed marking a turning point in college football history. This epic matchup, also known as the "First Greatest Game of the Century," held immense significance for both teams and the sport as a whole. Michigan's Point'A'Minute teams had a rather lengthy unbeaten streak and the U of Chicago wanted to break it.

The scoreless affair came down to the final minute when the Wolverine punter could not get a kick off nor escape the rush and a safety won the game for the Maroons.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on the Michigan Goal Line Punt Return

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal for positive football history. Welcome to another football archaeology day with Timothy Brown on that website. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, thank you, Darin. Look forward to chatting. And I was going to say this subject is kind of about my back-to-the-future game.

So that's a kind of fits in really well with your, the broader sports history network that you are a part of. But this is definitely my back to the future game. Well, that that's a great way to look at it.

I'm going to try to hold that line. And as you talk here, the title of your recent tidbit is Michigan's goal line punt return of 1905, the era that I love of football. For some reason, I'm just enamored with the early years of the 20th century and the ball game that was played.

So I can't wait to hear what you have to say about this. Yeah. So, you know, if any listeners aren't as aware, Pigskin Dispatch is part of the Sports History Network.

And, you know, Arnie runs that, and one of his, you know, kind of themes of the things that he uses, you know, consistently when he does his own podcast is he says, okay, get hop in the DeLorean and let's go back in time. Right. And so, you know, this was asked recently in another context, but it's like, if you could go back and watch one football game in history, what would that game be? And so I actually named two.

I said, if it was NFL, I'd go to the ice bowl, but if it's college or just general football, I would go back to the Chicago, Michigan game of 1905. And it's just like, you know, you just can't even imagine how big a game this was, you know? So it's, it is literally the last weekend of college football when the whole system is under attack because of the violence in the game and the number of deaths. And there's not going to be a whole; there's going to be a revolution before the 1906 season.

But so this is still, it's the last of the old guard. And you've got two teams entering the game, Michigan, who has been running roughshod over everybody, including Chicago for the most part, you know, in the most recent years, you know, Michigan was in the first Rose Bowl in 1902. They got their point-a-minute offense on their field in Yost, and leading into the game with Chicago, Michigan had outscored their opponents, 495 to zero, 495 to zero, you know, reasonably dominant, right? Now, Chicago was nowhere near as impressive. They had only outscored their opponents 269 to five.

I mean, they'd given up; they'd given up a touchdown, right? I mean, so they couldn't have been that impressive. Um, so anyway, it's just one of these things where it's just like, you know, these two just dominant teams. And I think that was probably the first time, you know, maybe some of the earlier Michigan teams where people were like this game, but for sure, this is the first game where it's like, this is a game that's better than any game being played that was played in the East all year long, right? Michigan had some great teams, and they were national champs, but this is the first game where the Midwest has the two best teams in the country.

And I, you know, nobody would have doubted that at that point. So it's a huge game, huge game. And just to add onto that, you probably have two of the biggest innovators of the game of football in history, but, you know, fielding HOs, as you said, and Amos Alonzo Stagg for Chicago, they don't get any bigger than that for college coaches.

Yeah. And so, and so, you know, they're playing in Chicago because that's where the big stadium is and that's where the big crowds can be, you know, and so they, you know, they get more, the gates bigger in Chicago. And so it's zero, zero in the fourth quarter, you know, it's a back-and-forth type of game, obviously, if it's zero, zero, and Walter Eckersall is the quarterback of Chicago.

He's also their punter and their drop kicker. So, midway through the fourth quarter, he's punting from the 55-yard line. Cause they still had a 55-yard line there.

Then he boots the ball, and it lands somewhere close to the end of the goal line. Michigan had two players back. One of them was a guy named Denny Clark.

He fields the ball on the two-yard line and apparently, you know, took a step back. And as he steps back, a guy named Mark Caitlin hits him. The hit carries over the goal line into the end.

Well, it wasn't the goal-end zone yet, but you know, it was past the goal line for safety. And so, you know, at that time, football did not have forward progress. So if you got hit on the one-yard line and carried into the, into the, you know, behind the goal into touch, you know, behind the goal line, then you, you know, if you got down there, there was safety.

And so Chicago goes ahead to nothing, and then fundamentally, nothing else happens the rest of the game. And Chicago wins two to nothing. And they're the national champs because of that play.

And two points were scored against Michigan for the season, out of safety. And so, you know, one of the things that happened in 1906 was that the football rules initiated forward progress.

So, that play would not have counted as a safety in 1906, but it did in 1905. So it's just one of these, you know, like great moments in college football. So, you know, it just would be really fun.

And unfortunately, I think Denny Clark was kind of a troubled guy his whole life, you know, even before any of this happened. But he, you know, he just was so distraught. He may not have even gone back to Ann Arbor with the team.

I'm not sure about that. But he literally he transferred, you know, he couldn't stand being there. He transfers to MIT graduates, you know, he's a smart guy.

And then, but he never really got over it. He ended up committing suicide in 1932. But, you know, it was just one of those things where, you know, forgetting about the Danny Clark or Denny Clark issue, you know, just the atmosphere at that game just had to be crazy.

You know, it's just, you know, just the best football that was being played in the country, and for it to end the way that it ended was just something else, you know. That was a humongous rivalry back then because the Chicago Maroons were part of the Western Conference Center that was called the Big Ten. But they were part of that.

Ohio State really wasn't anything to call home about it as a football program yet. And that was that was Michigan's big rival. And the other thing about that was there was a guy, and I'm going to leave his first name blank, but I think his last name is Elbels or Ebels.

Anyways, on the way back. No, no, it was a year or two before that. On the way back from a game when Michigan beat Chicago, a guy who was a Michigan student is taking the train back, and he writes this song that is now, you know, the victors.

So Michigan's fight song was written in response to a victory over Chicago. So that kind of gives you a little bit of a sense of, you know, Chicago's stature and the nature of that rivalry. And even like, you know, on Wisconsin, there's a line in on Wisconsin that now says, take the ball clear down the field, boys.

You know, we're going to win this game. But it used to take the ball clear around Chicago. We're going to win this game or along those lines.

So Chicago was a big deal for Wisconsin, too. You know, so they were a, you know, they're a big deal back then. Yeah, most definitely.

Well, that is a great story. And I'm glad you shared it with us today and just brings back, you know, get your blood boiling a little bit to watch some live football. And I can see why it would be one of your wishes with Arnie to go back and watch that game.

Did he ever show you his DeLorean when you were on with him? I don't think, you know, so when he and I did one or two podcasts, we just did it by telephone. So I didn't; I wouldn't have seen a visual. I think I was; I was probably one of his early Zoom video calls.

And he decided to show me the DeLorean as he was telling me. And here it was a little matchbox car. I was a little bit underwhelmed.

And I was a little bit disappointed. And it's like a, there wasn't a buzz, you know, he's all a smoke and yeah. Yeah.

Don't look at the DeLorean behind the curtain. Tim, Tim, that is a great piece of football history. And you share for pieces of football history a lot on your website.

And maybe you could tell the folks where to go into to look at some of your stuff. Sure. You know, the site is footballarchaeology.com. It's a Substack site.

So you can, you know, just go to footballarchaeology.com and subscribe. You know, I'm also, you know, I basically post everything on Twitter and on threads, and then, you know, you can also use the Substack app if you just want to follow as opposed to subscribe. So anyway, those are the kinds of options, or you can just go out to the site whenever you want.

And there's an archive now with about a thousand different, you know, articles out there. So have at it. All right, Tim, we thank you again for sharing with us and, you know, telling that great story.

Like I said, the hairs are still on the back of my neck. I have to go back and comb them after we're done here. But we thank you for that.

I'm going to hit the cold shower, and we will talk to you again next week. Hey, very good. Thanks.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.