Football Archaeology Visits With Pigskin Dispatch
We always love to hear a good gridiron tale or two, and it is such an honor to have the well-known author and Historian Timothy P. Brown join us weekly to tell us about different aspects of football history.
Timothy Brown's FootballArchaeology.com is a website dedicated to preserving pigskin history. digs into gridiron history to examine how football’s evolution shapes today's game. The site has a variety of articles, history of football word origins, and Daily Tidbits, which have a daily football factoid that shares some quite exciting items and aspects of the gridiron in a short read. They preserve football history in a very unique way. Visit the site at Today's Tidbits.
Tim Brown, one of the foremost experts on early college and pro football, is the host and founder of FootballArchaeology.com. Tim's love of the gridiron's past goes beyond just the website. Mr Brown, to date, is the author of three books on football history, appears on various football history podcasts, and has been quoted in articles by The Athletic, The Chicago Tribune, and other publications. He guest authors articles on UniWatch, and his research on the 1920s West Point Cavalry Detachment teams contributed to All American: The Power of Sports, currently on display at the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C.
His books include Fields of Friendly Strife, How Football Became Football: 150 Years of the Game's Evolution, and Hut! Hut! Hike! A History of Football Terminology explores the history of football’s words and expressions and how they became connected to the game.
Timothy Brown's FootballArchaeology.com is a website dedicated to preserving pigskin history. digs into gridiron history to examine how football’s evolution shapes today's game. The site has a variety of articles, history of football word origins, and Daily Tidbits, which have a daily football factoid that shares some quite exciting items and aspects of the gridiron in a short read. They preserve football history in a very unique way. Visit the site at Today's Tidbits.
Tim Brown, one of the foremost experts on early college and pro football, is the host and founder of FootballArchaeology.com. Tim's love of the gridiron's past goes beyond just the website. Mr Brown, to date, is the author of three books on football history, appears on various football history podcasts, and has been quoted in articles by The Athletic, The Chicago Tribune, and other publications. He guest authors articles on UniWatch, and his research on the 1920s West Point Cavalry Detachment teams contributed to All American: The Power of Sports, currently on display at the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C.
His books include Fields of Friendly Strife, How Football Became Football: 150 Years of the Game's Evolution, and Hut! Hut! Hike! A History of Football Terminology explores the history of football’s words and expressions and how they became connected to the game.
Football From Rugby The Evolution Discussion with Tony Collins and Timothy Brown
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.
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.
Timothy P Brown
Follow Timothy P. Brown and explore their bibliography from Amazon.com’s Timothy P. Brown Author Page. — www.amazon.com
Tim Brown, one of the foremost experts on early college and pro football, is the host and founder of FootballArchaeology.com. Tim's love of the gridiron's past goes beyond just the website. Mr Brown, to date, is the author of three books on football history, appears on various football history podcasts, and has been quoted in articles by The Athletic, The Chicago Tribune, and other publications. He guest authors articles on UniWatch, and his research on the 1920s West Point Cavalry Detachment teams contributed to All American: The Power of Sports, currently on display at the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C.
His books include: Fields of Friendly Strife; How Football Became Football: 150 Years of the Game's Evolution; and Hut! Hut! Hike! A History of Football Terminology, which explores the history of football’s words and expressions and how they became connected to the game.
The History of the American Football Forward Pass
Author and historian Tim Brown visits the Pigpen to help educate us on how the forward pass became legal in the game of football and why. Tim has some great books : How Football Became Football & Fields of Friendly Strife both of which I highly recommend you get your hands on to learn more about the game's history. Also Tim has a great website also called Fields of Friendly Strife where he shares some brilliantly recorded history of the game.
-Transcript of the Forward Pass History with Timothy Brown
Darin Hayes
Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes at Pigskin Dispatch. Welcome once again to the Pigpen. We have an exciting topic to talk about today. We will go back to the roots of football and, you know, one of the most compelling elements of the game, the passing game. And we're going to go back and look at where it came from, what it's all about, and how it derived to what it is today. And we've got an expert who wrote a very good book called How Football Became Football, the First 150 Years of the Games Evolution. And his name is Timothy P. Brown, and we'll bring him in now. Timothy Brown, welcome to the Pigpen.
Timothy Brown
Hey, Darin. Thank you. Appreciate you having me on.
Looking forward to it.
-Learning More About Timothy Brown
Darin Hayes
Like we were talking before we hit record here, I read your book. It is extremely fascinating. And I love how you grab all the different elements of football history, not just looking at it from the mirror image of a rulesmaker or of a player. You're going even on the officiating side. How officiating evolved with the game really caught my interest.
Timothy Brown
I don't know if I've ever seen anybody do that before, but you caught the interest of all the elements of football. Well done job on that. Yeah, I appreciate it. And I guess, you know, just to me, and a lot of the book is about college football because a lot of the history is about college football. But for me, it goes beyond the game. You know, there are the elements of the fans and the money and, you know, just kind of the, where it fits in society, and how it reflects societal change. I think those are some of the most interesting aspects of football, but it's not just a game on the field that goes beyond that. But of course, the core of it is the game on the field. Now, where did you get the interest to get to the point of writing books on football? I grew up in an athletic family. I played college football. I had a couple played or coached for a couple of years as a graduate assistant or as an assistant while I was going to grad school. And so I've just always had that, you know, kind of football element. And for me, it ended up that I was, you know, I wasn't working in business and collecting Rose Bowl memorabilia. So that's kind of my more my main collecting hobby. And I came across a story that just kind of fascinated me, which is what led to the first book, which covers the military Rose Bowl teams of World War One and World War Two, or I'm sorry, of World War One, not World War Two, but 1918 and 1919 Rose Bowls. And then, you know, in doing the research for that book, I had to really understand football back then rather than the present day. So, that required me to do a bunch of research. And eventually, I realized that the research itself and understanding football back then was a lot of fun. And so I just kind of expanded that. And so the second book that you mentioned, How Football Became Football, reflects really the first 150 years of the game, just how it evolved in multiple dimensions.
-Breaking Down Football into Eras
Darin Hayes
I mean, the other element that I thought you did a really good job on is sort of breaking football into three different segments, time segments of those 150 years. Maybe you could just share with the listeners a little bit about how you broke those up and what differentiates the three.
Timothy Brown
So the reason I broke it into three eras was just that, you know, I just felt like I couldn't just go chronological order, and just, you know, it would just be this recitation of facts, which would be kind of boring. So, I wanted to have some themes about what was happening in football during different time periods. And so the first era, which I just called the early era, was from the game's beginning. So, more or less, in 1869, with Rutgers and Princeton, and then going until 1905, when there were a series of rule changes due to the dangers of the game, etc. And so that's the first period. The second one started in 1906 and continued until 1959. Somebody could argue with me whether it should be 1955 or 1965. But, you know, I have my reasons for choosing 1960. But it's at that point where from 60 on, you know, we have dramatically increased influence of television, and therefore money in the game, we have dramatically increased influence of African American players. Then, there are a couple of other changes, particularly the permanent use of two-platoon football at the college level. Those three things just had a tremendous impact on the game as we know it today. And so, you know, I chose 1960 again; you could argue a slightly different time period, but that's what I worked with. I thought you were spot on. I would totally agree with you that 1960 was a big breaking point. And, of course, 1906, which is sort of what's going to lead us into our discussion today; I guess, though, before we get to 1906, we're going to have to try to figure out what football was the first 30-some years before 1906 that brought us to that point.
Darin Hayes
So maybe if you could describe us, what was football like in the early 1900s? Yeah, so I just want to step back a little bit further first to just say people say all the time football evolved from rugby.
-Early 20th Century American Football
Timothy Brown
And yes, that's true. But I just want to emphasize football was rugby. So, in the early days of what we now think of as gridiron, North American football, US and Canada, it was rugby. And you know, when they started the game, they made some minor tweaks, but it was right. So the game remained very much rugby-esque until, say, 1890. They made some rule changes, including allowing tackling below the waist and things like that, which made it harder to do the outside wide-open and running of rugby. And so the game started steering towards this, which ultimately became mass and momentum football. So mass meaning, you know, it was basically like playing goal line football, you know, the goal line offensive goal against goal line defense, all 110 yards of the field at the time. The mass refers to the idea of multiple blockers leading the runner through the hole and/or grabbing him by the handles that he had sewn on his pants to pull him through the hole. And the momentum, referring to, you know, back then, they didn't have rules on how many players had to be on the line of scrimmage. So, teams would have guards back or tackle back formations and different things. And there was no limit on the number of men who could be moving forward at the snap, you know, similar to what Canada has in their football. So, you know, they'd have these guys running all at the same time and collapsing into a particular hole, just basically slamming into to basically overrun one or two players on the defense. And so it became a very dangerous game. And as a result, there were lots of injuries and, ultimately, deaths, you know, resulting from the nature of the play at the time. Okay, so that sort of takes us to when we always hear about, you know, President Theodore Roosevelt became involved because of the high death count and injury count. And you know, many schools were, you know, canceling their football programs. I guess that sort of takes us up to the 1905 season. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think the whole thing with Roosevelt is a little bit overblown. But, you know, it was more, I think it was a high-profile act on his part. I mean, he really, there's nothing he could do to ban football, right? Right. But, you know, he was a football sport. He was a fan, you know, he, he was at the 1905 Army-Navy game at the end of the season. His son played for Harvard, at least the freshman team at the time. Oh, and he was a big believer in, you know, kind of that whole mass masculinity thing that was behind, you know, football at the time. So, he was a fan. So he wanted to make sure the game continued. At the end of the day, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton controlled the game. They were still even in 1904 and 1905; they were the three schools. Penn, maybe a little bit, but they were the three; they were the schools that controlled the game. And they had, they, they had core responsibility for the rulemaking bodies. It wasn't until 1904 that a non-Easterner, Amos Alonzo Stagg, who had played at Yale but was coaching at Chicago, was the first non-Easterner on the rules committee. So, you know, anything that was wrong with football was due to the guys out east. Okay. The good things about football were due to the guys out east, too. Right. So, there was sort of a reluctance on their part to want to change the game, that I take it. They liked having that game. I guess the flying wedge was gone by that point, but just like you said, the massive collision goal line play, every play, they sort of liked that, and they didn't want to see that change. I take it. Yeah. So, you know, one of their big arguments and, and, and with, with a fair amount of truth to it, but, you know, the, the, the whole death count thing came from a series of newspapers, you know, they, they would track what was happening around the country. And so the death count really was not; it wasn't a bunch of college players from your top-notch college teams. They counted anything from, you know, a lot of the deaths were just kids playing sandlot football or backyard football. A lot of them, you know, weren't; they had no coaching. They were just playing. They didn't know how to tackle the death count. Also included kids who maybe got cut or spiked on the field and got an infection while they couldn't treat infections like we can today. And so some of those guys died from an infection they sustained on the football field. So, on the one hand, the death numbers are exaggerated, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it was a dangerous game. And here and there, there were some college athletes who were killed playing the game. And some of what brought it to a head at the end of the 1905 season was an NYU player, a New York University player, who was killed, and their college president, you know, basically took up the banner and really pushed for change and started organizing change in what ultimately became the organized group that ultimately became the NCAA.
Darin Hayes
So I take it, though, even though Roosevelt's threat was a little bit idle, it was sort of a pivotal point in getting these groups to talk about the revisions and reform that was needed in football. Is that a fair statement?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, yeah, I think that that's true. I mean, it put pressure on the big schools to make changes. And then what ended up happening was like with NYU and some others, they just basically got to a point where they just said, you know, we're not paying attention to you anymore. You're not gonna make the rules anymore. We're gonna make the rules. Eventually, those two groups agreed to get together, you know, compromise on some of the rule changes that ended up taking place.
Darin Hayes
So, if I'm looking at this correctly, we have, you know, the Yale camp, Harvard, and Penn, and we would say Columbia was the other one? Princeton. So we have the Walter camps of the world on that side. And then, on the other side, who wants to have the reform?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, it could be; it was mostly schools that would now be considered V3 schools or V2. You know, they're just, but it was a mishmash. You know, by and large, the folks at the Army and Navy kind of supported the old world, too. You know, the old-school game. So it is more or less that the teams that were at the top of the heap at the time really had no reason to change. And the truth is that in those schools where they had effective coaching, the guys were conditioned before practice. They had the best of the equipment and training. They really had, you know, a limited number of serious injuries and deaths. So they kind of felt like, look, the problem isn't us. The problem is everybody else who doesn't know what they're doing. You know, I think that was really kind of the crux of the argument, but at the end of the day, even those folks realized that they needed to make some changes. And so it was really gonna be a matter of how do we compromise? How do we find ways to allow change without overturning the game that they had grown to love? You know, back then, people, you know, you go back and read newspaper articles from 1903, 1904, and they'll just go on and on about the virtues of some great punter. Now, we think of a punter as the guy of last resort; nobody wants to punt, right? They'll punt it on first down, third, second down all the time. And it was just such an integral part of the game that if you were a good punter, you were a star, you know? Now, typically, you were also the fullback or halfback on the team, but punting was a very highly regarded activity. That explains why I know we talked about a game where they had, I think, no second downs. They punted on first down every plague in Clement weather. I forget what it was, but we've talked about that in one of the podcasts recently. Okay, so we're at this meeting now. I take it after the end of the 1905 season before 1906 starts. And we have these two groups getting together. So, I'm taking it that the forward pass was one of the suggestions that were brought to the table to help open up the game and make it a little bit safer. Is that true? Yeah, so, you know, there were a lot of different suggestions, right? So, and really kind of coming despite the fact that the Easterners controlled things, there was input coming in from across the country. You know, I mean, anything ranged from the forward pass, which ultimately got implemented in 1906, though heavily restricted 1906, they also approved the onsite kick from scrimmage. So it was essentially a punt. in which any member of the offensive team could recover the punt and advance it. So, just like we think about an onside kick today, the kicking team can recover it. Well, they had opened up the game by allowing the kicking team to recover punts as well. And there had been a forerunner to that that was a little bit more restrictive, but that kind of what they call the quarterback kick, that carried on until 1922. So, it remained a part of the game for a while. Well, there are some good things that people would want to be punting on first down, then have to advance the ball a long way because you don't have the pass at that point in time. So maybe that's a good way to get a good chunk of yardage if you're in a stalemate. So interesting. Yeah, and if you think about it, punting was a natural part of the rugby-ish game. So, every team had skilled punters. And so what you wanted, in this case, was a punter who could kind of kick it off to the side in one of your ends, or somebody else could run down and get it. The forward pass was either something that didn't really change the game much or entirely brand new, depending on how you define the forward pass, which I think is one of, which is another big misconception in terms of people's understanding of how that changed the game. Before 1905 or before 1906, the game was not filled with forward passes, but the forward pass was common. It was just illegal. And the reason I say that is because what we now think of as laterals, a term that entered football all about 1914, or pitches, what we think of laterals and pitches, they call passes, right? So the quarterback got the snap from the center, and he tossed it to a half-back or a full-back. That was a pass. And so a forward pass was just those instances where they were running around the field, and they pitched it inadvertently or deliberately tossed it forward. And so it was a penalty, and they'd call the penalty, and they'd lose possession of the ball and that kind of thing. And if you look at old newspaper reports, it's all over the place. Forward passes almost every game; somebody's being penalized for a forward pass. So the game or the game had a forward pass. It was illegal. And so when they were thinking about the new forward pass in 1906, they were pretty much thinking of that. They were thinking of forwarding laterals. So they weren't viewing it as this thing that was gonna revolutionize the game. It was, and a number of committee members thought, yeah, we need it for a couple of years, and we can get rid of it. So, there was no notion of what was going to come down the road and how it would dramatically change the game.
-The Passing Game
Darin Hayes
It was more of a, well, yeah, you can pitch the ball forward and whatever. So it wasn't what you think of it today. They weren't thinking of Aaron Rodgers dropping back and dropping a 45-yard pass on a dime to a receiver who was streaking down the field.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, well, that's right. And so some of it is even. There are some great illustrations of the period that show and discuss the most effective way to throw the forward pass, right? And so, really, I mean, in 1906, there was only one team I'm aware of who threw the ball in the overhand spiral motion that we think of as the forward pass today. Everybody else was trying to figure out, like, okay, well, I'm only gonna toss it a couple of yards or whatever. And so they were. Some thought the best way to throw it was tossing it like a great grenade with a stiff arm or some basketball set shot. There were a variety of different techniques like that, but it was all within a 10-yard kind of radius, maybe flipping it 15 yards downfield to somebody, and just conceptually, nobody had. The skies did not open up, and a stone tablet did not come down, giving the football world a passing tree, right? I mean, nobody had any idea what any of that would have looked like. That was Sid Gillman and 40 or 50 yards in the future before that happened. Okay, 1906, you said the forward pass came in with some restrictions on it.
Darin Hayes
Maybe you could describe some of those restrictions. When the forward pass first came in, at that point, that was during the era of the checkerboard field. And so, probably a fair number of your listeners have seen a checkerboard field at one point or another.
Timothy Brown
But so beyond the normal stripes every five yards, there were lines running perpendicular to those. There were also five yards. So the reason those were there is in 1903, they instituted a rule that said that the first person to receive the ball from the center could not run forward or could not cross the line of scrimmage with the ball unless they were five yards right or left at the center. This was to try to eliminate some fakery that was going on in the center area and to keep them from running up the gut all the time. But so when the forward pass was adopted, they basically followed that same rule and said that in order to throw a forward pass, the passer has to be five yards right or left of the center before they can throw the ball. There were other restrictions, and some of these changed a little bit over time, but there were restrictions. Prior to 1912, it was a more restricted game. So, you know, they had things like you couldn't throw the ball more than 20 yards downfield. You couldn't; if the ball crossed the goal line on the fly or on a bounce, it was a turnover. If you threw a pass and it was not touched by an offensive or defensive player before it touched the ground, it was a turnover. So, you know, if you think about the implications of that, you've got guys who don't really know how to throw a forward pass very well, trying to throw it to people who don't know how to run passing routes. And if they throw it too far, it's a turnover. If they miss, if they have an incompletion, it's a turnover. So it's really not surprising that for the first half dozen or so years of football, the forward pass didn't get used very much other than by a couple of select teams. And some of those did very well. And they were playing with a watermelon ball, too, I imagine, right? More of a rugby, okay. Yeah, I guess that would make it very difficult to try to figure out how to throw that ball, wouldn't it? It'd be tough for us today, I think, to try to figure out how to throw that. Yeah, well, I mean, it really was one of the things. Early on, the ball was so thick that they basically kind of felt like unless the passer had big hands, they couldn't be, in effect, the passer just because they couldn't get a grip on the ball. You know, and the lacing, you know, the laces were just, you know, relatively thin pieces of leather that laced the ball together. They weren't like, you know, we've got polyvinyl chloride laces now that are stiff as, you know, stiff as a brick.
Darin Hayes
So it's very easy to get, you know, to spin on the ball and do those kinds of things. That wasn't the case back then. It reminds me of we had a gentleman who, one of my PFRA friends, Simon Herrera, has a vintage football game. They replicate the games played in the early 1920s in the pro game. And he wanted to try to get it so they wouldn't throw passes. So he had a ball developed for these games that he has every year. That's even a wider girth than the balls that you're talking about in the, you know, 1906. So they can't pass the ball. I forget what it was, like 24-inch girth or something. It's ridiculous, like a medicine ball. So, it was effective. They can't throw a pass with it. So, it sounds like this is a similar situation here for these folks who were trying to throw a pass.
Timothy Brown
Well, the flip side of it is that, you know, as long as you had that rounded ball, you could still continue to dropkick. But once you got to the, you know, there were successive changes to the dimensions of the ball. Once the ball got too pointy, drop-kicking went away because you couldn't predict where the ball was going to bounce anymore. Unless you're Doug Flutie, right? Well, he's playing on Astroturf, not on some muddy field that guys played on back in the day. Right. So, who did throw the first pass successfully? And how did that come about? It seems like everything's against them, wanting to throw a pass. Well, so, you know, one of the things, an interesting thing that happened as the committee was kind of as people are tossing out ideas on the changes that should occur in 1906, there were two teams out in Kansas that decided to play a game, a test game to experiment and institute some of the potential rule changes. So Fairmont, which now is Wichita State, and Washburn played one another. The coach of Washburn was a guy named John Outland; the Outland Trophies were named after them. And so they played a test game on Christmas Day, 1905. You know, it's unclear, exactly, you know, so they threw forward passes, but it's unclear what that means. You know, it's hard to believe that they would have really restructured their offense in a significant way. It probably meant that they just tossed the ball forward on a couple of occasions. I think only one forward pass was completed, and the game ended up in a 0 -0 tie or 6 -6 tie, you know, whatever it was. So, it's not a very good test of the process, but it points out the fact that you really have time to let things sink in and conceptualize the changes that you had as a coach. The last names were Eddie Coach and Coaches. He had played at Wisconsin and, I think, was an all-American or, you know, whatever. He was a star there, but he ended up with a guy named Bradbury Robinson, who transferred from Wisconsin down at St. Louis U. Bradbury Robinson was a big, pretty big guy who had big hands, and he had learned to throw the overhand spiral. I guess he'd learned it by throwing the ball back when he was retrieving punks. But so he all said, you know, here's this guy who has this capability that nobody else had. And so St. Louis U basically and Coaches, you know, built this offense around, you know, it's not like they just went to a passing offense, but, you know, they threw the ball far more than anybody else. They were undefeated in 1906, and before the season, I used to live in St. Louis. I grew up in Wisconsin, but I used to live there. So, I know the weather in both places, and St. Louis is ungodly in the summer in terms of heat and humidity. So he took his boys up to Wisconsin for training camp back in the days when training camp meant he really did camp. And then, as they were getting ready to go back to St. Louis, they played a local school named Carroll College, which is my alma mater. Now it's Carroll University, but they played a game, and Bradbury Robinson threw the first forward pass in a legal, you know, authorized game. So I always claimed that Carroll invented pass defense, which you would want to guess. Yeah, I guess it would be. Yeah. Although St. Louis U won. So, but so that was, that game was played in early September 1906. And, you know, various teams tried the forward pass. Carlisle was, you know, an early innovator in its use. They always liked anything kind of tricky. Otherwise, it really did not get used much over the next couple of years; just because it was, it was heavily restricted. And, frankly, you know, the Eastern teams didn't really like it that much to begin with. Where it really saw some use was out West, and probably the, you know, one of the seminal moments in the forward pass didn't come until 1913 when, you know, Knute Rockne and Gus Dorius at Notre Dame visited Army for a game, and they were throwing the ball all over the place and the New York sports writers and certainly the West Point football team were surprised at what they could do. And Notre Dame beat Army's butt, and, you know, it brought a lot of attention to what you could do with the forward pass if you think about it differently than most teams thought about it to that point.
Darin Hayes
Now, it was sort of a slow progression, though, from 1906 to, let's say, 1912 to get the passing game to be that way, for Rockne and the rest of Notre Dame to throw the ball like that. Can you describe it? I think 1912 you described as being another pivotal year for the forward pass.
Timothy Brown
Yeah. So, you know, for me, there are three things going on. One is, like I said, you know, that, so when they first approved the forward pass, there's just an inability to conceptualize what it could be. I mean, nobody thought it would be what Don Coryell or somebody else would produce, you know, down the road. There was also just an inability to figure out the techniques to use, which we've talked about a little bit. And then there were restrictions. So, you know, the, we had things like, you know, the, you had to be five yards right or left. And, you know, this will play out again, but in a different form, like in the 40s. But, you know, what we think of is any kind of quick passing, you know, so a quick slant. Right. I mean, that's like. They couldn't even think of a quick slant at the time. But because the passer had to be five yards right or left, he could never have thrown a quick slant. He could never have thrown a bubble screen. He could, you know, there are things that we take it, take for granted as part of football today in the passing game, just they couldn't even think about that as an opportunity because it was, it was, it wasn't legal, you know?
Darin Hayes
So, you know, you basically were forcing the pass to occur only on rollouts. Okay, so 1912 sort of eliminated that rule so that they could throw more of a traditional setting that we know passing as?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, so yeah, by 1912, they dropped that 20-yard downfield rule. They, I believe, also dropped the rule that, so I believe by then, you could throw the ball into the end zone. So, until 1912, there was no end zone, right? So there was this undefined area behind the goal line, but because it was illegal to throw the ball over the goal line, they didn't need an end zone per se. It had to be carried over the goal line. And so, in 1912, they changed that. It was just one of those things where there were just these incredible little tiny steps to make the game more open, but 1912 was a big one. So you can throw the ball as far downfield as you want. You can throw it into the end zone. They later had restrictions where you can only throw one forward pass in a set of downs and things like that. But I think things opened up enough in 1912 that people could see how the forward pass could change the game. They still didn't use that much, but it was getting there. But I guess in a way, I know you described this in the book, the passing restrictions being lifted, and especially that having those end zones defined as being 10 yards, it ended up changing the field from what the Canadians, you know, have the 110-yard field goal line to goal line, still to this day.
-Stadium Evolution
Darin Hayes
But our stadiums in this, like you described, I know Harvard and Yale and of a couple others had the cement stadiums where they were restricted with that only so much room to put a stadium, and they had to change100-yard100 yard field with the two end zones, is that correct?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, a little bit; I added a little bit just to say that Harvard is an example. Harvard built what is still their stadium in 1903, and it was the first, or the largest, reinforced concrete building in the world at the time, blah, blah, blah. But the point was it was there, and it was gonna stay there, right? They had built that stadium so that it could accommodate a regulation football field, a fairly small track, and some sideline area. Well, one of the discussions they had in 1905 was whether we should widen the field like the Canadians had to open up the game. And, you know, with Harvard being one of the dominant forces in the game at the time, they were like, no, we're not changing our stadium, so we need to keep it as is. So, they didn't widen the field in 1905. When it came to 1912, you ran into an issue with the length of the field, not its width. And so there were stadiums like the Polo Grounds in New York City where a lot of college games were played. Back then, a lot of college games were played in baseball parks because that's where the stadium was for, right? Right. And so, depending on the configuration of the ballpark, you might not be able to fit the 110-yard field with 10-yard end zones on the end of it, so 130-yard field. You might only be able to fit a 120-yard field. So what they ended up doing is they eliminated the 55-yard line and, you know, before, you know, kickoffs had been from the midline instead of the 40, and they switched it to the 40 and things like that. So, you know, fairly innocuous kind of change, but, you know, that's one of the, you know, Americans changed to the 50-yard line. It wasn't the Canadians who bastardized our game; we bastardized the game that we had kind of collectively agreed on. And the same thing with three downs. That's sort of the way that Walter's camp designed it, with three downs. And, uh, we also changed that out here. So that occurred in 1912 as well. So we switched to four downs to gain 10 yards at that point. So, actually, probably 1912 is almost as impactful as, uh, 1906. And maybe, maybe not as much as like the early 18 eighties, but, uh, uh, truly some big changes there. And I can see why you have that incorporated as your next era, the second phase of football. Cause there's a lot of going on there. Yeah. Tremendous changes. And then, and then from then on, you know, I mean, there's more tweaking, some of which, you know, some tweaks are bigger than others, but, uh, 1906 to 1912 was a, you know, a period of turmoil, but they, they kind of game came out of it and, and started moving forward, a combination of thinking about the game differently, new techniques, and then rule chains listened up the passing game.
Darin Hayes
Now, Tim, what do you think would have happened, you know, now that we know the whole story arc of the passing game and all the changes that came because of between 1906 and 1912, uh, in your opinion, would the game of football survived without those revisions?
Timothy Brown
You know, it's one of those where, okay, without revisions, I think the answer is no, you know, I, I just, I think there was enough push for the game too, you know, enough recognition, the game was a dangerous game that, uh, without changes, I think it would have died, um, but I'm not sure that would have happened, you know, I think just like today, you know, yeah, I think football still has a lot of dangers in front of it in terms of CTE and all of that, but I think the game's going to change, you know, it's, it will address it. It's, you know, there are enough people who want the game to survive, and there's enough money behind. You know, people who want the game to survive will adjust as it needs to. Um, it may be slower than some folks would like, but it will adjust. And so I think the same thing there. I think if, if the game, um, if it had not changed in 1906, okay, it probably would have been 1908 or 10 or something, but had it not changed, then, then I think it would have, you know, what we saw with, you know, as you mentioned, teams drop the drop football or schools drop football, you know, Columbia dropped football, Northwestern dropped football, USC dropped football, Cal dropped football, Stanford dropped football, but those out in California, they, they switched immediately to rugby. And so, you know, one of the more interesting questions, I think, is whether America switched from American or gridiron football to rugby. How would that have affected the game of rugby? You know, you know, how would the, you know, would, would rugby be the same game it is today if America had been involved? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't, but I guarantee you just based on the, just the sheer population of the country and, and the, you know, I mean, the big game, the California Stanford game in the years that they were playing rugby, that got all the attention that the football game had in the past, big crowds, big press coverage, all of that.
Darin Hayes
Yeah, I believe even to this day, Australia is playing two or three different versions of rugby, just in that much smaller country than ours. So yeah, I guess that would have had a big impact on rugby if the United States had been playing that.
Timothy Brown
So very interesting, very interesting. Canada had a, you know, Canada kind of went off in a different, in its own direction; they played what was called Canadian rugby, which had some elements of American football. It had bounds and a scrimmage, but it was still much more of a wide-open game, no blocking, you know, at that time, whereas American football picked up blocking in the 1880s. So, and then they eventually merged back towards an American-like football, you know, so Canadian football is now very close to American football, but Canadian rugby, until the twenties or so, probably was as similar to rugby as American football. And then that's sort of where the Gray Cup came out. It was the Canadian rugby originally before the CFL.
Darin Hayes
So very interesting. Now, as you said earlier, I, as you said earlier, have a book on the military. Maybe you could tell us what the name of that book is. And I guess we're both your books and where folks could buy them at.
Timothy Brown
So, one book is Fields of Friendly Strife. So, it comes from General MacArthur's quote about the playing fields at West Point. But that's basically a book that follows the teams that played in the 1918 and 1919 Rose Bowls. So it was World War I. And so rather than, for various reasons, rather than having college teams play in the Rose Bowls, they had military teams play. So there was the Marine training camp on the West Coast. It was Mare Island. There was an army training camp up near Tacoma called Camp Lewis. They played in the 1918 game. And then Mirror Island met Great Lakes from near Chicago in the 1919 game. That game included guys like George Halas, who became a fairly famous name in football. But he was on the Great Lakes team, as were a number of others, some pretty talented athletes. So basically, the book kind of follows those teams as they play in their season. Of the guys who had played in 1918, about half of them ended up shipping out and ending up in France during World War I. So it kind of traces them all through that period and then their lives afterward. Wasn't that the game where Patty Driscoll touched on a pass to Halas? That's the game? Okay, okay, okay. All right, great, great.
Darin Hayes
Okay, so you have a website that's named after that original book. Maybe if you could tell us what that is so listeners could go and check that out. Yeah, so Fields of Friendly Strength, it started off really to support my first book.
Timothy Brown
And then, as I kind of turned the corner, a lot of my early information covers World War I and the teams and games. And then I pretty much go right into just various history of football topics. So I would say the last 50 articles or posts that I have are pretty much straight football, but football history. Mostly pre-1960 and a lot of older stuff. I post articles, two or three articles a month. It's available at fieldsoffriendliestrife.com. I've got a Twitter account and Facebook. So, if you either search my name, Timothy P. Brown, or Fields of Friendly Strength, you'll come across it. It's, you know, if you search Fields of Friendly Strength and you're looking for me, you're gonna find it, so.
Darin Hayes
Okay, well, we'll also be listeners. We will have a link to Tim's site on our show notes of the podcast you're listening to, or you can go to pigskindispatch .com. We'll also have some backlinks there to get you there. So we'll make sure we get you in the direction if you need that help. So a great, great site. I highly recommend the site. I highly recommend the book. Just a tremendous job that you did. And coming from an official to an old coach, that's hard to give compliments, I guess, going both ways, but I really enjoyed it.
Timothy Brown
You know, we're natural enemies, you know, as my friend, Josie Ziemba says, you know, so. You know, it's a funny thing. I think for me, some of the stuff I enjoyed most of all in doing the research was the role of officiating. You know, it's just the, so, you know, like things that the book covers, it covers, you know, when did referees start? What did referees wear along the way? What were their uniforms? When did penalty flags come into play? When did whistles or the horns that they used come into play? When did the gun come into play? You know, the referee signals, you know, signal penalties. Well, that had to start, too. So all of those kinds of things, you know, they weren't there when football started. They had to develop. And so we just try to identify as best as I could when those things started and who we can credit with those kinds of changes. Yeah, those evolutions still happen recently because I don't know if you probably remember, but probably about 15 years ago, the NFL went from white knickers to wearing black pants, which in the officiating world was humongous.
Darin Hayes
I had some arguments probably 25 years ago with some people I officiated with that were traditional. I said, no, white knickers are the traditional pants of officials. I said, well, here, let me show you this photograph from 1903, and what's this guy wearing? He's wearing a black suit coat with black pants and dark-colored pants. And I hated the knickers because, especially before, everybody had turf fields, you had grass stains, mud, and you know how washing white is. It's tough, especially if you do a Friday night game; you gotta go do JV games the next day. And you have only so many pairs of white knickers. So it's- Well, one of the things I've got in the book, but one of my favorite aspects of officiating was, you know, until the 20s, maybe the 30s, there was really no training for officials.
Timothy Brown
You were just a former player who knew most of the rules. And so, and you had to be somebody people trusted, kind of thought you were a citizen, right? Most football officials wore their letter sweaters when they were officiating. And it was, and if you look at box scores, really through 19, really through World War II, the box scores of most games would list the officials, and they tell you the school that they attended. And it was because, you know, if you were an Ohio State guy, you did not officiate Ohio State games. You might do Michigan and Indiana and Pitt or whatever. But so you're wearing your letter sweater of a different team was kind of a number one said, I know what I'm talking about because I want a football letter.
Darin Hayes
But secondly, I'm impartial. You know, I'm not rooting for the two teams that are on the field today. Yeah, I know I've read some things where, like, Walter Camp, as he was coaching Yale, would go to New York City to officiate the, you know, the Harvard Princeton game, for instance; I know a couple of instances.
Timothy Brown
So yeah, and, you know, there's, you know, some of the earlier Rose Bowls, you know, USC was a lesser team back then, but you know, they were their head coach, you know, was officiating the Rose Bowl, you know, he was local, didn't have to pay a whole lot more than the bus fare, you know, and so.
Darin Hayes
Yeah, it's just unbelievable. You know, besides the uniform changing, when I started officiating in the early 80s, or I'm sorry, later 80s, you know, we, as a wing official, you know, the head linesman and the line judge, they had you go probably within two yards of the widest offensive player, you know, so if you had a wideout, you'd be tears. Well, that changed probably in the nineties when the offense changed. There are kids getting faster. They said, okay, plant your butts on the sideline. You know, you don't have to be close to officiating. So, that was a big to do in the officiating world. And I can't even imagine, you know, incorporating things like the forward pass and doing it with the two or three officials on the field when you're so used to that, you know, grind it out the game in the middle, so.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, well, I've got one of the articles on the website about the history of down boxes and chains, you know, generally. And so, you know, back in the day, so, you know, what we now call the down box, back in the day, it really was a box. You know, it was a stick with a box on it that had four sides and one, two, three, four. And they spun it around, depending on what down it was. But then, the linesman carried that around with them on the field, you know? And they'd be, you know, he'd be running downfield with the sharp stick with a box on it. And so it just, you know, certain things like that that just seem crazy now. But it's just the way the game evolved, you know? And so, so that kind of stuff, I just think that you know, it's fascinating to figure out, you know, kind of how it happened and why it changed, you know, from one period to another. Well, it definitely is.
Darin Hayes
You do an excellent job of illustrating the changes and how they affected all aspects of the game; as I said, you do a wonderful job and wonderful job of explaining the history of the forward pass today, and I really appreciate you coming on here and, uh, uh, you know, sharing that with us and, uh, we'd love to have you on again sometime if we can to talk about a different subject because you're very interesting and you're very knowledgeable.
Timothy Brown
So I thank you. You name the topic and I'll be there. Okay. It's fun, you know, fun to, fun to share, share information. Cause there's somebody else out there who's got some insight on something that neither of us have.
Darin Hayes
And so let's learn from them, too. Absolutely. So preserve that football history, and we thank you for that. And that's what we're all about. And, uh, thanks for helping us. Let's do that tonight. So thank you very much.
Timothy Brown
Darin, my pleasure.
-Transcript of the Forward Pass History with Timothy Brown
Darin Hayes
Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes at Pigskin Dispatch. Welcome once again to the Pigpen. We have an exciting topic to talk about today. We will go back to the roots of football and, you know, one of the most compelling elements of the game, the passing game. And we're going to go back and look at where it came from, what it's all about, and how it derived to what it is today. And we've got an expert who wrote a very good book called How Football Became Football, the First 150 Years of the Games Evolution. And his name is Timothy P. Brown, and we'll bring him in now. Timothy Brown, welcome to the Pigpen.
Timothy Brown
Hey, Darin. Thank you. Appreciate you having me on.
Looking forward to it.
-Learning More About Timothy Brown
Darin Hayes
Like we were talking before we hit record here, I read your book. It is extremely fascinating. And I love how you grab all the different elements of football history, not just looking at it from the mirror image of a rulesmaker or of a player. You're going even on the officiating side. How officiating evolved with the game really caught my interest.
Timothy Brown
I don't know if I've ever seen anybody do that before, but you caught the interest of all the elements of football. Well done job on that. Yeah, I appreciate it. And I guess, you know, just to me, and a lot of the book is about college football because a lot of the history is about college football. But for me, it goes beyond the game. You know, there are the elements of the fans and the money and, you know, just kind of the, where it fits in society, and how it reflects societal change. I think those are some of the most interesting aspects of football, but it's not just a game on the field that goes beyond that. But of course, the core of it is the game on the field. Now, where did you get the interest to get to the point of writing books on football? I grew up in an athletic family. I played college football. I had a couple played or coached for a couple of years as a graduate assistant or as an assistant while I was going to grad school. And so I've just always had that, you know, kind of football element. And for me, it ended up that I was, you know, I wasn't working in business and collecting Rose Bowl memorabilia. So that's kind of my more my main collecting hobby. And I came across a story that just kind of fascinated me, which is what led to the first book, which covers the military Rose Bowl teams of World War One and World War Two, or I'm sorry, of World War One, not World War Two, but 1918 and 1919 Rose Bowls. And then, you know, in doing the research for that book, I had to really understand football back then rather than the present day. So, that required me to do a bunch of research. And eventually, I realized that the research itself and understanding football back then was a lot of fun. And so I just kind of expanded that. And so the second book that you mentioned, How Football Became Football, reflects really the first 150 years of the game, just how it evolved in multiple dimensions.
-Breaking Down Football into Eras
Darin Hayes
I mean, the other element that I thought you did a really good job on is sort of breaking football into three different segments, time segments of those 150 years. Maybe you could just share with the listeners a little bit about how you broke those up and what differentiates the three.
Timothy Brown
So the reason I broke it into three eras was just that, you know, I just felt like I couldn't just go chronological order, and just, you know, it would just be this recitation of facts, which would be kind of boring. So, I wanted to have some themes about what was happening in football during different time periods. And so the first era, which I just called the early era, was from the game's beginning. So, more or less, in 1869, with Rutgers and Princeton, and then going until 1905, when there were a series of rule changes due to the dangers of the game, etc. And so that's the first period. The second one started in 1906 and continued until 1959. Somebody could argue with me whether it should be 1955 or 1965. But, you know, I have my reasons for choosing 1960. But it's at that point where from 60 on, you know, we have dramatically increased influence of television, and therefore money in the game, we have dramatically increased influence of African American players. Then, there are a couple of other changes, particularly the permanent use of two-platoon football at the college level. Those three things just had a tremendous impact on the game as we know it today. And so, you know, I chose 1960 again; you could argue a slightly different time period, but that's what I worked with. I thought you were spot on. I would totally agree with you that 1960 was a big breaking point. And, of course, 1906, which is sort of what's going to lead us into our discussion today; I guess, though, before we get to 1906, we're going to have to try to figure out what football was the first 30-some years before 1906 that brought us to that point.
Darin Hayes
So maybe if you could describe us, what was football like in the early 1900s? Yeah, so I just want to step back a little bit further first to just say people say all the time football evolved from rugby.
-Early 20th Century American Football
Timothy Brown
And yes, that's true. But I just want to emphasize football was rugby. So, in the early days of what we now think of as gridiron, North American football, US and Canada, it was rugby. And you know, when they started the game, they made some minor tweaks, but it was right. So the game remained very much rugby-esque until, say, 1890. They made some rule changes, including allowing tackling below the waist and things like that, which made it harder to do the outside wide-open and running of rugby. And so the game started steering towards this, which ultimately became mass and momentum football. So mass meaning, you know, it was basically like playing goal line football, you know, the goal line offensive goal against goal line defense, all 110 yards of the field at the time. The mass refers to the idea of multiple blockers leading the runner through the hole and/or grabbing him by the handles that he had sewn on his pants to pull him through the hole. And the momentum, referring to, you know, back then, they didn't have rules on how many players had to be on the line of scrimmage. So, teams would have guards back or tackle back formations and different things. And there was no limit on the number of men who could be moving forward at the snap, you know, similar to what Canada has in their football. So, you know, they'd have these guys running all at the same time and collapsing into a particular hole, just basically slamming into to basically overrun one or two players on the defense. And so it became a very dangerous game. And as a result, there were lots of injuries and, ultimately, deaths, you know, resulting from the nature of the play at the time. Okay, so that sort of takes us to when we always hear about, you know, President Theodore Roosevelt became involved because of the high death count and injury count. And you know, many schools were, you know, canceling their football programs. I guess that sort of takes us up to the 1905 season. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think the whole thing with Roosevelt is a little bit overblown. But, you know, it was more, I think it was a high-profile act on his part. I mean, he really, there's nothing he could do to ban football, right? Right. But, you know, he was a football sport. He was a fan, you know, he, he was at the 1905 Army-Navy game at the end of the season. His son played for Harvard, at least the freshman team at the time. Oh, and he was a big believer in, you know, kind of that whole mass masculinity thing that was behind, you know, football at the time. So, he was a fan. So he wanted to make sure the game continued. At the end of the day, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton controlled the game. They were still even in 1904 and 1905; they were the three schools. Penn, maybe a little bit, but they were the three; they were the schools that controlled the game. And they had, they, they had core responsibility for the rulemaking bodies. It wasn't until 1904 that a non-Easterner, Amos Alonzo Stagg, who had played at Yale but was coaching at Chicago, was the first non-Easterner on the rules committee. So, you know, anything that was wrong with football was due to the guys out east. Okay. The good things about football were due to the guys out east, too. Right. So, there was sort of a reluctance on their part to want to change the game, that I take it. They liked having that game. I guess the flying wedge was gone by that point, but just like you said, the massive collision goal line play, every play, they sort of liked that, and they didn't want to see that change. I take it. Yeah. So, you know, one of their big arguments and, and, and with, with a fair amount of truth to it, but, you know, the, the, the whole death count thing came from a series of newspapers, you know, they, they would track what was happening around the country. And so the death count really was not; it wasn't a bunch of college players from your top-notch college teams. They counted anything from, you know, a lot of the deaths were just kids playing sandlot football or backyard football. A lot of them, you know, weren't; they had no coaching. They were just playing. They didn't know how to tackle the death count. Also included kids who maybe got cut or spiked on the field and got an infection while they couldn't treat infections like we can today. And so some of those guys died from an infection they sustained on the football field. So, on the one hand, the death numbers are exaggerated, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it was a dangerous game. And here and there, there were some college athletes who were killed playing the game. And some of what brought it to a head at the end of the 1905 season was an NYU player, a New York University player, who was killed, and their college president, you know, basically took up the banner and really pushed for change and started organizing change in what ultimately became the organized group that ultimately became the NCAA.
Darin Hayes
So I take it, though, even though Roosevelt's threat was a little bit idle, it was sort of a pivotal point in getting these groups to talk about the revisions and reform that was needed in football. Is that a fair statement?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, yeah, I think that that's true. I mean, it put pressure on the big schools to make changes. And then what ended up happening was like with NYU and some others, they just basically got to a point where they just said, you know, we're not paying attention to you anymore. You're not gonna make the rules anymore. We're gonna make the rules. Eventually, those two groups agreed to get together, you know, compromise on some of the rule changes that ended up taking place.
Darin Hayes
So, if I'm looking at this correctly, we have, you know, the Yale camp, Harvard, and Penn, and we would say Columbia was the other one? Princeton. So we have the Walter camps of the world on that side. And then, on the other side, who wants to have the reform?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, it could be; it was mostly schools that would now be considered V3 schools or V2. You know, they're just, but it was a mishmash. You know, by and large, the folks at the Army and Navy kind of supported the old world, too. You know, the old-school game. So it is more or less that the teams that were at the top of the heap at the time really had no reason to change. And the truth is that in those schools where they had effective coaching, the guys were conditioned before practice. They had the best of the equipment and training. They really had, you know, a limited number of serious injuries and deaths. So they kind of felt like, look, the problem isn't us. The problem is everybody else who doesn't know what they're doing. You know, I think that was really kind of the crux of the argument, but at the end of the day, even those folks realized that they needed to make some changes. And so it was really gonna be a matter of how do we compromise? How do we find ways to allow change without overturning the game that they had grown to love? You know, back then, people, you know, you go back and read newspaper articles from 1903, 1904, and they'll just go on and on about the virtues of some great punter. Now, we think of a punter as the guy of last resort; nobody wants to punt, right? They'll punt it on first down, third, second down all the time. And it was just such an integral part of the game that if you were a good punter, you were a star, you know? Now, typically, you were also the fullback or halfback on the team, but punting was a very highly regarded activity. That explains why I know we talked about a game where they had, I think, no second downs. They punted on first down every plague in Clement weather. I forget what it was, but we've talked about that in one of the podcasts recently. Okay, so we're at this meeting now. I take it after the end of the 1905 season before 1906 starts. And we have these two groups getting together. So, I'm taking it that the forward pass was one of the suggestions that were brought to the table to help open up the game and make it a little bit safer. Is that true? Yeah, so, you know, there were a lot of different suggestions, right? So, and really kind of coming despite the fact that the Easterners controlled things, there was input coming in from across the country. You know, I mean, anything ranged from the forward pass, which ultimately got implemented in 1906, though heavily restricted 1906, they also approved the onsite kick from scrimmage. So it was essentially a punt. in which any member of the offensive team could recover the punt and advance it. So, just like we think about an onside kick today, the kicking team can recover it. Well, they had opened up the game by allowing the kicking team to recover punts as well. And there had been a forerunner to that that was a little bit more restrictive, but that kind of what they call the quarterback kick, that carried on until 1922. So, it remained a part of the game for a while. Well, there are some good things that people would want to be punting on first down, then have to advance the ball a long way because you don't have the pass at that point in time. So maybe that's a good way to get a good chunk of yardage if you're in a stalemate. So interesting. Yeah, and if you think about it, punting was a natural part of the rugby-ish game. So, every team had skilled punters. And so what you wanted, in this case, was a punter who could kind of kick it off to the side in one of your ends, or somebody else could run down and get it. The forward pass was either something that didn't really change the game much or entirely brand new, depending on how you define the forward pass, which I think is one of, which is another big misconception in terms of people's understanding of how that changed the game. Before 1905 or before 1906, the game was not filled with forward passes, but the forward pass was common. It was just illegal. And the reason I say that is because what we now think of as laterals, a term that entered football all about 1914, or pitches, what we think of laterals and pitches, they call passes, right? So the quarterback got the snap from the center, and he tossed it to a half-back or a full-back. That was a pass. And so a forward pass was just those instances where they were running around the field, and they pitched it inadvertently or deliberately tossed it forward. And so it was a penalty, and they'd call the penalty, and they'd lose possession of the ball and that kind of thing. And if you look at old newspaper reports, it's all over the place. Forward passes almost every game; somebody's being penalized for a forward pass. So the game or the game had a forward pass. It was illegal. And so when they were thinking about the new forward pass in 1906, they were pretty much thinking of that. They were thinking of forwarding laterals. So they weren't viewing it as this thing that was gonna revolutionize the game. It was, and a number of committee members thought, yeah, we need it for a couple of years, and we can get rid of it. So, there was no notion of what was going to come down the road and how it would dramatically change the game.
-The Passing Game
Darin Hayes
It was more of a, well, yeah, you can pitch the ball forward and whatever. So it wasn't what you think of it today. They weren't thinking of Aaron Rodgers dropping back and dropping a 45-yard pass on a dime to a receiver who was streaking down the field.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, well, that's right. And so some of it is even. There are some great illustrations of the period that show and discuss the most effective way to throw the forward pass, right? And so, really, I mean, in 1906, there was only one team I'm aware of who threw the ball in the overhand spiral motion that we think of as the forward pass today. Everybody else was trying to figure out, like, okay, well, I'm only gonna toss it a couple of yards or whatever. And so they were. Some thought the best way to throw it was tossing it like a great grenade with a stiff arm or some basketball set shot. There were a variety of different techniques like that, but it was all within a 10-yard kind of radius, maybe flipping it 15 yards downfield to somebody, and just conceptually, nobody had. The skies did not open up, and a stone tablet did not come down, giving the football world a passing tree, right? I mean, nobody had any idea what any of that would have looked like. That was Sid Gillman and 40 or 50 yards in the future before that happened. Okay, 1906, you said the forward pass came in with some restrictions on it.
Darin Hayes
Maybe you could describe some of those restrictions. When the forward pass first came in, at that point, that was during the era of the checkerboard field. And so, probably a fair number of your listeners have seen a checkerboard field at one point or another.
Timothy Brown
But so beyond the normal stripes every five yards, there were lines running perpendicular to those. There were also five yards. So the reason those were there is in 1903, they instituted a rule that said that the first person to receive the ball from the center could not run forward or could not cross the line of scrimmage with the ball unless they were five yards right or left at the center. This was to try to eliminate some fakery that was going on in the center area and to keep them from running up the gut all the time. But so when the forward pass was adopted, they basically followed that same rule and said that in order to throw a forward pass, the passer has to be five yards right or left of the center before they can throw the ball. There were other restrictions, and some of these changed a little bit over time, but there were restrictions. Prior to 1912, it was a more restricted game. So, you know, they had things like you couldn't throw the ball more than 20 yards downfield. You couldn't; if the ball crossed the goal line on the fly or on a bounce, it was a turnover. If you threw a pass and it was not touched by an offensive or defensive player before it touched the ground, it was a turnover. So, you know, if you think about the implications of that, you've got guys who don't really know how to throw a forward pass very well, trying to throw it to people who don't know how to run passing routes. And if they throw it too far, it's a turnover. If they miss, if they have an incompletion, it's a turnover. So it's really not surprising that for the first half dozen or so years of football, the forward pass didn't get used very much other than by a couple of select teams. And some of those did very well. And they were playing with a watermelon ball, too, I imagine, right? More of a rugby, okay. Yeah, I guess that would make it very difficult to try to figure out how to throw that ball, wouldn't it? It'd be tough for us today, I think, to try to figure out how to throw that. Yeah, well, I mean, it really was one of the things. Early on, the ball was so thick that they basically kind of felt like unless the passer had big hands, they couldn't be, in effect, the passer just because they couldn't get a grip on the ball. You know, and the lacing, you know, the laces were just, you know, relatively thin pieces of leather that laced the ball together. They weren't like, you know, we've got polyvinyl chloride laces now that are stiff as, you know, stiff as a brick.
Darin Hayes
So it's very easy to get, you know, to spin on the ball and do those kinds of things. That wasn't the case back then. It reminds me of we had a gentleman who, one of my PFRA friends, Simon Herrera, has a vintage football game. They replicate the games played in the early 1920s in the pro game. And he wanted to try to get it so they wouldn't throw passes. So he had a ball developed for these games that he has every year. That's even a wider girth than the balls that you're talking about in the, you know, 1906. So they can't pass the ball. I forget what it was, like 24-inch girth or something. It's ridiculous, like a medicine ball. So, it was effective. They can't throw a pass with it. So, it sounds like this is a similar situation here for these folks who were trying to throw a pass.
Timothy Brown
Well, the flip side of it is that, you know, as long as you had that rounded ball, you could still continue to dropkick. But once you got to the, you know, there were successive changes to the dimensions of the ball. Once the ball got too pointy, drop-kicking went away because you couldn't predict where the ball was going to bounce anymore. Unless you're Doug Flutie, right? Well, he's playing on Astroturf, not on some muddy field that guys played on back in the day. Right. So, who did throw the first pass successfully? And how did that come about? It seems like everything's against them, wanting to throw a pass. Well, so, you know, one of the things, an interesting thing that happened as the committee was kind of as people are tossing out ideas on the changes that should occur in 1906, there were two teams out in Kansas that decided to play a game, a test game to experiment and institute some of the potential rule changes. So Fairmont, which now is Wichita State, and Washburn played one another. The coach of Washburn was a guy named John Outland; the Outland Trophies were named after them. And so they played a test game on Christmas Day, 1905. You know, it's unclear, exactly, you know, so they threw forward passes, but it's unclear what that means. You know, it's hard to believe that they would have really restructured their offense in a significant way. It probably meant that they just tossed the ball forward on a couple of occasions. I think only one forward pass was completed, and the game ended up in a 0 -0 tie or 6 -6 tie, you know, whatever it was. So, it's not a very good test of the process, but it points out the fact that you really have time to let things sink in and conceptualize the changes that you had as a coach. The last names were Eddie Coach and Coaches. He had played at Wisconsin and, I think, was an all-American or, you know, whatever. He was a star there, but he ended up with a guy named Bradbury Robinson, who transferred from Wisconsin down at St. Louis U. Bradbury Robinson was a big, pretty big guy who had big hands, and he had learned to throw the overhand spiral. I guess he'd learned it by throwing the ball back when he was retrieving punks. But so he all said, you know, here's this guy who has this capability that nobody else had. And so St. Louis U basically and Coaches, you know, built this offense around, you know, it's not like they just went to a passing offense, but, you know, they threw the ball far more than anybody else. They were undefeated in 1906, and before the season, I used to live in St. Louis. I grew up in Wisconsin, but I used to live there. So, I know the weather in both places, and St. Louis is ungodly in the summer in terms of heat and humidity. So he took his boys up to Wisconsin for training camp back in the days when training camp meant he really did camp. And then, as they were getting ready to go back to St. Louis, they played a local school named Carroll College, which is my alma mater. Now it's Carroll University, but they played a game, and Bradbury Robinson threw the first forward pass in a legal, you know, authorized game. So I always claimed that Carroll invented pass defense, which you would want to guess. Yeah, I guess it would be. Yeah. Although St. Louis U won. So, but so that was, that game was played in early September 1906. And, you know, various teams tried the forward pass. Carlisle was, you know, an early innovator in its use. They always liked anything kind of tricky. Otherwise, it really did not get used much over the next couple of years; just because it was, it was heavily restricted. And, frankly, you know, the Eastern teams didn't really like it that much to begin with. Where it really saw some use was out West, and probably the, you know, one of the seminal moments in the forward pass didn't come until 1913 when, you know, Knute Rockne and Gus Dorius at Notre Dame visited Army for a game, and they were throwing the ball all over the place and the New York sports writers and certainly the West Point football team were surprised at what they could do. And Notre Dame beat Army's butt, and, you know, it brought a lot of attention to what you could do with the forward pass if you think about it differently than most teams thought about it to that point.
Darin Hayes
Now, it was sort of a slow progression, though, from 1906 to, let's say, 1912 to get the passing game to be that way, for Rockne and the rest of Notre Dame to throw the ball like that. Can you describe it? I think 1912 you described as being another pivotal year for the forward pass.
Timothy Brown
Yeah. So, you know, for me, there are three things going on. One is, like I said, you know, that, so when they first approved the forward pass, there's just an inability to conceptualize what it could be. I mean, nobody thought it would be what Don Coryell or somebody else would produce, you know, down the road. There was also just an inability to figure out the techniques to use, which we've talked about a little bit. And then there were restrictions. So, you know, the, we had things like, you know, the, you had to be five yards right or left. And, you know, this will play out again, but in a different form, like in the 40s. But, you know, what we think of is any kind of quick passing, you know, so a quick slant. Right. I mean, that's like. They couldn't even think of a quick slant at the time. But because the passer had to be five yards right or left, he could never have thrown a quick slant. He could never have thrown a bubble screen. He could, you know, there are things that we take it, take for granted as part of football today in the passing game, just they couldn't even think about that as an opportunity because it was, it was, it wasn't legal, you know?
Darin Hayes
So, you know, you basically were forcing the pass to occur only on rollouts. Okay, so 1912 sort of eliminated that rule so that they could throw more of a traditional setting that we know passing as?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, so yeah, by 1912, they dropped that 20-yard downfield rule. They, I believe, also dropped the rule that, so I believe by then, you could throw the ball into the end zone. So, until 1912, there was no end zone, right? So there was this undefined area behind the goal line, but because it was illegal to throw the ball over the goal line, they didn't need an end zone per se. It had to be carried over the goal line. And so, in 1912, they changed that. It was just one of those things where there were just these incredible little tiny steps to make the game more open, but 1912 was a big one. So you can throw the ball as far downfield as you want. You can throw it into the end zone. They later had restrictions where you can only throw one forward pass in a set of downs and things like that. But I think things opened up enough in 1912 that people could see how the forward pass could change the game. They still didn't use that much, but it was getting there. But I guess in a way, I know you described this in the book, the passing restrictions being lifted, and especially that having those end zones defined as being 10 yards, it ended up changing the field from what the Canadians, you know, have the 110-yard field goal line to goal line, still to this day.
-Stadium Evolution
Darin Hayes
But our stadiums in this, like you described, I know Harvard and Yale and of a couple others had the cement stadiums where they were restricted with that only so much room to put a stadium, and they had to change100-yard100 yard field with the two end zones, is that correct?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, a little bit; I added a little bit just to say that Harvard is an example. Harvard built what is still their stadium in 1903, and it was the first, or the largest, reinforced concrete building in the world at the time, blah, blah, blah. But the point was it was there, and it was gonna stay there, right? They had built that stadium so that it could accommodate a regulation football field, a fairly small track, and some sideline area. Well, one of the discussions they had in 1905 was whether we should widen the field like the Canadians had to open up the game. And, you know, with Harvard being one of the dominant forces in the game at the time, they were like, no, we're not changing our stadium, so we need to keep it as is. So, they didn't widen the field in 1905. When it came to 1912, you ran into an issue with the length of the field, not its width. And so there were stadiums like the Polo Grounds in New York City where a lot of college games were played. Back then, a lot of college games were played in baseball parks because that's where the stadium was for, right? Right. And so, depending on the configuration of the ballpark, you might not be able to fit the 110-yard field with 10-yard end zones on the end of it, so 130-yard field. You might only be able to fit a 120-yard field. So what they ended up doing is they eliminated the 55-yard line and, you know, before, you know, kickoffs had been from the midline instead of the 40, and they switched it to the 40 and things like that. So, you know, fairly innocuous kind of change, but, you know, that's one of the, you know, Americans changed to the 50-yard line. It wasn't the Canadians who bastardized our game; we bastardized the game that we had kind of collectively agreed on. And the same thing with three downs. That's sort of the way that Walter's camp designed it, with three downs. And, uh, we also changed that out here. So that occurred in 1912 as well. So we switched to four downs to gain 10 yards at that point. So, actually, probably 1912 is almost as impactful as, uh, 1906. And maybe, maybe not as much as like the early 18 eighties, but, uh, uh, truly some big changes there. And I can see why you have that incorporated as your next era, the second phase of football. Cause there's a lot of going on there. Yeah. Tremendous changes. And then, and then from then on, you know, I mean, there's more tweaking, some of which, you know, some tweaks are bigger than others, but, uh, 1906 to 1912 was a, you know, a period of turmoil, but they, they kind of game came out of it and, and started moving forward, a combination of thinking about the game differently, new techniques, and then rule chains listened up the passing game.
Darin Hayes
Now, Tim, what do you think would have happened, you know, now that we know the whole story arc of the passing game and all the changes that came because of between 1906 and 1912, uh, in your opinion, would the game of football survived without those revisions?
Timothy Brown
You know, it's one of those where, okay, without revisions, I think the answer is no, you know, I, I just, I think there was enough push for the game too, you know, enough recognition, the game was a dangerous game that, uh, without changes, I think it would have died, um, but I'm not sure that would have happened, you know, I think just like today, you know, yeah, I think football still has a lot of dangers in front of it in terms of CTE and all of that, but I think the game's going to change, you know, it's, it will address it. It's, you know, there are enough people who want the game to survive, and there's enough money behind. You know, people who want the game to survive will adjust as it needs to. Um, it may be slower than some folks would like, but it will adjust. And so I think the same thing there. I think if, if the game, um, if it had not changed in 1906, okay, it probably would have been 1908 or 10 or something, but had it not changed, then, then I think it would have, you know, what we saw with, you know, as you mentioned, teams drop the drop football or schools drop football, you know, Columbia dropped football, Northwestern dropped football, USC dropped football, Cal dropped football, Stanford dropped football, but those out in California, they, they switched immediately to rugby. And so, you know, one of the more interesting questions, I think, is whether America switched from American or gridiron football to rugby. How would that have affected the game of rugby? You know, you know, how would the, you know, would, would rugby be the same game it is today if America had been involved? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't, but I guarantee you just based on the, just the sheer population of the country and, and the, you know, I mean, the big game, the California Stanford game in the years that they were playing rugby, that got all the attention that the football game had in the past, big crowds, big press coverage, all of that.
Darin Hayes
Yeah, I believe even to this day, Australia is playing two or three different versions of rugby, just in that much smaller country than ours. So yeah, I guess that would have had a big impact on rugby if the United States had been playing that.
Timothy Brown
So very interesting, very interesting. Canada had a, you know, Canada kind of went off in a different, in its own direction; they played what was called Canadian rugby, which had some elements of American football. It had bounds and a scrimmage, but it was still much more of a wide-open game, no blocking, you know, at that time, whereas American football picked up blocking in the 1880s. So, and then they eventually merged back towards an American-like football, you know, so Canadian football is now very close to American football, but Canadian rugby, until the twenties or so, probably was as similar to rugby as American football. And then that's sort of where the Gray Cup came out. It was the Canadian rugby originally before the CFL.
Darin Hayes
So very interesting. Now, as you said earlier, I, as you said earlier, have a book on the military. Maybe you could tell us what the name of that book is. And I guess we're both your books and where folks could buy them at.
Timothy Brown
So, one book is Fields of Friendly Strife. So, it comes from General MacArthur's quote about the playing fields at West Point. But that's basically a book that follows the teams that played in the 1918 and 1919 Rose Bowls. So it was World War I. And so rather than, for various reasons, rather than having college teams play in the Rose Bowls, they had military teams play. So there was the Marine training camp on the West Coast. It was Mare Island. There was an army training camp up near Tacoma called Camp Lewis. They played in the 1918 game. And then Mirror Island met Great Lakes from near Chicago in the 1919 game. That game included guys like George Halas, who became a fairly famous name in football. But he was on the Great Lakes team, as were a number of others, some pretty talented athletes. So basically, the book kind of follows those teams as they play in their season. Of the guys who had played in 1918, about half of them ended up shipping out and ending up in France during World War I. So it kind of traces them all through that period and then their lives afterward. Wasn't that the game where Patty Driscoll touched on a pass to Halas? That's the game? Okay, okay, okay. All right, great, great.
Darin Hayes
Okay, so you have a website that's named after that original book. Maybe if you could tell us what that is so listeners could go and check that out. Yeah, so Fields of Friendly Strength, it started off really to support my first book.
Timothy Brown
And then, as I kind of turned the corner, a lot of my early information covers World War I and the teams and games. And then I pretty much go right into just various history of football topics. So I would say the last 50 articles or posts that I have are pretty much straight football, but football history. Mostly pre-1960 and a lot of older stuff. I post articles, two or three articles a month. It's available at fieldsoffriendliestrife.com. I've got a Twitter account and Facebook. So, if you either search my name, Timothy P. Brown, or Fields of Friendly Strength, you'll come across it. It's, you know, if you search Fields of Friendly Strength and you're looking for me, you're gonna find it, so.
Darin Hayes
Okay, well, we'll also be listeners. We will have a link to Tim's site on our show notes of the podcast you're listening to, or you can go to pigskindispatch .com. We'll also have some backlinks there to get you there. So we'll make sure we get you in the direction if you need that help. So a great, great site. I highly recommend the site. I highly recommend the book. Just a tremendous job that you did. And coming from an official to an old coach, that's hard to give compliments, I guess, going both ways, but I really enjoyed it.
Timothy Brown
You know, we're natural enemies, you know, as my friend, Josie Ziemba says, you know, so. You know, it's a funny thing. I think for me, some of the stuff I enjoyed most of all in doing the research was the role of officiating. You know, it's just the, so, you know, like things that the book covers, it covers, you know, when did referees start? What did referees wear along the way? What were their uniforms? When did penalty flags come into play? When did whistles or the horns that they used come into play? When did the gun come into play? You know, the referee signals, you know, signal penalties. Well, that had to start, too. So all of those kinds of things, you know, they weren't there when football started. They had to develop. And so we just try to identify as best as I could when those things started and who we can credit with those kinds of changes. Yeah, those evolutions still happen recently because I don't know if you probably remember, but probably about 15 years ago, the NFL went from white knickers to wearing black pants, which in the officiating world was humongous.
Darin Hayes
I had some arguments probably 25 years ago with some people I officiated with that were traditional. I said, no, white knickers are the traditional pants of officials. I said, well, here, let me show you this photograph from 1903, and what's this guy wearing? He's wearing a black suit coat with black pants and dark-colored pants. And I hated the knickers because, especially before, everybody had turf fields, you had grass stains, mud, and you know how washing white is. It's tough, especially if you do a Friday night game; you gotta go do JV games the next day. And you have only so many pairs of white knickers. So it's- Well, one of the things I've got in the book, but one of my favorite aspects of officiating was, you know, until the 20s, maybe the 30s, there was really no training for officials.
Timothy Brown
You were just a former player who knew most of the rules. And so, and you had to be somebody people trusted, kind of thought you were a citizen, right? Most football officials wore their letter sweaters when they were officiating. And it was, and if you look at box scores, really through 19, really through World War II, the box scores of most games would list the officials, and they tell you the school that they attended. And it was because, you know, if you were an Ohio State guy, you did not officiate Ohio State games. You might do Michigan and Indiana and Pitt or whatever. But so you're wearing your letter sweater of a different team was kind of a number one said, I know what I'm talking about because I want a football letter.
Darin Hayes
But secondly, I'm impartial. You know, I'm not rooting for the two teams that are on the field today. Yeah, I know I've read some things where, like, Walter Camp, as he was coaching Yale, would go to New York City to officiate the, you know, the Harvard Princeton game, for instance; I know a couple of instances.
Timothy Brown
So yeah, and, you know, there's, you know, some of the earlier Rose Bowls, you know, USC was a lesser team back then, but you know, they were their head coach, you know, was officiating the Rose Bowl, you know, he was local, didn't have to pay a whole lot more than the bus fare, you know, and so.
Darin Hayes
Yeah, it's just unbelievable. You know, besides the uniform changing, when I started officiating in the early 80s, or I'm sorry, later 80s, you know, we, as a wing official, you know, the head linesman and the line judge, they had you go probably within two yards of the widest offensive player, you know, so if you had a wideout, you'd be tears. Well, that changed probably in the nineties when the offense changed. There are kids getting faster. They said, okay, plant your butts on the sideline. You know, you don't have to be close to officiating. So, that was a big to do in the officiating world. And I can't even imagine, you know, incorporating things like the forward pass and doing it with the two or three officials on the field when you're so used to that, you know, grind it out the game in the middle, so.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, well, I've got one of the articles on the website about the history of down boxes and chains, you know, generally. And so, you know, back in the day, so, you know, what we now call the down box, back in the day, it really was a box. You know, it was a stick with a box on it that had four sides and one, two, three, four. And they spun it around, depending on what down it was. But then, the linesman carried that around with them on the field, you know? And they'd be, you know, he'd be running downfield with the sharp stick with a box on it. And so it just, you know, certain things like that that just seem crazy now. But it's just the way the game evolved, you know? And so, so that kind of stuff, I just think that you know, it's fascinating to figure out, you know, kind of how it happened and why it changed, you know, from one period to another. Well, it definitely is.
Darin Hayes
You do an excellent job of illustrating the changes and how they affected all aspects of the game; as I said, you do a wonderful job and wonderful job of explaining the history of the forward pass today, and I really appreciate you coming on here and, uh, uh, you know, sharing that with us and, uh, we'd love to have you on again sometime if we can to talk about a different subject because you're very interesting and you're very knowledgeable.
Timothy Brown
So I thank you. You name the topic and I'll be there. Okay. It's fun, you know, fun to, fun to share, share information. Cause there's somebody else out there who's got some insight on something that neither of us have.
Darin Hayes
And so let's learn from them, too. Absolutely. So preserve that football history, and we thank you for that. And that's what we're all about. And, uh, thanks for helping us. Let's do that tonight. So thank you very much.
Timothy Brown
Darin, my pleasure.
A Brief History of Football's Air Age
Before foam and Kevlar dominated the gridiron, a far stranger form of protection reigned: the pneumatic pad. In the early 20th century, players donned inflatable armor, resembling futuristic gladiators more than athletes. This essay delves into the rise and fall of these curious contraptions, a chapter in football history that is both innovative and ultimately deflated.
Timothy P Brown has a geat post on this on Football Archaeology titled: Getting Pumped Up for Pneumatic Football Pads.
The story of air-filled helmets has an early tie to 1903 with a full-page ad for “Spalding’s Pneumatic Head Harness in Spalding's sponsored Football Rules Guide for that year.
Initially, the idea seemed revolutionary. Pneumatic pads boasted impressive shock absorption, reducing the thud of tackles and promising a new era of player safety. However, problems surfaced quickly. The cumbersome air bladders restricted movement, turning agile athletes into clunky robots. Leaks were frequent, leaving players feeling vulnerable and, ironically, deflated. The technology proved impractical, and by the 1940s, air had all but vanished from the playing field.
Despite their short-lived tenure, pneumatic pads hold a significant place in football history. They represent a bold, if misguided, attempt to address player safety, paving the way for future innovations like leather and foam padding.
Their comical appearance remains a quirky footnote in the sport's evolving narrative, reminding us that the quest for protection is often a bumpy, deflated one.
- Transcribed Conversation of Pumped Up Pneumatic Jel with Timothy Brown
Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to another edition where we get to talk to Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com about football from yesteryear and one of the famous tidbits that he's had out recently. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.
Darin, thank you. Looking forward to chatting and getting pumped up. Yeah, like the old Saturday Live skit where they say, we're going to pump you up.
My worst German accent there. So I apologize for that. But yeah, your title is very fitting.
We're saying that because the title of your tidbit from back in August of this past year is getting pumped up for pneumatic football pads. A lot of P words in there, a lot of big words, and a lot of exciting stuff for equipment. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about that story.
Yeah, so this is one of those stories. Last week, we talked about what might have been with St. Louis U football, you know, had they continued playing or if things had gone differently back in the day. So this is kind of similar, but it's one of those things where for, I mean, this happens in all kinds of different product areas and industries, but you know, you kind of have to have this confluence of technology and inventiveness and engineering and manufacturing prowess and everything in order for a product to be successful. And so this is a story where the ideas were there well in advance of actually being fully implemented, but they just couldn't get it done to make it practical.
So, this is really about the first use of pneumatics. So, you know, like inflatable tires and things like that. You know, the first use of pneumatics in footballs was, it was an attempt to, they made like canvas and rubber covered thigh pads, and they'd blow them up, and then you'd insert them into your pants.
And, you know, at the time, most of the thigh pads were like bamboo and other kinds of reeds. You know, if you see somebody looking at the old pictures, you see all these tiny vertical slots. And so it was either that or like quilt material.
So, you know, they're trying to avoid what the, you know, Charlie horses and that kind of thing. So somebody had an idea of pumping up these little pads and using those. So they did that in the thigh pads.
And then there was also, there were also some attempts in the late 1890s to maybe apply it to helmets. And they weren't helmets at the time. And, you know, in my terminology, a helmet has to have some kind of hard protective cover or a crown.
Helmets initially were head harnesses, similar to wrestlers' headgear. So they tried to do that with foot helmets. It didn't really work, but they did use them in France for cyclists and the Tour de France.
And then it just goes, you know, kind of the pneumatic world goes dry as far as its application of football until the 1950s. And then you have the guy Cecil Cushman, who was the coach at the University of Redlands in California. And he was there for a long time, but he was an inventor throughout his time there.
He also got a patent in 1952 for this pneumatic lining for the inside of helmets. By then, helmets had plastic linings, so the idea made sense.
It never, you know, for whatever reason, I mean, it just didn't work. Maybe they just couldn't manufacture them. They weren't reliable enough when you did use them, something happened, but so they never took, took on or took off.
But Cushman is actually, besides being the coach there, he's best known for being the inventor of the strap on kicking tee or kicking shoe, kicking toe. So I've shown this in other tidbits, but I was trying to imagine what the strap on kicking key was. I'm like, yeah, yeah.
Sorry. I misspoke. So it's a kicking toe, but you know, I played long enough ago, you know, we still had straight-ahead kickers and, you know, we had an offensive in college.
We had an offensive tackle who would pull off his shoes, you know, somebody throw the kicking shoe to him, and then he'd, you know, put it on and try to kick the point of the field. Right. So, I mean, teams had done that forever.
So he invented this is basically a big solid block of rubber that fit around the cap of the shoe. And then it had a rubber strap on the other end that you put around your heel. It was actually, you know, pretty, pretty good invention.
But so anyways, that's what he's known for. So then it wasn't until like 1970s when both Rydell and Schutt came out with helmets that had an air bladder inside of them. So, you know, again, on the I'm old enough story, I had, you know, in grade school, I wore a suspension helmet in high school.
It was one of those white pad helmets in college. I thought it was like, geez, I'm in the big time now because we had an air bladder plus the white pads. It was like we almost could never get better than that.
So, you know, anyways, it just took until they had this idea in the 1890s for this pneumatic helmet. But it wasn't until the 1970s that it actually came to fruition. So I just, you know, again, it's just one of those where everything kind of had to fit together.
All the pieces had to come in place or come in, you know, come into place in order for it to work. But it did. And, you know, just one of those theory and practice kinds of things.
They had the theory; they didn't have the practice. Yeah. I'm glad you brought it up.
And because there's a lot of people that, you know, are football fans, but never played the game. Maybe you don't know, you know, you and I and our generation, we've seen a lot, like you've been saying, it's gone on the inside of a football helmet as well as the outside. The outside doesn't look like it's changed all that much, maybe some more aerodynamic, but the materials are much different.
And then, you know, the face masks are different, but the interior, like you say, the suspension or foam or air or, you know, God only knows what the foam pads that come out and you, you know, they kept falling out all the time, and you had all that going on. So, but some people don't appreciate that, the comfort that you have when you have this, you know, big plastic thing or whatever, the composite thing on your head, you know, you want to be comfortable because you have to, that's what you're using to look around and everything else, you know, your vision, everything's affected by it. So I'm glad when you bring up these things, and it shares it with everybody.
Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, I've got a story that I could, well, I'm going to tell it anyway.
My kids think I'm nuts. When I was playing, I used to get the first few days of practice every year. I get these really severe headaches, which basically tells you I probably shouldn't have been playing football, but you know, it didn't matter. So, but so, I mean, it just, it was almost like disabling.
So what I would do, you know, once I got to college, I wanted, I didn't want that to happen. So I'd get the helmet before hand. And then during the last couple of weeks before practice started in the summer, I'd go in the basement before I'm going to ready to go to bed.
And I go pound my head on the floor to, you know, simulate getting this. This is starting to explain a lot about our relationship. And it's just like, I mean, I did that now for three years, but then I'd go to, I'd get a headache, and then I'd go to bed and sleep. But then, once I started practicing, it didn't bother me.
I know it's just idiotic, but it's just one of those funny things. So, part of it tells you the quality of helmets just probably wasn't that good. And then when I look at some of the helmets guys wore earlier on, I mean, you know, I mean, tackling has changed too.
And people don't hit in the same way now. I mean, people are much more forceful in some ways than they were back then. In other ways, less, cause, you know, you didn't, you're not taught to stick your helmet, you know, in a guy's chest anymore, but anyways.
Yeah. I have a whole new respect for you now, Tim. You were right up there with the guy from the Triangles movie—the Dayton Triangles movie is out—and the guy who was tackling the trees to get ready for the game.
I don't know if you saw the highlights of that. I think you were born maybe a couple of decades too late. You should have a different generation.
I actually did. I, I was a kid. You know, I didn't have a plastic, you know, everybody had those little youth plastic cups that were just, you know, they bought them at a dime store or something.
They were garbage load things. So like when we'd play like pickup games, kids would put those on. I didn't have one.
So I had my uncle's leather helmet from his high school playing days, which is sitting up there on the shelf. You can see it. Right.
But anyway, so I'd put that baby. So I needed to protect my noggins. Yeah.
I could remember. Don't feel too much of myself in this, uh, in this episode. Yeah.
I can remember the early seventies. I think all kids on Christmas day would get the shoulder pads, Jersey, and helmet from the Sears Roebuck catalog of their favorite team. Of course, I had a Terry Bradshaw and the Steelers helmet on, and we would all take them to school.
And then at recess, you'd go out in the playground and all the boys, you know, we'd have, you know, you have like 20 different teams, the representative. Still, we'd all be padded up and playing and, you know, doing stupid things that, you know, seven, eight-year-old kids are doing with football helmets on, but good, good fun, but no protection at all. You're right. It's a, just like a, I think it's a foam that was probably less dense than a sponge that we use today.
It was inside of those things. So, there is not very much protection there. But, uh, yeah, I had to order out of the Husky Boys select section of the Sears catalog.
So, I'm with you on that one. Yeah. Tim, you know, we, we appreciate you coming on and sharing, uh, like we said, some of these facets of, uh, the, the equipment and how that's changed the game because, you know, the comfort of the players are a big thing on how they perform.
And, uh, you know, it's these advancements in safety and everything, but they still have a long way to go. People were still getting hurt and getting concussions, and hopefully, you know, that'll get eliminated someday with the technology. But, uh, you have tidbits like this on different areas of football from modern times, all the way back to the beginning of football.
And yet you share on football, archeology.com and some other areas too. Maybe you could share some of those with the folks so they can join in. Yeah.
So really simple. If you're interested, um, just go to football, archeology.com. Um, you know, if you hit a site, you're offered multiple opportunities. I think maybe you're forced to, well, you're, you're offered the opportunity to subscribe.
So it's just provide your email. Then you'll get an email every night at seven o'clock Eastern, that offers a story of the day. Um, if you don't like that approach, then, um, you can just follow me on Twitter at football archeology, you know, under the name football archeology.
I'm also on threads, uh, under football archeology. So as well as on the, uh, Substack app. So whatever works for you, that's how to get, get there.
All right. Well, Tim, we appreciate you coming on and sharing us, uh, another great, uh, thought of how football was played in yesterdays and yesteryears. And, uh, we appreciate it.
And we will talk to you again next Tuesday.
Hey, we're good there. Thank you.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
Timothy P Brown has a geat post on this on Football Archaeology titled: Getting Pumped Up for Pneumatic Football Pads.
The story of air-filled helmets has an early tie to 1903 with a full-page ad for “Spalding’s Pneumatic Head Harness in Spalding's sponsored Football Rules Guide for that year.
Initially, the idea seemed revolutionary. Pneumatic pads boasted impressive shock absorption, reducing the thud of tackles and promising a new era of player safety. However, problems surfaced quickly. The cumbersome air bladders restricted movement, turning agile athletes into clunky robots. Leaks were frequent, leaving players feeling vulnerable and, ironically, deflated. The technology proved impractical, and by the 1940s, air had all but vanished from the playing field.
Despite their short-lived tenure, pneumatic pads hold a significant place in football history. They represent a bold, if misguided, attempt to address player safety, paving the way for future innovations like leather and foam padding.
Their comical appearance remains a quirky footnote in the sport's evolving narrative, reminding us that the quest for protection is often a bumpy, deflated one.
- Transcribed Conversation of Pumped Up Pneumatic Jel with Timothy Brown
Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to another edition where we get to talk to Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com about football from yesteryear and one of the famous tidbits that he's had out recently. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.
Darin, thank you. Looking forward to chatting and getting pumped up. Yeah, like the old Saturday Live skit where they say, we're going to pump you up.
My worst German accent there. So I apologize for that. But yeah, your title is very fitting.
We're saying that because the title of your tidbit from back in August of this past year is getting pumped up for pneumatic football pads. A lot of P words in there, a lot of big words, and a lot of exciting stuff for equipment. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about that story.
Yeah, so this is one of those stories. Last week, we talked about what might have been with St. Louis U football, you know, had they continued playing or if things had gone differently back in the day. So this is kind of similar, but it's one of those things where for, I mean, this happens in all kinds of different product areas and industries, but you know, you kind of have to have this confluence of technology and inventiveness and engineering and manufacturing prowess and everything in order for a product to be successful. And so this is a story where the ideas were there well in advance of actually being fully implemented, but they just couldn't get it done to make it practical.
So, this is really about the first use of pneumatics. So, you know, like inflatable tires and things like that. You know, the first use of pneumatics in footballs was, it was an attempt to, they made like canvas and rubber covered thigh pads, and they'd blow them up, and then you'd insert them into your pants.
And, you know, at the time, most of the thigh pads were like bamboo and other kinds of reeds. You know, if you see somebody looking at the old pictures, you see all these tiny vertical slots. And so it was either that or like quilt material.
So, you know, they're trying to avoid what the, you know, Charlie horses and that kind of thing. So somebody had an idea of pumping up these little pads and using those. So they did that in the thigh pads.
And then there was also, there were also some attempts in the late 1890s to maybe apply it to helmets. And they weren't helmets at the time. And, you know, in my terminology, a helmet has to have some kind of hard protective cover or a crown.
Helmets initially were head harnesses, similar to wrestlers' headgear. So they tried to do that with foot helmets. It didn't really work, but they did use them in France for cyclists and the Tour de France.
And then it just goes, you know, kind of the pneumatic world goes dry as far as its application of football until the 1950s. And then you have the guy Cecil Cushman, who was the coach at the University of Redlands in California. And he was there for a long time, but he was an inventor throughout his time there.
He also got a patent in 1952 for this pneumatic lining for the inside of helmets. By then, helmets had plastic linings, so the idea made sense.
It never, you know, for whatever reason, I mean, it just didn't work. Maybe they just couldn't manufacture them. They weren't reliable enough when you did use them, something happened, but so they never took, took on or took off.
But Cushman is actually, besides being the coach there, he's best known for being the inventor of the strap on kicking tee or kicking shoe, kicking toe. So I've shown this in other tidbits, but I was trying to imagine what the strap on kicking key was. I'm like, yeah, yeah.
Sorry. I misspoke. So it's a kicking toe, but you know, I played long enough ago, you know, we still had straight-ahead kickers and, you know, we had an offensive in college.
We had an offensive tackle who would pull off his shoes, you know, somebody throw the kicking shoe to him, and then he'd, you know, put it on and try to kick the point of the field. Right. So, I mean, teams had done that forever.
So he invented this is basically a big solid block of rubber that fit around the cap of the shoe. And then it had a rubber strap on the other end that you put around your heel. It was actually, you know, pretty, pretty good invention.
But so anyways, that's what he's known for. So then it wasn't until like 1970s when both Rydell and Schutt came out with helmets that had an air bladder inside of them. So, you know, again, on the I'm old enough story, I had, you know, in grade school, I wore a suspension helmet in high school.
It was one of those white pad helmets in college. I thought it was like, geez, I'm in the big time now because we had an air bladder plus the white pads. It was like we almost could never get better than that.
So, you know, anyways, it just took until they had this idea in the 1890s for this pneumatic helmet. But it wasn't until the 1970s that it actually came to fruition. So I just, you know, again, it's just one of those where everything kind of had to fit together.
All the pieces had to come in place or come in, you know, come into place in order for it to work. But it did. And, you know, just one of those theory and practice kinds of things.
They had the theory; they didn't have the practice. Yeah. I'm glad you brought it up.
And because there's a lot of people that, you know, are football fans, but never played the game. Maybe you don't know, you know, you and I and our generation, we've seen a lot, like you've been saying, it's gone on the inside of a football helmet as well as the outside. The outside doesn't look like it's changed all that much, maybe some more aerodynamic, but the materials are much different.
And then, you know, the face masks are different, but the interior, like you say, the suspension or foam or air or, you know, God only knows what the foam pads that come out and you, you know, they kept falling out all the time, and you had all that going on. So, but some people don't appreciate that, the comfort that you have when you have this, you know, big plastic thing or whatever, the composite thing on your head, you know, you want to be comfortable because you have to, that's what you're using to look around and everything else, you know, your vision, everything's affected by it. So I'm glad when you bring up these things, and it shares it with everybody.
Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, I've got a story that I could, well, I'm going to tell it anyway.
My kids think I'm nuts. When I was playing, I used to get the first few days of practice every year. I get these really severe headaches, which basically tells you I probably shouldn't have been playing football, but you know, it didn't matter. So, but so, I mean, it just, it was almost like disabling.
So what I would do, you know, once I got to college, I wanted, I didn't want that to happen. So I'd get the helmet before hand. And then during the last couple of weeks before practice started in the summer, I'd go in the basement before I'm going to ready to go to bed.
And I go pound my head on the floor to, you know, simulate getting this. This is starting to explain a lot about our relationship. And it's just like, I mean, I did that now for three years, but then I'd go to, I'd get a headache, and then I'd go to bed and sleep. But then, once I started practicing, it didn't bother me.
I know it's just idiotic, but it's just one of those funny things. So, part of it tells you the quality of helmets just probably wasn't that good. And then when I look at some of the helmets guys wore earlier on, I mean, you know, I mean, tackling has changed too.
And people don't hit in the same way now. I mean, people are much more forceful in some ways than they were back then. In other ways, less, cause, you know, you didn't, you're not taught to stick your helmet, you know, in a guy's chest anymore, but anyways.
Yeah. I have a whole new respect for you now, Tim. You were right up there with the guy from the Triangles movie—the Dayton Triangles movie is out—and the guy who was tackling the trees to get ready for the game.
I don't know if you saw the highlights of that. I think you were born maybe a couple of decades too late. You should have a different generation.
I actually did. I, I was a kid. You know, I didn't have a plastic, you know, everybody had those little youth plastic cups that were just, you know, they bought them at a dime store or something.
They were garbage load things. So like when we'd play like pickup games, kids would put those on. I didn't have one.
So I had my uncle's leather helmet from his high school playing days, which is sitting up there on the shelf. You can see it. Right.
But anyway, so I'd put that baby. So I needed to protect my noggins. Yeah.
I could remember. Don't feel too much of myself in this, uh, in this episode. Yeah.
I can remember the early seventies. I think all kids on Christmas day would get the shoulder pads, Jersey, and helmet from the Sears Roebuck catalog of their favorite team. Of course, I had a Terry Bradshaw and the Steelers helmet on, and we would all take them to school.
And then at recess, you'd go out in the playground and all the boys, you know, we'd have, you know, you have like 20 different teams, the representative. Still, we'd all be padded up and playing and, you know, doing stupid things that, you know, seven, eight-year-old kids are doing with football helmets on, but good, good fun, but no protection at all. You're right. It's a, just like a, I think it's a foam that was probably less dense than a sponge that we use today.
It was inside of those things. So, there is not very much protection there. But, uh, yeah, I had to order out of the Husky Boys select section of the Sears catalog.
So, I'm with you on that one. Yeah. Tim, you know, we, we appreciate you coming on and sharing, uh, like we said, some of these facets of, uh, the, the equipment and how that's changed the game because, you know, the comfort of the players are a big thing on how they perform.
And, uh, you know, it's these advancements in safety and everything, but they still have a long way to go. People were still getting hurt and getting concussions, and hopefully, you know, that'll get eliminated someday with the technology. But, uh, you have tidbits like this on different areas of football from modern times, all the way back to the beginning of football.
And yet you share on football, archeology.com and some other areas too. Maybe you could share some of those with the folks so they can join in. Yeah.
So really simple. If you're interested, um, just go to football, archeology.com. Um, you know, if you hit a site, you're offered multiple opportunities. I think maybe you're forced to, well, you're, you're offered the opportunity to subscribe.
So it's just provide your email. Then you'll get an email every night at seven o'clock Eastern, that offers a story of the day. Um, if you don't like that approach, then, um, you can just follow me on Twitter at football archeology, you know, under the name football archeology.
I'm also on threads, uh, under football archeology. So as well as on the, uh, Substack app. So whatever works for you, that's how to get, get there.
All right. Well, Tim, we appreciate you coming on and sharing us, uh, another great, uh, thought of how football was played in yesterdays and yesteryears. And, uh, we appreciate it.
And we will talk to you again next Tuesday.
Hey, we're good there. Thank you.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
Princeton's Sammy White Had a Banner Day
The 1911 Harvard-Princeton game was a doozy that followed a fourteen-year span during which the schools did not play one another. Few conferences existed around the turn of the century, and they focused on eligibility requirements rather than scheduling, so when one school upset another, they stopped playing one another. But Harvard and Crimson decided to let bygones be bygones in 1911 and scheduled an early November game at Princeton’s Osborne Field. — www.footballarchaeology.com
Football Archaeology's Tim Brown tells the tale of Princeton Tigers' baseball star who had a tremendously successful day on the gridiron against a rival.
Sanford Brownell "Sammy" White (1888-1964) wasn't just a Princeton Tiger – he was a multi-sport legend who left an indelible mark on the university's athletic history. His versatility shone across football, baseball, and even basketball, leaving behind a legacy of excellence and innovation.
Gridiron Gladiator:
White's football exploits are perhaps the most celebrated. In 1911, he single-handedly propelled the Tigers towards the eastern college football championship. His incredible performance against Harvard included:
Scoring seven of the eight points for Princeton.
He repeated some equally remarkable Johnny on the Spot plays a few weeks later in a 6-6 Tigers win over rival Yale.
All-American Selector at the time, Walter Camp, probably saw only these two contests in person, and with that information, White was selected as a consensus All-American.
Baseball Champion:
White wasn't just a gridiron warrior; he was also a talented baseball player.
He led the Tigers to a baseball championship in 1911, serving as team captain and showcasing his skills as a batter and pitcher.
Beyond the Diamond and Gridiron:
White's athletic prowess extended beyond football and baseball. He also played basketball at Princeton and later went on to coach in several sports, including football at Haverford College.
He was a pioneer in the field of athletic administration, serving as Princeton's Director of Athletics and contributing to the development of intercollegiate athletics in the United States.
A Multifaceted Legacy:
White's impact wasn't just about victories and statistics. He was known for:
His athleticism and intelligence: White combined strength and speed with strategic thinking, making him a formidable competitor in any sport.
His leadership: He was a natural leader, inspiring his teammates to achieve their best.
His sportsmanship: White was known for his fair play and integrity, earning the respect of opponents and fans alike.
-Transcribed Sammy White Glory Moment Conversation with Timothy Brown
Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to another edition where we get to go back in time and talk about some good old days of football. And Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology is joining us to tell us about one of his recent tidbits on a very popular item, or maybe not so popular.
We'll find out here in a second to learn something. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Darren, thank you.
Yeah, looking forward to chatting about a Mr. White. Yeah, you have a tidbit from August of this past year titled Sammy White's Moments of Glory. So what would you like to tell us? I assume this isn't the Sammy White who played in the NFL in the '70s.
No, different person, different person. This guy played about 60 years earlier.
-The Football Archaeology of Sammy White
So this was Princeton's Sammy White, who, if you go to Princeton's football website and look for persons of glory who played for Princeton, will still be one of the guys mentioned.
He's really considered one of the top guys, not for his career, but for what he did in a couple of games. So the background on this is that Princeton, there was always the Princeton, Harvard, and Yale triangle with Penn off to the side most of the time. But from time to time, those teams would get mad at one another and disagree for this or for that reason.
And then they just wouldn't play. I mean, they didn't have a scheduling conference at the time. And the Ivy Conference didn't exist until 54, I believe it was.
So anyways, Harvard and Princeton schedule a game for 1911, but they hadn't played for 11 years prior to that due to one of those, somebody got mad at the other. So while there were key events or big events that happened on the field that day, other events happened up in the air. And one was just a hot air balloon travel by the field during the game, which is kind of cool.
But more importantly, that day, a guy named Robert Collier, who was the publisher of Collier's Weekly, the magazine, was an aviation enthusiast, and he got an airplane. So he took his photographer, a guy named Hare, his last name, I think it's Robert Hare. But anyway, he takes him up in the airplane, and they fly past the football field, and Hare takes pictures of the game being played down there on Princeton's field.
So that proves or the pictures that he took that day proved to be the first aerial images of a football game being played. So just one of those little nuggets in a tidbit. So kind of interesting.
Yeah. Anyways, in the game, Princeton's 5-0-2 and Harvard's 5-0 were the best. So, two good teams.
And Sammy White plays for Princeton and he's a senior that year. He didn't even play football as a sophomore. He was a substitute as a junior.
In the spring of his junior season, he was the baseball captain. So, you know, he's a fine athlete. He just wasn't that great of a football player.
But as a senior, he starts at the left end. And in the first seven games, when they went 5-0-2, he didn't really do anything special. He was just kind of there and he continued starting.
But again, nothing really special. So, in the Princeton-Harvard game during the second quarter, Harvard gets the ball down to the 10-yard line, and then Princeton kind of stops him. And yeah, this is 1911.
So it's, you know, three downs instead of four downs at the time. So, on third down, Harvard attempts a field goal, but it's blocked. And White happens to be in the right place at the right time.
He picks up the ball and heads the other way and ends up, you know, running the ball right through the goalposts, putting it down for a touchdown. And because he ran it right through the goalposts, they were able to kick the extra point attempt from straight out from the goalposts, from the middle of the field, you know, and they make it. So it's 6-0 because of five-point touchdown time, one point extra point.
So then in the third quarter, White, as an end, is the gunner on a punt. You know, nice long punt. It goes into the end zone.
White tackles the Harvard player for safety and makes it to nothing. And then later on, Harvard scores a touchdown. They convert.
So it's 8-6, and that's the end of the game. So here's this White who hasn't done a darn thing all year long, scores a touchdown, tackles a guy for safety to give Princeton seven of their eight points in the game, and the difference, you know, in terms of beating Harvard. So that's all great.
Then they beat Dartmouth the next week in a tough game. And then they finish, Princeton finishes their season playing Yale on a bloody, not a bloody field, on a muddy field. And they hadn't beaten Yale since 1903.
So, so, you know, they're playing the game. And then at one point, Yale, you know, pitches a lateral, and it goes a little wild, and it just so happens Sammy White is standing there, picks it up, boom heads down the field. And he's getting chased by a guy who finally kind of catches up to him at about the five-yard line, you know, leaps for him to tackle.
And it's on, they're on this really muddy field. So while he gets tackled at about the five, they both slide into the end zone for a touchdown because at the time, you know, forward, they had forward progress, but you actually had to stop the guy. It didn't, you know, he's sliding on the ground, or if he's crawling on the ground, that still was forward progress.
So anyways, he does that, he slides all the way into the end zone. They convert. So again, they take a six, and nothing leads.
Yale ends up kicking a field goal later on in the game, and Princeton wins six to three. So here's this guy who really hadn't done squat. I mean, hey, he's starting for Princeton.
So he's, you know, fine enough athlete, he's been their baseball captain. So, but, you know, he wasn't that good, but he was in the right place at the right time, two or three times in two of the biggest games of the year and on the national championship team, at least, you know, retrospectively or retroactively. So White becomes, White gets named to the first team, the American team.
You know, now, did he deserve it? You know, he makes the biggest plays in the biggest games, but otherwise, he is just an average player. So it's just one of those, it's an interesting, you know, I mean, it's an interesting thing about just generally, but, you know, it's one of those where, you know, did he deserve to be an all-American? Probably not, but he was. And so because of that, and because he helped them win the national championship, he's considered, you know, one of the studs in Princeton's football history.
Sinclair, when you think about that for a little bit, though, I mean, who's deciding the all-America team in 1911, Walter Camp? Well, at that point, it's a guy named Mr. Camp. Yeah.
So, it was probably the two games that he probably saw Princeton play Yale, and it was definitely him, probably the Harvard game. So that's probably the two games that he saw and said, Hey, this guy's going out of his mind. So not only was he on the spot, but he also had the right games to perform those.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, again, back then, there was no film, right? There's no film to watch.
You can't catch the Washington game on television. You know, you can really only go on reputation, what you're hearing from coaches you trust and correspondents that you trust, and what you see with your own eyes. So, you know, Camp saw what he saw and heard what he heard.
And so Mr. White's an all-American. Well, he, uh, lives on in, uh, you know, famously here in legendary and, uh, maybe there are some better players than him on his own team, even that didn't get the credit. And we kind of forgotten them, but, uh, Hey, it's sure fun to talk about them here, you know, a hundred and some years later.
So that's pretty cool. He did. He had a teammate named Hope Colby Baker, who is pretty famous.
So he's the guy who kicked the extra points in each of those situations. So, you know, now he's known more for hockey than he is for football, but you know, yeah. He was a hell of a football player, too.
Yeah. Well, great stuff, Tim. We always appreciate, uh, these tidbits that you come up with and finding these little inkling stories or facts and, and figures and pieces of equipment.
And we really enjoy those. And you share this with, with the, you know, the public each and every day. Maybe you could share with our listeners here, how they too can partake in your tidbits.
Yeah, uh, real simple. Just go to footballarchaeology.com, provide your email address, and you'll get an email every night at seven o'clock Eastern with the tidbit; read them then, or let them pile up, um, until you're ready to read them. Alternatively, you can follow me on on Twitter, on, uh, Substack, on Substack app, or on, uh, threads, all of, all of them under the name Football Archaeology.
So whatever suits your needs. All right. Well, Timothy P. Brown, footballarchaeology.com. We thank you very much for sharing this great story of Sammy White and, uh, bringing his story to our modern times in our modern years.
And, uh, we would love to hear another great story from you next week. Very good. Look forward to it.
A look at the History of Winged Helmets
Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology shares his research and a keen eye for unique helmet designs. This episode focuses on the "winged" helmet design and the homage paid to it by a few teams in the modern era.
Our conversation is based on a Tidbit of Tim's he titled: When Leather Helmets Earned Their Wings.
-Transcribed Winged Helmets with Timothy Brown
Hello, my football friends, Darin Hayes, PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pig Pen. And we have another great episode where we're going to talk to the resident expert, who says that we, well, are not our residents, but we go to footballarchaeology.com residents and talk to their great founder and historian, Timothy P. Brown. Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen.
Darin, thank you. I have a leather helmet sitting here in front of me. Uh, I no longer, it no longer fits.
Yeah, I can see your name etched in the back of it there for, from your, from your playing days, I assume. No, this was for my uncle's playing days. Really? Okay.
So that is a genuine game-playing helmet, then? It's not a game that used Spalding helmets. And, uh, I actually did wear this in my backyard football day days in my youth. When the other neighborhood kids had those plastic, cheap plastic little things, I didn't have one of those.
So I pulled this baby out and protected my noggin. Well, Hey, it, uh, it's in your logo too. So that's, that's always a good thing too, or something similar to it.
So that's great. So folks, if you didn't realize it yet, our topic today is going to be a tidbit that Tim just a little while ago called when leather helmets earned their wings. So we're gonna get some history on these leather helmets that Tim just showed us.
So, Tim, I'll let you take it away. Yeah. So, you know, I think it's, uh, so, you know, fashion and styles are, you know, everybody's got their own tastes, right?
And I have made public my, um, my belief that the 1930s produced the ugliest football uniforms. I've written a poster too on that and provide photographic evidence, uh, which no one has been able to refute so far. Uh, I mean, it just, they just had stripes going.
There were so many stripes, uh, on some of those uniforms that it was just ungodly ugly. But the 1930s also produced winged helmets, which, um, now people associate, uh, typically with Michigan, Delaware, uh, Princeton, and then there's probably, you know, 300 high schools spread across the country that wear those ugly things. But so as not to offend you, if you're a fan of one of those teams, they're still ugly.
So, but then, the point, the real point is not, you know, I mean, I'm an equal opportunity ugliness kind of historian. So, I am willing to discuss the origins of wings and winged helmets. And I think really the funniest thing about them is that they, the first team to wear winged helmets, was not Michigan, but Ohio State, which is just kind of a fun little.
That's really ironic. Yes. So, so what happened, you know, um, in 1930, there were some new rules put in place that required helmets to have different colors or at least contrasting colors.
Now that could be done either by painting them or by, um, you know, I think most people are familiar with the straps that ran across the tops and there were different patterns, including, you know, what we now think of as kind of the Michigan helmet. There were straps running along the crown of the helmet. And so those could be painted or oftentimes when they produce the helmets, it would be the leather would be in different colors.
So the straps might be a dark Brown or a light Brown, and the rest of it, you know, you know, different variation. Um, but they did that because, in the late twenties, there were people who were, you know, uh, on their shirts, on the front of their jerseys, and on their, uh, on the inside of their arms and things. And they'd wear them in the same color as some of them would wear them in the same color as the football.
So then people were confusing the leather on the iron with the leather on the football. And there were even running backs who would like to toss their helmet off so that, you know, defenders would see the helmet bouncing along the ground and think that's a ball. So they kind of put it, put a stop to that, and they said, okay, your helmets have to have contrasting colors, uh, at the same time.
So there was, that was kind of a stylistic, but it also had a functional use. At the same time, the manufacturers were all trying to create better, more protective helmets. And one of the things that they all kind of did at the same time was to add pads on the front of the helmet about where, you know, the forehead is.
And so rather than just put a pad on there, which is what they had done previously, they started stylizing those pads. And so, um, you know, one version was the wing that we think of now where it kind of, you know, there's the, it kind of moves around a little bit, and then there's this, uh, you know, kind of these tips on either side, but there were, you know, that wasn't the only version. There were 20 or 30 different versions of these things.
Some of them were, I don't even know how to describe it. Cause I, I did some looking before we talked about the shape, but it's, um, it's like a cross between an upside down T and a shamrock with three, with three leaves, you know, that there's kind of had this bulb, bulges thing or bulbous thing, like where the wing would be, and then it would extend all the way up to the, to the top of the crown. So anyway, we're just a lot of different variations on these things.
And so the wings were functional because they pat, you know, they provide additional pads, but for the manufacturers, they were making them try to make them look cool, right? So that people would buy them. I mean, if it was between the DMN, DNM helmet, and the reach helmet, and they were the same price and presumably the same quality, well, whichever one looked cooler would be the one that you'd order. So, um, anyways, I mean, that's kind of the whole deal of it.
And the actual, um, tidbit shows a lot of pictures from sporting goods catalogs at the time. But what's happened is that despite there being many variations back then, every team that I see pretty much has the same today. You know, the same teams are all the teams today that use that winged look seem to pretty much have the same look, you know, they don't, you know, they don't, they don't use the other versions that were available.
So, if you're a high school coach or somebody out there who has an influence on helmet designs, you can go your own way and adapt to one of the looks from the thirties, which is something other than the Michigan helmet. Well, I'm going to have to, uh, make a true confession here that I didn't figure out that Michigan's helmet, 'cause that's the one that's the most popular of these winged helmets. I didn't realize, you know, it was a winged helmet.
I thought that was representing their mascot, the Wolverine. And I was trying to envision a Wolverine. I'm thinking, boy, Wolverines have stripes going down her back and down her sides like that.
And like the wings were sort of the ears of it. That's what I thought, you know, it was until I got into college and found out otherwise, but I never realized it was; they were sort of modeling it after the leather helmets that came before them on the plastic and whatever they make them out of now. But, uh, so very interesting.
So, I'm glad you felt comfortable sharing that with us. Yeah, I am. So there are probably people I'll get the mail coming in now.
You idiot. I mean, there's all kinds of things like that where, you know, I didn't realize that this is where that came from. Yeah.
I guess I never really put a lot of thought into it, but I just assumed it was a Wolverine. I mean, so, um, actually, in my book, How Football Became Football, I've got a picture of, I can't remember his name right now, but an offensive tackle for Ohio State and, you know, wearing the helmet from 1930. So, uh, proof positive that, uh, you know, Michigan didn't invent the things, but, you know, they're obviously the ones that are all associated with them.
And it takes a Wisconsin fan to point that out about the Michigan state. Actually, there's a Michigan state fan who has documented a fair amount of this stuff on the internet. So you want some others to, uh, to jump in on that big ten rivalries, uh, going back in history and picking on their headgear, uh, all good stuff.
Well, Tim, that was really enlightening. And I appreciate you coming on and sharing this tonight. Now you have these tidbits that come out each and every day, uh, seven days a week, 365; you're a busy guy and, uh, you, you like to share them, and you like people to enjoy them and comment and, uh, share them with other people.
Why don't you, uh, tell folks how they can get a hold of your tidbits on a daily basis? Sure. So, the easiest way is to go to footballarchaeology.com. Um, when you hit the site, if you haven't been there before, it's going to ask you to enroll or subscribe. All you have to do is just enter your email.
Uh, it's free. You'll get, uh, you'll get an email every night with whatever the story is for that day. And, uh, you can also follow me on Twitter.
You know, obviously, I'm going to throw out some other things on Twitter besides, you know, more commenting on somebody else's things, but I do share all my tidbits there, but subscribing just ensures you get it. And then you can, you know, it's in your inbox. You can ignore it for two weeks and then read whatever you want to read.
So, you know, that's kind of the value of subscribing to you. Um, but yeah, it's supposed to be fun, and hopefully, that's the way it comes across. All right.
Well, folks, I highly recommend you, uh, take Tim up on that offer to get the tidbits and whatever your preference is to get it and, uh, visit footballarchaeology.com and see the wisdom and knowledge of Timothy P. Brown in action. Tim, thanks a lot. And we will talk to you again next week.
Thank you, sir. Look forward to it.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
Our conversation is based on a Tidbit of Tim's he titled: When Leather Helmets Earned Their Wings.
-Transcribed Winged Helmets with Timothy Brown
Hello, my football friends, Darin Hayes, PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pig Pen. And we have another great episode where we're going to talk to the resident expert, who says that we, well, are not our residents, but we go to footballarchaeology.com residents and talk to their great founder and historian, Timothy P. Brown. Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen.
Darin, thank you. I have a leather helmet sitting here in front of me. Uh, I no longer, it no longer fits.
Yeah, I can see your name etched in the back of it there for, from your, from your playing days, I assume. No, this was for my uncle's playing days. Really? Okay.
So that is a genuine game-playing helmet, then? It's not a game that used Spalding helmets. And, uh, I actually did wear this in my backyard football day days in my youth. When the other neighborhood kids had those plastic, cheap plastic little things, I didn't have one of those.
So I pulled this baby out and protected my noggin. Well, Hey, it, uh, it's in your logo too. So that's, that's always a good thing too, or something similar to it.
So that's great. So folks, if you didn't realize it yet, our topic today is going to be a tidbit that Tim just a little while ago called when leather helmets earned their wings. So we're gonna get some history on these leather helmets that Tim just showed us.
So, Tim, I'll let you take it away. Yeah. So, you know, I think it's, uh, so, you know, fashion and styles are, you know, everybody's got their own tastes, right?
And I have made public my, um, my belief that the 1930s produced the ugliest football uniforms. I've written a poster too on that and provide photographic evidence, uh, which no one has been able to refute so far. Uh, I mean, it just, they just had stripes going.
There were so many stripes, uh, on some of those uniforms that it was just ungodly ugly. But the 1930s also produced winged helmets, which, um, now people associate, uh, typically with Michigan, Delaware, uh, Princeton, and then there's probably, you know, 300 high schools spread across the country that wear those ugly things. But so as not to offend you, if you're a fan of one of those teams, they're still ugly.
So, but then, the point, the real point is not, you know, I mean, I'm an equal opportunity ugliness kind of historian. So, I am willing to discuss the origins of wings and winged helmets. And I think really the funniest thing about them is that they, the first team to wear winged helmets, was not Michigan, but Ohio State, which is just kind of a fun little.
That's really ironic. Yes. So, so what happened, you know, um, in 1930, there were some new rules put in place that required helmets to have different colors or at least contrasting colors.
Now that could be done either by painting them or by, um, you know, I think most people are familiar with the straps that ran across the tops and there were different patterns, including, you know, what we now think of as kind of the Michigan helmet. There were straps running along the crown of the helmet. And so those could be painted or oftentimes when they produce the helmets, it would be the leather would be in different colors.
So the straps might be a dark Brown or a light Brown, and the rest of it, you know, you know, different variation. Um, but they did that because, in the late twenties, there were people who were, you know, uh, on their shirts, on the front of their jerseys, and on their, uh, on the inside of their arms and things. And they'd wear them in the same color as some of them would wear them in the same color as the football.
So then people were confusing the leather on the iron with the leather on the football. And there were even running backs who would like to toss their helmet off so that, you know, defenders would see the helmet bouncing along the ground and think that's a ball. So they kind of put it, put a stop to that, and they said, okay, your helmets have to have contrasting colors, uh, at the same time.
So there was, that was kind of a stylistic, but it also had a functional use. At the same time, the manufacturers were all trying to create better, more protective helmets. And one of the things that they all kind of did at the same time was to add pads on the front of the helmet about where, you know, the forehead is.
And so rather than just put a pad on there, which is what they had done previously, they started stylizing those pads. And so, um, you know, one version was the wing that we think of now where it kind of, you know, there's the, it kind of moves around a little bit, and then there's this, uh, you know, kind of these tips on either side, but there were, you know, that wasn't the only version. There were 20 or 30 different versions of these things.
Some of them were, I don't even know how to describe it. Cause I, I did some looking before we talked about the shape, but it's, um, it's like a cross between an upside down T and a shamrock with three, with three leaves, you know, that there's kind of had this bulb, bulges thing or bulbous thing, like where the wing would be, and then it would extend all the way up to the, to the top of the crown. So anyway, we're just a lot of different variations on these things.
And so the wings were functional because they pat, you know, they provide additional pads, but for the manufacturers, they were making them try to make them look cool, right? So that people would buy them. I mean, if it was between the DMN, DNM helmet, and the reach helmet, and they were the same price and presumably the same quality, well, whichever one looked cooler would be the one that you'd order. So, um, anyways, I mean, that's kind of the whole deal of it.
And the actual, um, tidbit shows a lot of pictures from sporting goods catalogs at the time. But what's happened is that despite there being many variations back then, every team that I see pretty much has the same today. You know, the same teams are all the teams today that use that winged look seem to pretty much have the same look, you know, they don't, you know, they don't, they don't use the other versions that were available.
So, if you're a high school coach or somebody out there who has an influence on helmet designs, you can go your own way and adapt to one of the looks from the thirties, which is something other than the Michigan helmet. Well, I'm going to have to, uh, make a true confession here that I didn't figure out that Michigan's helmet, 'cause that's the one that's the most popular of these winged helmets. I didn't realize, you know, it was a winged helmet.
I thought that was representing their mascot, the Wolverine. And I was trying to envision a Wolverine. I'm thinking, boy, Wolverines have stripes going down her back and down her sides like that.
And like the wings were sort of the ears of it. That's what I thought, you know, it was until I got into college and found out otherwise, but I never realized it was; they were sort of modeling it after the leather helmets that came before them on the plastic and whatever they make them out of now. But, uh, so very interesting.
So, I'm glad you felt comfortable sharing that with us. Yeah, I am. So there are probably people I'll get the mail coming in now.
You idiot. I mean, there's all kinds of things like that where, you know, I didn't realize that this is where that came from. Yeah.
I guess I never really put a lot of thought into it, but I just assumed it was a Wolverine. I mean, so, um, actually, in my book, How Football Became Football, I've got a picture of, I can't remember his name right now, but an offensive tackle for Ohio State and, you know, wearing the helmet from 1930. So, uh, proof positive that, uh, you know, Michigan didn't invent the things, but, you know, they're obviously the ones that are all associated with them.
And it takes a Wisconsin fan to point that out about the Michigan state. Actually, there's a Michigan state fan who has documented a fair amount of this stuff on the internet. So you want some others to, uh, to jump in on that big ten rivalries, uh, going back in history and picking on their headgear, uh, all good stuff.
Well, Tim, that was really enlightening. And I appreciate you coming on and sharing this tonight. Now you have these tidbits that come out each and every day, uh, seven days a week, 365; you're a busy guy and, uh, you, you like to share them, and you like people to enjoy them and comment and, uh, share them with other people.
Why don't you, uh, tell folks how they can get a hold of your tidbits on a daily basis? Sure. So, the easiest way is to go to footballarchaeology.com. Um, when you hit the site, if you haven't been there before, it's going to ask you to enroll or subscribe. All you have to do is just enter your email.
Uh, it's free. You'll get, uh, you'll get an email every night with whatever the story is for that day. And, uh, you can also follow me on Twitter.
You know, obviously, I'm going to throw out some other things on Twitter besides, you know, more commenting on somebody else's things, but I do share all my tidbits there, but subscribing just ensures you get it. And then you can, you know, it's in your inbox. You can ignore it for two weeks and then read whatever you want to read.
So, you know, that's kind of the value of subscribing to you. Um, but yeah, it's supposed to be fun, and hopefully, that's the way it comes across. All right.
Well, folks, I highly recommend you, uh, take Tim up on that offer to get the tidbits and whatever your preference is to get it and, uh, visit footballarchaeology.com and see the wisdom and knowledge of Timothy P. Brown in action. Tim, thanks a lot. And we will talk to you again next week.
Thank you, sir. Look forward to it.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
The Unbelievable Story of Left-Handed Quarterbacks & Their Own Football
Footballs come in all shapes and sizes, but are you aware that at one point, they made unique balls for passers who were either left- or right-handed?Timothy... — www.youtube.com
Footballs seem like they are suited for almost any player to use, and they currently are. That was not always the case, though. There was a time when footballs were indeed designed with handedness in mind. In this post, we'll delve into the history of handed footballs, explore the reasons behind their creation, and discuss why they eventually fell out of favor in professional football.
Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology visits us in this episode to share the story of the righty and southpaw editions of the pigskin.
If you love the football talk on history and evolution, then you should check out the original article Tim wrote : Right- and Left-Handed Footballs.
Transcript of Conversation of Right and Left Handed Footballs
Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of Pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. it is Tuesday, and Everybody who follows us knows What happens on Tuesday. We have our friend Timothy P Brown of football archaeology calm Join us for another glimpse back in football history and learning something great Tim.
Welcome back to the pig pen. Hey there, good to be with you this evening. I look forward to chatting a little bit about football and Stuff like that. Yeah, you are very Festive between your background and the hat. Is that the Chicago Cardinals or Chicago Marines? I mean, that is correct. So this is the background from 1905, 1905, or 1906. I think it's 1905 Spalding's. You know, their official football guide, And so at least for our purpose today, I'm gonna say it's from the 1905 book, and Yes, since they have the all-American team for 1904.
It looks like, Yeah, So it's got to be that that's pretty and who was National Champions in 1905, in 1905, Michigan Chicago Maroons? Oh, were they okay? Cuz you gave it away to me, and I didn't even get me over the head with a bat, They beat Michigan in the last game of the season On a play that would no longer count the next year because, you know, they changed some rules But they won two to nothing So do nothing. Okay, I think we talked about that game in one of our episodes, and I think we did it.
We did a store or we did a Podcast on it, and I've also, You know, here and there, like on Twitter or something, somebody will say, you know, If you could go back in time and watch one game, what would it be for me? That would be the game. Yeah, Just think about the coaches from that game, Amos Alonzo Stag and Fielding Yost on Michigan's sideline. Oh, yeah. What's his name? You know, his longtime coach at Carnegie, Stephen Walter Stephan? You had Hugo Bezdek, And that's just the Chicago guys, you know, they're up, you know, right? Yeah, Great, great story.
We'll have to rekindle that link for that Podcast episode again so people can enjoy it. That's a good one to listen to, but tonight we have a topic That you wrote on a recent tidbit, and it's called right and left-handed footballs, which sort of caught me by surprise. I remember when I read it back in February when you put it on like, Wow, left-handed football; so it would never have thought so once you tell us a little bit about that tonight. Yeah, so, you know, it's Kind of a, I think it's a fun story just because, you know, When we think about balls being handed, you know, left I mean baseball gloves, There's left hand and right-handed and you know, or any kind of glove basically, I guess You know, but balls Especially round balls. There's tends to be you know You can throw it pick it up or whatever with your right or left hand Bowling balls are the only ones that I really can think of that aren't You know because you gotta stick your thumb in there and fingers and whatnot, so those are left and right-handed I believe but They're drilled right to the individual so yeah so so anyways, and then you know footballs obviously aren't round but You know, so we tend to think of them as universal anyways, right and for the most part that has been the case, but when When they started using footballs in the evening They started painting the balls that that's you know early 1900s as far as I know stag in Chicago actually were the first people That I've got documented, you know documentation that they they painted a ball white Because they had late classes and so they couldn't practice until it was dusk and yada yada So so they start painting balls and then other people picked up on that And you know generally the paint on the ball was Slipperier than Just the tanned leather so that was always a bit of a problem and But you know, they're just worth other than practice and then the really pretty occasional night games People didn't really need to use Painted balls but as as lighting got better and in the 30s in particular is really when lighting Kind of took off right and So, you know high schools were playing under the lights and a lot of colleges, you know added lighting And I think I think that I don't really have You know documented Evidence of this, but I believe that that was so for sure That's when striping came on to the on the balls. Now.
I think the primary reason for that was because If you striped the ball at the end, it wasn't a slippery as a fully painted ball So and they also there was also this whole issue of you know, what I call the camouflaging effect so that You know a lot of teams were still wearing the brown Friction strips or ovals on their jerseys and so a brown ball against the brown Patch could be Kind of hidden People were there teams are starting to wear white jerseys then Stanford was one of them and you know, there were others but so then a white painted ball against the white jersey, you know was problematic so anyways, they started striping them and again, I think it's both the slipperiness and then the So it's a functionality reason and then this camouflaging effect And so, you know, so it's just one of those things where like we know where the stripes go on the ball Right, right Everybody knows it's like two inches to two and a quarter inches in from the tip of the ball and yada You know, I mean, it's a set place and So, you know, we're used to that because that's the only thing we've ever known and yet if you go back and look at the balls of the 30s and into the 50s Originally a lot of the stripes were closer to the laces They had double striping And the you know striping in a couple different patterns they had stripes one or two manufacturers put out balls striped longitudinally rather than You know Latitudinally So anyways, it's just one of those things where you know, it's just Kind of a fun thing where You know, how did they figure this out? And so eventually, but by, you know, the early 1950s, guys like Otto Graham were complaining that the stripe on the ball just happened to hit exactly where he put his thumb. When he, you know, put his hand on the ball, and so, you know, he would complain about it, and then people like John Brody a little bit later. He'd scrape Scrape the paint off the balls that he was gonna use because that was still when teams supplied their own balls, and you know things like that, so eventually, You know, there were enough complaints about this at what the NFL did in around You know in the late 60s the NFL eliminated the stripe on the Underside of the ball. So, you know, each ball traditionally has four panels.
So on the panel Where the quarterbacks where a right-handed quarterbacks thumb would go, They got rid of the stripe on, you know on Well, it's on two different panels because it can hold the ball this way or that way, right, you know and so So if you look at balls from that era, there's a missing stripe on On two of the different two of the panels only have one stripe rather than two And you know two bottoms two bottom panels So then what you know, so Everybody is happy with that and then these two nimrods one called Kenny Stabler and the other Named Bobby Douglas who played for the Bears. They were left-handed, so they showed up. They're like, hey, you know these balls make sense for right-handed quarterbacks. What about us, right? Give me a little bit of love, and so, you know, Davis of Oakland complained about it, and then, in the preseason of 1970, the NFL provided left-handed balls in addition to right-hand balls. So then as an official, the official had to be, You know, They would mark the balls, and I think they just use like a magic marker and they put R or L on the balls To designate that it's a right or left-handed ball and depending on which quarterback was in the game that's the ball that they used and So, I mean, it's just you know, just added to the work that the officials had to deal with They had to inspect more balls, you know all that Kind of Stuff, right? And then somebody finally had the idea. You know, the NFL continued with their right and left-handed balls until 1976, at which point they dropped stripes, right? So before that, they'd use a stripe for night games, but the plain ball for day games, so then in 1975, the NFL or the NCAA Adopted the They adopted the ball that had no striping on the bottom panels Right.
So that's the way it is today if you look at an NCAA ball or stripes on the top two panels, the ones that had joined the laces, But there's no striping on the bottom panels, and this the CFL, on the other hand, They have stripes to go that encircle the ball so So I've always Kind of made the little joke that you know Apparently even though the CFL primarily has Canadian or has American quarterbacks in that league They somehow managed to throw spirals in Canada with a fully striped ball That American quarterbacks can't do when they're in America. So, you know, it's one of those things. I think a lot of times that's stuff. There's as much branding as anything else. You know, it's like CFL wants to have a distinctive ball, and That's one way to do it.
But you know, I don't know. I just think it's Kind of a funny little story. It definitely is the one thing that sort of made me think and I had to keep looking over It's like I have a high school ball.
That's Got the half stripes like you're talking about on the top two panels of the panels that touch the strings, And I'm sitting there thinking, okay, if the big thing was with the Brody and autogram of their thumb resting on it, Why would they put the stripes on that side of the ball? You would think their thumb would be Touching because their fingers would be on the strings, or their thumb would be on one of those two panels, right-handed or left-handed. You would think it almost makes more sense If that was the case; the stripes would be on the bottom two panels that aren't touching. The thumbs gonna rest on the bottom panels on the bottom panels so here is an arena football that one of my sons grabbed at some point. Most Davis to sign it, but So no striping, but if my hand, It's gonna be tough with the way this thing is working. But basically, you know your stripe or your fingers. Okay, so you're I got Okay, and then my thumb is down here on the bottom panel, okay I see I understand that, and if I'm a lefty, so my thumb is on this hand because I'm a righty Lefty, my thumb is on this panel over here.
It does go on the bottom panel. Okay, I'm sorry. You know, I have recently released the history of football in the book. I have images that I got from the Heritage Not Heritage Foundation, but you know, heritage auctions. They had sold a right-handed football, and they sold an NFL right-handed football. That sold a while back, and they gave me permission to, you know, to use those images in the book. Oh, nice. Yeah, So We'll come back to that in a second here, But I have another question. As I was thinking here now, a few weeks ago, You talked about how we had the helmet trickeration episode where that sort of spawned The markings on the helmet so that it would not look like a ball, and you know, you're so we're the stripes on the ball about the same time as the putting Decor on the helmets to make it so they didn't look good.
Yeah, so just to clarify, that helmet trickeration Story that we talked about was from like 1905 Now, and the striping on the helmets didn't kick in until, I Want to say like, 35 or something like that Anyways, you know, it was I think it was in the 30s, but it was for the same reason you know it was because people were There's a running back who would take throw his helmet his brown leather helmet off and to simulate a fumble As far so the first story that I first documentation I found of anybody adding stripes to a ball came in a BYU versus it would be Northern Colorado now and they had a game where one of the teams I think was BYU's wearing white shirts jerseys and Northern Colorado was gonna wear had brown pants that more or less matched the color of the ball, and so they Kind of got into a little bit of a peeing match on that and The the only way they could settle it was to put stripes on the ball So and maybe somebody else's done did it before that but that's the first story. I came across evidence of that happening. So Yeah, so it's it was Kind of. I'm gonna say 33 or something in that Kind of range. So, right in the same middle that decade, then for both interesting.
Okay. Yeah, and then it became, you know, So it's funny, you know, there's some inventions like that that the the manufacturers don't really pick up for a while. But that was one where pretty quickly there were balls available From the manufacturers that were striped or painted and painted and stripped because the white ones would have black stripes The brown ones would have white stripes. There were orange balls with black stripes, Yellow, you know, and ironically enough.
That's your favorite decade when they had the Uglies uniforms, According to some of your writings. Yes Yeah, so there was a lot of eye candy in the mid-30s for football Unf.ortunately, there aren't as many color photos from that period That I can use as Evidence, but some of them, even the black and white it, 's pretty clear how ugly they are Maybe some of those new modern AI apps that color in you know, your old family photos are in black and white and everything and they look pretty good So maybe some of that will help us to augment the history here Played around with some of those things and I'm still trying to figure out exactly what I want to be able to show using AI Images, I thought I thought earlier when you were going reaching back for the football. I saw a box of 64 Crayola's back there. So maybe, oh Wait, we can't. We can't see anything back there.
We just see you disappear into your back. Hey, I wanted to get you thinking a little bit, but Tim, you alluded to it a little bit that you have a book out Yeah on this very subject, and once you tell us a little bit about the book Yeah, you know, it's just so I'll just be real quick. But you know what I found is, You know, I've now got, you know, Coming up on a thousand articles on my football archaeology site, And I had two or three books that I published earlier on football. And so, you know, I've got there's Kind of information scattered all over the place I wanted to so I'm starting a series of books to Kind of condense or consolidate information on Specific topics and so the first one that I did was on the history of the football. So it just looks at Like where did the ball come from? How did it get its shape? Why why is it shaped? Why does have this? prolate spheroid shape You know, why is it constructed the way it's constructed? How did it change over time? Why did it change over time? You know, what were some of the influences when did it get smaller thinner? Etc.
And so, you know as a transition from rugby to football so anyways, just Kind of tells the story of all of those changes and You know, it's just a fun, you know, I think it's fun little read that Kind of just goes into as far as I know It's the first book that looks at you know, the history of the football and maybe that should tell me something But I you know, I think it was Kind of a fun topic No, no, it's definitely a fun topic and I appreciate you. You're letting me have have an advanced copy to read it and it's a great read folks and Definitely want to get a copy of that and Tim as long as we're plugging it. How can people get their hands on the book? Yeah, it's available on on Amazon and I don't know if it will be immediately available through like Walmart and Barnes & Noble, but I'll just tell you I make the most money if you buy it from Amazon I'll make as much money if you buy it from the other sources, but you know, if that's what you need to do Have at it, but it's it's available In you know paperback.
It's 135 pages. So, you know pretty quick read So it's available in paperback Kindle so, you know ebook it's now available on audio So if you prefer to consume in the car, it's not my beautiful voice. It's some, you know artificial voice But it sounds pretty good.
And then And if you you know, if you have Kindle Unlimited, you've got that subscription in the books free so My second favorite f-word free Yeah Kind of like, you know, it's like Spotify the artists still get paid if you listen to your music on Spotify, but just not as much As if you buy it straight up, yeah, well
Tim we appreciate it Of course folks you can visit Tim on his website footballarchaeology.com Check out his tidbits like the one that we talked about tonight and more that he has a thousand articles Like he said so
Tim we thank you for joining us and we will talk to you again next Tuesday.
Very good. Thanks, sir
Goldsmith Sports Equipment 1935 Consulting Staff
This is the first of seven articles in a series covering the 1935-36 Fall & Winter GoldSmith Athletic Equipment catalog. Preceding each section of the catalog is a one-page cartoon about the history of that type of equipment, in today’s case, football pants. — www.footballarchaeology.com
The Football Archaeology of the Football Men Who Endorsed and helped Goldsmith Sporting Goods to make football equipment in 1935.
Helmets are probably the first piece of equipment we think of when someone asks us about football. The head covering may be the most recognizable element of the gridiron.
Timothy Brown, like many of us, is enamored by the evolution of the football helmet as a product and safety device. Tim collects football catalogs selling the equipment and then dives into the variations and innovations that were derived along the way.
In a recent post, 1935 GoldSmith Sports Equipment Consulting Staff, Tim delved into the 1935 Coaching Consultants and reps that GoldSmith had and then came on to share what he found with us on a podcast episode.
-Transcription of 1935 GoldSmith Sports Equipment Consulting Staff with Timothy Brown
Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to another Tuesday as we get to visit with our friend Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.
Thank you, sir. Look forward to chatting again, as always, and hopefully we'll have something interesting for people to listen to.
Yeah, you, Tim, you have some amazing things happening, you know, each and every day, and every once in a while you get some of these zingers that like, just like, I can't call it an earworm, I don't know what it is, it just, it stays with me all day when I read it. I read it in the evening and it stays with me through the night. I'm laying in bed thinking about it, wake up next morning, and one of those is, you keep going into the Goldsmith's catalog, and you had one that, you know, that you had back in September out as a tidbit that talks about some staff that Goldsmith's catalog got some information from, so maybe you could talk a little bit about that tonight.
Yeah, so, you know, so I guess, you know, first off, just, you know, by way of background, I have something on the order, you know, 30 or 40 vintage sporting goods catalogs, you know, so I collect them over time, or I've collected them over time, it's just a way to be able to look up, okay, well, you know, some of it's just images, you know, for the tidbits, but it's also just, you know, you can look at them and understand, okay, this is what this equipment was made of at the time, and how things changed and things that they created that disappeared because they didn't really work very well, or they were uncomfortable, you know, whatever it may have been. Anyways, I collect these catalogs, and most of them, I'm just, you know, I'm buying them online, and so I don't, typically, I'm only seeing like cover photographs, a couple of inside pages, but I don't know what, you know, it's not like, you know, it can be a 90 page catalog, but I'm only seeing images of a couple of them. Anyways, this was one of those, you know, I bought this, Goldsmith was a big brand at the time, and I didn't have a lot of Goldsmith catalogs, so I, you know, picked this one up.
And, you know, then once it was delivered, it was like, right away, okay, this is really cool, because in addition to just normal pages, showing the equipment, the pricing and everything for shoulder pads and helmets and whatever, each of the different major types of equipment, they had a lead in cartoon page that kind of told the history of that type of equipment, the history of football shoes, the history of helmets. And so, it was, number one, it's just kind of fun imagery, they're interesting cartoons. So, it was just a way to, you know, kind of go through those, and then, you know, what I've done, you know, it's a series of, there will be an eighth week now, but, you know, so it's just a way to publish, to do these, show these cartoons, and then just go through the equipment of the time.
And so, this is mid-30s, you know, so what was equipment like, you know, then. And so, this, the first of those cartoons was about what they called their consulting staff. And so, that was, you know, essentially, consulting staff was like, the coaches, and one trainer, who were their, like, their advisory staff, they were the guys who they would go to, to talk through, you know, what kinds of changes do we need for the equipment, or if they had a research and development group, they would show them, they'd show these coaches, hey, here's what we've come up with, what do you think about this? Can you have you guys wear this stuff in spring practice, or in regular practice, and see how it performs? You know, so they were, you know, obviously, these coaches were paid.
And in many cases, they, that, you know, the manufacturers would then, you know, just like your old baseball gloves, where it was like, the Mickey Mantle glove, or whatever, you know, there were, there were pants, and helmets, and footballs, that had the Newt Rockne name on it, or who met Pop Warner, and John Heisman, and, you know, so. Well, Tim, was, was Goldsmith, were they sort of in the Midwest? Is that what I'm getting a sense of? Or what part of the country were they centered out of? You know, a lot of the coaches that are on this advisory staff are Midwest guys. So, I kind of get a sense of that.
But, you know, there was a lot of Midwest, like D&M was out east, they were like a Massachusetts firm, but Spalding was Midwest, Reach, I believe, was Midwest, or a couple down in St. Louis. So, yeah, I don't have that catalog in front of me. But I could, you know, I could look, look it up.
And I can, you know, let you know, you know, kind of where they were based. Yeah, that's, that's what I was, Is there a reason you ask her? Well, I know that Spalding was out of Chicago, and it just seemed, you know, and it seems like, like you said, this, a lot of these coaches are Midwestern teams, Western Conference, Big Ten teams. And I just wondering, you know, if there was a reason why maybe, you know, distribution or something that they were in the center of the country because you really, you think about that area, you know, football starting in the east and moving west, you'd almost think the equipment would be more of an eastern-based, you know, industrial shipping out.
But just curious. Yeah, I think, well, my understanding is a lot of it was the stockyards in Chicago, you know, so there was access to leather. Okay, you know, so I mean, so much of the early equipment, yeah, so much of the early equipment was leather, that, you know, it made more sense to be where you could pick and choose and get high-grade leathers and yada, yada, yada.
So, yeah, I mean, it's funny, it's one of those things you wouldn't even think is, you know, there's no reason anymore, you know, to be near a source of leather.
Obviously, you know, baseball gloves are a different story. But otherwise, you know, most football equipment, there's no leather involved anymore.
And then the ball, you know, obviously, the balls were leather. So anyways, yeah, that's, that's why I love it, you know, started in the Midwest. That makes perfect sense.
Okay, thanks. Yeah, so, so then, you know, like these coaches were, you know, the folks that they had on at that point, so in 1935, they had a Hunk Anderson, who was at North Carolina State, but it just finished a tour at Notre Dame. So Midwest, then he had played at Notre Dame.
Noble Kizer was at Purdue. Fritz Crisler was at Princeton, but he had been at, he had played at Uof Chicago. He had coached Minnesota before going to Princeton.
And then obviously ended up at Michigan. Doc Spears had been all over. Well, he kind of he was a journeyman, he was actually a doctor, but a football coach, but he was at Wisconsin at the time.
And I can't remember if he had just gone there. I think he got fired after that, and then went out to Oregon, or it could have been the other way around. And then this guy, Frank Major Wandel, from Yale, who was, he was one of those interesting guys at the time, there were a lot of, it's kind of like, you know, there are these strength and conditioning coaches now who are, you know, kind of, they have their own brand, they're, they're nationally known, nationally recognized guys.
And, you know, back then, there were trainers like that, too. And he was one of them. So he'd been longtime trainer at West Point, and he ends up down at, I think it was LSU for a couple of years.
Then he ends up at Yale, which is where he was at at the time. So, so actually, the mix isn't that much Midwestern. But it's interesting, because the image that you have, and folks, if you've got to enjoy these images that Tim's talking about, we have link in the show notes, you can go to Tim's page and see some of these, he's talking about these cartoons.
But Major Wandel, you know, everybody else is sort of wearing like white knickers. And he's got like, I don't know if they're plaid knickers, or, but that's what jumps out of you on the page to me, is these knickers. And it's he's in the lower right hand corner of the page I'm looking at, but he must have been a character to have some like looks like he's golfing, maybe.
Yeah, I mean, he's one of those guys who just like came out of some gym in New Jersey, and ended up eventually hooking in with, he did some training, you know, during World War One, and then ends up at West Point for quite a while. But yeah, I mean, back then, trainers were function both. They handled both the kind of sports medicine side, you know, they weren't physicians.
But when we think about athletic training, we're thinking about, you know, hot baths, and cold baths, and, you know, taping guys, and, you know, some kind of contraption, you know, so it doesn't hurt, as well as strength and condition. So they were both at the time, and mostly conditioning, they didn't do as much strength work. But yeah, a lot of these guys were, you know, they're big on the whole, getting guys to roll on the ground to toughen them up.
Things that we now think are pretty absurd, but, you know, that was kind of core beliefs at the time. Yeah, I can remember back when I was playing when I was, like, I think the first year I played, maybe I was in fifth grade or something. I remember our coach, he was old school.
He was an older guy. And you'd have part of your calisthenics, you'd run in place, and then drop and make sure your stomach hits first, because that's going to toughen your gut up, you know, as everybody gets the wind knocked out of when you hit the ground, and you're gasping trying to get back up. But I picture that kind of training.
Yeah, that was the deal. But one of the things I thought was kind of cool, I can't remember, you know, which eater left this as a comment or a question, but, you know, I'm a Purdue fan. And, you know, there were a lot of schools back in the 30s that wore winged helmets, right? I mean, we now associated with just a select few schools.
But back then, it was very common. Nevertheless, you know, this guy made a comment that you know, back in the 30s, mid-30s, in particular, Purdue wore winged helmets, you know, so wing in front straps, you know, going back, kind of, you know, the Michigan, Delaware, Princeton style now. But she's like, so that's where you know because Noble was one of these advisory coaches.
And so I would bet if you look at images of the Purdue team from that era, there probably weren't some, some form of Goldsmith helmet, right? So as opposed to some competitive brand. So anyways, but for him, it was kind of a neat insight because it's like, so that's why they were those, those stupid. Now, with these coaches, sort of being on the board of directors, or the consultants of the now the day, is that, you know, their teams buy all their equipment from a Goldsmith, then is that was that's part of the deal of, you know, I've never really seen anything that goes into the details of those kinds of contracts.
I mean, I've read a few things about Knute Rockne because he was like, I mean if you think that there's somebody that, that is on every commercial nowadays, like, you know, save been, you know, down in Alabama's on a fair amount of stuff. But Rockne was, I mean, he was pitching, obviously, all kinds of athletic equipment. And then he pitched Ramblers or Studebakers, you know, one of those brands, he made coffee, he did all you know, stuff for Kelloggs, a lot of stuff for Kelloggs, and they had coffee at the time.
I just thought Barbasol was big on Barbasol. So he was from a Holmes and Travis Kelsey, eat your hearts out. Newt Rocky was first.
That's right. Major sponsor ambassador. Yeah.
Okay, so well, yes. Did the coach or did the teams buy that brand of equipment? And so I've never really, you know, I've never seen anything definitive. In that regard, and I have this kind of a storyline I've never checked into.
You know, I have read a number of things with Newt Rocky and his, you know, he, he promoted a lot of different kinds of consumer goods, but then also a lot of football equipment. So I mean, I have to believe that they, at minimum, they benefited from the, you know, they got discounts on the equipment, and in some cases, free stuff in order to test it, you know, it had to be that kind of thing going on. But, you know, the research I've done in the past about, you know, like when logos first came, you know, when logos became prominent in the 60s, really Adidas, you know, among track athletes that whole thing got going, and they were, you know, giving away equipment, paying athletes to wear their branded goods.
So that's really where that started. But there were probably, you know, less, you know, maybe a little bit less formal, you know, kinds of, you know, deals in the past, right? You know, yeah, I'm just picturing like a high school coach or athletic director saying, Hey, you know, Fritz Kreisler's endorsing this product, goldsmith, we better write our equipment there, because, you know, we're, we're Fritz Kreisler fans, or, you know, you know, Hunky Anderson fans, whatever, you know, they see they're endorsing it. And, you know, that's probably a lot of the attraction from for having them on the covers.
Yeah. And, you know, I'm sure they got that they got paid something just like, you know, the baseball gloves. And, you know, those athletes got things, and somehow they get money when their gloves are sold.
Right. So right. But, you know, the details of it, I don't understand, or, you know, really know anything about.
I wonder, I picture, you know because you have some great images of the helmets. I wonder maybe, you know, we can look back at some old photographs. Maybe I'll do that in some spare time here and look and see if you can tell a goldsmith helmet from, you know, a Spalding or some of the other manufacturers.
And maybe you can tell that way and say, Hey, you know, Purdue was wearing a goldsmith in 37 or. Yeah. And yeah.
Well, even in that article, I did do that. I couldn't find a good sharp image of the Princeton team from that era to see, well, what helmet they wore? Well, in fact, what I, the only thing I really found was a, it was a painting or an illustration from a year, you know, Princeton yearbook. And the helmets of Princeton players are wearing what we think of as a classic winged helmet.
It was. There's a helmet style. It kind of looks like, now I'm blanking on the term, but it's kind of like a three-leaf clover sort of design. It's, you know, so anyway, but, you know, and Goldsmith offered that helmet and, or that style of helmet, but I think others did as well.
So sometimes it's hard to tell like what brand, because, you know, people, you know, they, they wore, you know, they had similar designs, you know, different brands. Okay. Gotcha.
All right. So go ahead and continue. Yeah.
Well, I was mostly just gonna say, I'm not sure, you know, I'm just, I put together some notes in advance. And so I don't know that I had had anything else. I mean, other than just one of the things that's pretty remarkable, as in all the catalogs or in all the different products, is it like on helmets, you could go from, like, say, a $15 helmet down to like one that costs $2 and 35 cents.
So the, you know, they, they end up having these high end helmets, and then, then there's kind of moderately priced ones, and then there's pretty inexpensive helmets. And so you just gotta, you know, it's like now, every helmet has to meet a certain base at least, you know, performance level, you know, based on Noxi. But, you know, back then, it was like, well, no, we, this is a helmet, it's good.
You know, but there's no measurement standards or anything. It's just like you're taking somebody's word for it. Yeah, that leads into one of the questions I was gonna ask you because the the ad for the helmets that you have on this tidbit, you know, it has three examples of helmets that they were promoting.
And all of them say leather lined. Now, what would be the alternative to leather-lined in that era? Would it be like, you know, cloth or something? Or, you know? Yeah, I think the internals were either leather or felt for the most part. And so you'll, you'll also see things.
You pretty much have to look at the less expensive ones to get a handle on the alternatives. For example, moleskin was kind of a high-end material for pants. It was not as popular in the 1930s, but it was still a high-end material.
Canvas was a low-end material. And then there might be different kinds of twills and maybe duck and whatever. I don't even know what some of those things really are, that they're one form of cotton, you know, material or another, but then by the 30s, you were getting into, you know, silk, and a lot of times it's like airplane cloth, which is actually a form of silk.
So silk, and then I'm blanking on the kind of the really shiny material that satin, you'd see that satin, yeah, it's so you'd see satin on the front of you know, certain, certain teams pants. So yeah, I mean, some of it was once they got into some of the, the not-so-like silk, one of the real values of it was lighter, much more water repellent, you know, so it didn't soak up sweat and, you know, water in a rainy situation. So the players, you know, felt lighter, but it also silk is much easier to dye.
And you can do a much broader range of colors, whereas the duck and canvas pretty much always had earth tones, you know, one or tone or another. So everybody wore kind of the same look in pants until New York versus wearing purple pants. So, you know, I mean, it's, you think about it, that was a big deal.
Awesome. Somebody, hey, they're wearable pants. Right? Yeah, I was just trying to go when you were saying, you know, that from the $15 helmet down to the $2 and 35 cent helmet, I'm picturing, you know, hey, you know, varsity players, you get the $15 helmet with a leather lined and freshmen, you're going to get the burlap lined helmets, you know, uncomfortable.
Yeah, well, I'm sure that sure that was short, obviously, the freshmen who were wearing the stuff, those latest and greatest 10 years ago. Right. And the thing on some of that is, I was looking at, so I'm still writing, you know, writing one of these, and it there's, there's kind of like a flap in the back between kind of the ear hole area in the back.
It's got some kind of flexible extension, some kind of elastic band there. So there was that part of the sizing. If you look at the catalog, sometimes not a lot is said about helmet sizing.
And so, you know, I always had a big old water bucket head. So I needed a big helmet. I've got a younger brothers, you know, got a pinhead.
And, you know, so, but presumably, we would have been issued the same helmet. So, yeah, I'm sure they had some kind of size variations, but, you know, they don't talk about much of the catalog size variations. You had to stuff some straw or a rag in the back or something to make it stay on your head.
Tim, that's a fascinating stuff. And you've, you've got a lot of these goldsmiths that you've been coming out as you said, you had an eight-part series on it, but you have a lot of other interesting stuff coming out, you know, seven days a week. Maybe you could share with folks how they could get in touch with you to learn about your tidbits and read them each and every day.
Yeah. So, you know, so my preferring would be that it just visits the site and you subscribe. And, you know, that way, basically if you're subscribed, you can, you'll get the, you'll get the tidbit by email every night.
Cause I assume it's seven o'clock Eastern. If you, if you're a Substack reader, you can also just get it and follow me on Substack. And then, you know, you'll, you'll be able to get them every night.
Some people don't want the email, but there you go. They like getting it on Substack. I also, at least for now, tweet it every night.
And then I also posted on the application threads. So me on one of those, it's always Football Archaeology. You know, if you enter that, you'll find me.
And then it's kind of like happy reading. All right. Well, Timothy Brown, thank you.
Once again, footballarchaeology.com is the place to go and we appreciate you, sir. And we will talk to you again next Tuesday.
Very good.
Thank you. Thanks, Tim.
Transcribed by TurboScribe
The Change from Leather to Plastic Helmets
Riddell invented plastic helmets and offered them first to Northwestern, who wore them for their season opener versus Syracuse in 1940. Other schools wanted to use plastic helmets for the 1941 season, but by then, plastics had been declared a wartime material as the U.S. geared up for war. Schools quickly switched to plastic helmets when they became available after the war, though some players opted to stick with leather. — www.footballarchaeology.com
The modern-day football helmet seems to be changing almost annually to make the game safer. At no time since the inception of wearing protective headgear did it change more drastically than when leather helmets were replaced with the new plastic technology?
One of the top experts in early football rules history Timothy P. Brown joins us in the discussion to chat about the transition of the material composition of helmets. Timothy Brown's FootballArchaeology.com has a daily football factoid that he shares that is really quite interesting in a short read.
This chat is based on Tim's original Tidbit titled: Transitioning from Leather to Plastic.
-Transcribed Leather to Plastic Helmets with Timothy Brown
Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And we like to look down that portal every Tuesday and go into some football archaeology with our friend Tim Brown of that very site, Football Archaeology. Tim Brown, welcome back to The Pig Pen.
Hey, Darin. Thanks for having me back. Looking forward to chatting once again.
Yeah, we are really enjoying these these Tuesday meetings that we have and, you know, talking about some different aspects of football that are sort of some of them are a little out there. They're not directly related to the game. Some are very directly related to the game, but they're all very interesting indeed, and we really appreciate you sharing these with us.
Yeah. You know, I just love football in all dimensions, including the technical side of the game, the fan experience, and how it's handled in the media. And so equipment and uniforms, all that kind of stuff.
And so, you know, I just try to approach it from a different place, you know, every couple of days to, you know, basically try to mix it up, you know, try to do some different things. Well, I'm glad you said you would like to talk about the uniforms and some of the equipment because I think that's a subject I'd like to discuss today because you had a recent tidbit out, and you called it the transition from leather to plastic. It's one of those things that's not directly involved in the game of football, but it's such an important element of it and such a big change that happened to the game.
And I'd sure like to hear about it. Yeah, well, I mean, I think the development of plastic helmets and then, you know, metal-reinforced face masks is one of the defining elements of today's game. And so, I mean, obviously, a lot happened before that, but the game just has changed dramatically as a result of that development.
So, you know, I think the thing that's that, you know, maybe people don't recognize it when they, with the Intercollegiate Football Association, adopted word for word effectively, adopted the rugby rules in 1876. I mean, they changed three or four rules, but nothing, nothing really significant. Well, one of the rules that came along from rugby was a rule that basically said that you could not players could not wear anything that had a hard substance.
And they cited a substance called gutta-percha, which was some kind of rosin or, you know, it was basically like what we might think of as an early plastic. And, you know, it came off of trees from Indonesia or whatever. But so, you know, anything that was hard could not be worn on the uniform.
So, you know, all the protective gear early on was soft leathers. Right. So when they had any kind of head harness, there's a softer leather is heavily padded, both on the outside and inside.
You know, the shoulder pads that they wore were, you know, fairly just pads filled with felt and horsehair and things like that. They used a little bit of sole leather, which is harder leather, on helmets for a little bit around the turn of the last century. And then they got rid of those.
They basically outlawed them. So so then, you know, football went, you know, continued with this no hard substances thing and then, you know, for decades. And then they kind of started allowing a little bit more sturdy helmets.
Right. Those still those tended to be fairly soft on the outside. But then in 1940, Rydell introduced plastic helmets and Northwestern was first team to wear them.
A few other teams had them early on. And then they also the U.S. Army got a hold of them and actually borrowed helmets from West Point and then basically modified it. And then Rydell became a supplier to the Airborne.
So, you know, Airborne trainees wore Rydell football helmets when they were jumping out of airplanes. You know, you see images of that here and there. But so, the football helmet preceded the crash helmet that the pilots were wearing.
Yeah. So until then, you know, there were people who tried, you know, I mean, if you think about the early guys in planes flying around like gliders. All right.
There was a if you were if you're going to hit the ground, you were really going to hit the ground. And so, you know, they tried to do tried to wear various types of pads on their head. But again, it was more like a football helmet.
And a lot of them, you think about the World War one ace and Snoopy and everything, you know, they're just wearing a leather kind of hood. But so they ended up. They started, you know, they used the because of World War two supply issues, they really couldn't produce any more civilian helmets.
So it really wasn't until after World War two that the helmets kicked in the plastic ones. And so they they were adopted pretty, pretty quickly. But there were still a lot of people holding out there.
You know, folks who just thought these things were too hard. They're causing a lot of injuries. Most guys didn't wear face masks at the time.
So, you know, you got hit in the face by a hard helmet. You know, that didn't feel that good. So and, you know, that's, I think, part of the reason why additional people started wearing face masks.
But yeah, I mean, it was just there was this constant battle of should we retain more of the rugby element where you don't pad up and then let the game go wherever it goes, or do we try to protect players from, you know, I mean, what the plastic helmet did was it protected people from skull fractures. Right. I mean, the leather helmet did that to some extent, but not really.
Plastic helmets did do that, but again, they came at the cost of now you're hitting somebody else with a hard plastic helmet. And then coaches started teaching, you know, spearing and things like that. And, you know, some of the blocking changed to take advantage of the hard helmet.
But they eventually outruled all of that or outlawed all of that. So anyway, it was just kind of an interesting period of time. And, you know, really, I think basically by 61 or 62, pretty much everybody had been switching over to plastic helmets.
You can still buy them, but you can still buy leather, is what I meant. But typically, it was, they're selling, you know, pretty much all over or all. So, it was such a long period of time to, you know, like over a decade, it sounds like maybe a couple of decades for that transition; it wasn't like a wide sweeping change where they, you know, the rules maker said next year, everybody wears plastic helmets.
So you had games for probably some participants were wearing leather and some were wearing plastic. Is that true? Oh yeah. Yeah.
And in fact, so the this, that, that tidbit about the transitioning from leather to plastic, there's an image or two that shows some guys wearing the old leather helmets with the straps, you know, crossing the head or crossing the, you know, the top of the helmet. And then other guys, what's clearly a plastic helmet. So, you know, I think through probably 1949, 50, you would see a lot of that.
And then after that, it became, you know, there were just certain people who just, Hey, this is a helmet I always wore. I wore it in high school. So I'm going to continue wearing it.
You had guys who didn't wear helmets at all. You know, you had the Tommy McDonald's of the world, um, in the NFL who didn't wear a helmet. Um, so, but you know, I think there were just some old school coaches who didn't, you know, who just thought that the, the leather helmet was safer.
Um, I think they were wrong, but that's what they thought, you know? So, um, but the, you know, the other thing was that you know, the, you know, the leather helmet, there was like, it kind of, it wasn't a suspension system, but there were, you know, there was padding inside of it, then, the early plastic helmets were all suspension systems, you know, and I don't know if you ever wore one of those, but I did, you know, and there was, you know, it didn't offer anywhere near as much protection as the padded and the airfield ones that, you know, I was able to wear a little bit later. Um, but you know, the other thing that, you know, you, you mentioned about, you know, there wasn't a rule that said you had to wear a plastic helmet, um, that still really didn't come into place. Um, the, um, the national testing organization, I think it's people call it Noxie, but N O C S A E always got the little stamp on the back of the helmet.
Um, that opened its doors in 68, started certifying helmets in 73. And it wasn't until 78 that the NCAA required anyone playing in a game to have one of those stickers on their helmet. That's I didn't realize it was as recent as that.
I was thinking it was back in the fifties or sixties, but yeah, very interesting. That, you know, it was, um, you know, there was, there was a lot of, you know, testing, a lot of universities were involved in testing the helmet quality. Um, Wayne state, uh, here in the Detroit area was big.
Michigan was big on it. Uh, North Carolina was big on it. So, you know, there were various, um, uh, Northwestern did a bunch of.
Uh, testing in the early sixties with like sensors to measure how hard, you know, the level of contact and, you know, the strength of the hits that were occurring. So, anyway, it was all academic research. And so it wasn't until somewhere in the seventies that they really kind of figured out and had a reasonable set of standards that they could even try to enforce.
Isn't it kind of interesting that, uh, sort of the more things change, the more they stay the same? Now we are seeing teams; all the NFL teams, I think, had to wear the guardian cap over their hard shell, which is a softening. I'm not sure exactly what the materials, but I know it's, it's like a dead deadens, any blows that you take it to the head, uh, where you, you know, instead of having that impact, you know, hard plastic, the hard plastic, whatever the materials they make them out of now.
And, uh, it almost goes back to those days of the, the leather of, you know, that impact, but you still have the hard shell underneath it to give that extra protection. So I'm actually, uh, writing an article on the history of the pad, you know, the external pads, uh, just, you know, partly driven by, you know, kind of the prevalence of the, the guardian, uh, pads, but, you know, so it's, it's an interesting thing. There was a Cornell did a lot of development work on that and, you know, their, their students or their players wore, I think it was just a strip, um, you know, through the middle, but the challenge that they had initially with the external padding was, um, that the, like if it's plastic to plastic, it's fairly clean hit boom.
It's that's it. Whereas with the padding that they had then the, the two helmets stayed in contact with one another and increased the force and increased some of the torque. So that was part of the reason why that never really went forward.
And I think that's probably still part of the case, but I know I'm not enough of a technologist to know that. Just as a side note, I think you probably remember the pro caps in the 1990s. I think a couple of members of the Buffalo Bills wore them.
Um, they were the sort of like that, um, almost like a styrofoam, almost like a wrestling mat type material that you'd put over the top of the helmet. Those were made, uh, or actually found by a guy about five, 10 miles from here, founded them here near Pennsylvania. And they were making those.
So, but never, never took off though. Well, actually I think it's called the thing was called materials called Insolite, but that's the stuff that Cornell initially put on top of their helmets and then Ohio state, Oklahoma, Duke, others use them. Um, that was also Insolite was the first material used to create the initial like wrestling mats that weren't made of horsehair and felt and all that stuff.
So, there's a connection between the two. I mean, it was sort of what I described as a wrestling mat. I wasn't too far off then.
Oh, very interesting. Well, Tim, you did it once again, you educated us on something that was a little bit off the beaten path that, uh, maybe us football fans wouldn't pay attention to, but you're keen. I caught another one and we appreciate that.
Uh, why don't you let folks know, uh, where, where they can find more of your material and, uh, follow you on social media? Yeah. So, um, you can just find me at, uh, footballarchaeology.com. Uh, there's an option.
There's always an option to subscribe. And if you subscribe, you'll get the content into your email box whenever I post anything, which is at least once a day. Um, otherwise follow me on Twitter.
Um, and again, just look for football archaeology, and you should be able to find me. Okay. Tim Brown and football archaeology.
Thank you very much. Once again, we'll talk to you next week.
Okay, cool. Thanks, Darin.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
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