Football History

Penalties. The bane of an offense's drive, the lifeblood of a desperate defense. But sometimes, amidst the flurry of yellow flags and frustrated shouting, a penalty emerges that transcends mere frustration and enters the realm of the truly bizarre. This series, spanning articles and podcasts, dives headfirst into the hilarious and perplexing world of odd penalty enforcement in American football history.

We'll embark on a journey through the annals of gridiron gaffes, uncovering those head-scratching moments where penalties were enforced in strange, unexpected, and often chuckle-worthy ways. From the curious case of the two-yard penalty to the flag that mysteriously migrated across the field, no bizarre enforcement will be left unexplored.

Prepare to be entertained! We'll dissect these peculiar situations, analyze the rules (or lack thereof) that led to such unusual outcomes, and relive the reactions of players, coaches, and fans who witnessed these moments of on-field absurdity.

Was it simple officiating error, a product of the game's ever-evolving rulebook, or perhaps a touch of footballing chaos? Join us as we unearth the stories behind the odd penalties, those unforgettable footnotes in football history that remind us that even the most serious sport can't escape a good dose of the unexpected.

So, buckle up, football fans! Get ready to laugh, learn, and reminisce about the times when penalties took a turn for the truly odd, proving that sometimes, the most memorable moments on the gridiron aren't touchdowns or interceptions, but the bizarre ways the game itself unfolds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right. The new and old things. All right.

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

Thank you again, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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Timothy P. Brown, in his FootballArchaeology.com Daily Tidbit, reveals the evolution of pass interference in football. An interesting origin and need for the rule arose as the forward pass morphed.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown Football Before Pass Interference

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 down that historic road into some football archaeology with the host and founder of FootballArchaeology.com, Timothy P. Brown. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Thank you, Darin, for this beautiful summer evening. Glad to be sitting inside in my basement talking with you. And I, too, am in a basement where it's much cooler than the rest of the house and 80-degree weather that we're not used to, going from 50s to 80s in a couple of days.
It's kind of a shock to the system. But we've got a little bit of a shock to the system in one of your recent tidbits that we're going to discuss tonight. And you have a great title to it, and it's called Before There Was Pass Interference.
And I don't think any of us listening or talking on the subject remember before pass interference. So we're really interested to hear what it was like. Yeah.

Yeah. And I still, I've got an article that I've been working on for quite some time to try to describe the difficulty of coming up with a passing attack in 1906. So, the forward pass was new.

And the fact that they, well, they didn't have a pass interference penalty when the forward pass was first legalized. And so, you know, just to kind of set the scene for that or, you know, to describe why, you know, it's the fact that, you know, I think we now tend to think of, we think of passing the way we've always known it, you know, the overhand spiral, throwing the ball down the field, airing it out. And that's not what they conceived of at the time.

You know, football had, you know, all basically always had forward passing. It was just legal. And for them, a forward pass was a forward lateral.
So it was these, you know, just short little, either inadvertent or, you know, on purpose, they tossed the ball forward. And if the referee caught it, they were penalized for it. And it was actually, you know, a loss, you know, they lost the ball.

So when the forward pass was first legalized, most people were thinking in terms of fairly short-range kind of tosses, you know, pitch kinds of approaches. And, you know, the techniques were, you know, there was kind of the basketball two-hand set shot, sort of, you know, pushing the ball to another guy, the grenade toss, things like that. So, and so, you know, if you think of the forward pass in those very short-range kinds of dimensions, you probably weren't thinking in terms of pass interference.

I mean, people were getting jostled around, you know, I mean, they were, somebody was tackling you, and the guy in front of you was blocking and, you know, maybe you pitched the, you know, you pitched the ball to the guy who was blocking. And so, you know, pass interference didn't kind of make sense conceptually. The other thing that was related to that is that in 1906, they also expanded the onside punt.

So, making every player on the offense eligible to run downfield and get and recover a punt for the off or for the kicking team, regardless of whether they were offside or onside relative to the punter. So, you know, and football already had, you know, they didn't call them gunners that didn't come till maybe the fifties or something. But they had, you know, their ends would split out oftentimes on punts if it was, you know, a planned punt.

And so then, you know, that guy would get jostled by a defender all the way down. And so, you know, the expectation was somebody running downfield like that was going to get hit. So there was just not a, you know, they just didn't conceive of a forward, the forward passing game we know and love today.

And so they didn't think of pass interference the same way. And so they played the first two seasons without really without any rules regarding pass interference. And then in in 1908, they adopted a new rule that said the defense can push the offense out of the way to get to the ball and to try to catch the ball.

But there were no restrictions on the offense. So they could they didn't even have to, you know, they could push the guy so he wouldn't catch the ball, you know, the defender to not catch the ball. And so that stuck around until 1910.

That sounds like a whole lot more fun to watch than what we have today. Yeah. Well, you just I mean, you think about it.

I mean, like the, you know, press coverage and, you know, some of the things, you know, where now, you know, the defenders can't hit the receiver, you know, five after five yards downfield, things like that. You know, those rules, you know, weren't around until like, you know, I think it was the early 70s when those rules came into being, you know, and then that was obviously, you know, when the so you couldn't be in contact when the ball was in the air. Prior to that, it was kind of anything goes.

So that was, you know, maybe to some extent, the remnant of it. But yeah, I don't think the five-yard chuck rule in the NFL came into maybe the late 70s or early 80s. I think it was pretty prevalent during the 70s.
You could have contact, and yeah, right. Yeah, because I mean, the Raiders were the, you know, probably the foremost that, yeah, Lester Hayes and Mel Blount were guilty of it, too. All of them were big corners.

So then, in 1910, they said, OK, you can't, you can't make contact. You can't push or shove, you know, but you could kind of use your body if you're making a bona fide attempt to catch the ball, which is fundamentally the rule that we have today. You know, they also just for 1910, they got rid of it in 1911.

They also added the rule that the defender could not tackle the receiver until he had taken one step after catching the ball, which kind of presages, you know, the targeting or defenseless player, you know, sort of sort of thing. But they got rid of it, you know, after just one year and, you know, just left it at, you know, basically at that point, they said, OK, once he catches the ball or touches the ball, then it's Katie bar the door. But so, you know, it's really, you know, it took a couple of years for pass interference to come into being.

And then, you know, by basically 1910, are pretty much our current. Handling and view of pass interference came into being, you know, now what happens in the hand chucking and all that kind of stuff, press coverage that has changed. But pass interference is pretty much what it is.

Yeah, that's that's an interesting look at it. And, you know, it's stayed pretty consistent through all the years. It's too bad that the definition of a catch hasn't stayed that same way because it seems like recently we've lost what, you know, catching the ball is a legal catch anymore.
At least the NFL has. I think college still has it right in high school as a right. But it's a little bit confusing in the NFL anymore.

Yeah, I don't I don't even try to understand that one. I wait for the call on the field and then or from the box and, you know. Well, hopefully they're getting closer and closer to get it back to what it should be, what we all know is a catch and what isn't a catch.

And you just know it's not hard to describe, but you know, when somebody catches the ball. Yeah, it's, but, you know, that's kind of the tough thing for referees to have a basis for their rulings. And that's that's true.

Or officials, I should say. But yeah, it's a it's a difficult one to try to figure out. But, you know, so what's, you know, back to the just the pure pass interference thing.
It's just interesting that they kind of settled on something early on that, you know, has worked for one hundred and one hundred and ten years. And it's really, really pretty remarkable because there aren't that many rules where that has been the case. Yeah.

When you can have a bunch of football minds around the country and throughout the ages all agreeing on something, that is pretty remarkable. Well, Tim, that was another fascinating tidbit that you had recently. Now, folks would love to get their hands on your tidbits each and every day.

And maybe you could give them some information that you can share with them. Yeah. So, you know, I release the stories every day at seven o'clock Eastern.
And all you got to do if you're interested is go to footballarchaeology.com. There's an opportunity to subscribe on every page. And so you sign up and it's free. You get an email in your inbox at seven o'clock Eastern each night.

And so, you know, you can pile them up for the week or read them that minute, whichever you prefer. And if you're not, you know, if you don't want me invading your inbox, you can follow me on Twitter at footballarchaeology.com or not, or just footballarchaeology is my name there. Right.

OK. Well, Tim Brown, footballarchaeology.com. Thank you very much for joining us. And we will talk to you again next Tuesday.

Very good. Thank you, sir.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.