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.
Fumbles and Touch Back History with Timothy Brown
Those feared fumbles in the end zones can be a disaster for teams trying to score. To the defense’s delight, there can be a recovery for a touchback. Timothy... — www.youtube.com
The modern touchback rule in American football, where a ball fumbled out of the end zone results in possession for the receiving team at the 20-yard line, wasn't always the way it was. Its history reveals an interesting journey shaped by strategic considerations, safety concerns, and the ever-evolving nature of the game.
Timothy Brown of FootballArchaeology.com joins us to discuss this interesting but rare football event and its evolution in history.
Early Days and the Muffed Punt: In the early years of American football (late 19th century), recovering a fumble in the end zone, even if accidentally, awarded the recovering team a touchdown. This strategy, known as the "muffed punt," involved intentionally fumbling the ball just before crossing the goal line to score. It was a risky maneuver but potentially offered an advantage in scoring position.
Safety First: Introducing the Safety: Recognizing the dangers of this practice, a new rule was introduced in 1882, awarding the opposing team two points (later changed to one) for recovering a fumble in the end zone, effectively discouraging the "muffed punt" and prioritizing player safety.
Strategic Shifts and the Touchdown: However, the new rule also created a strategic conundrum. Teams facing fourth-and-long situations near their own end zone could intentionally fumble the ball out of bounds for a safety, essentially sacrificing two points to avoid a potential turnover and touchdown by the opponent. This led to the introduction of the "touchback" rule.
The History of Tipped Pass Rules with Football Archaeology’s Timothy Brown
The tipped pass is an exciting play that we see often in the pass-happy offenses of modern times and the athletes on both sides of the ball downfield. The ru... — www.youtube.com
The tipped pass is an exciting play that we see often in the pass-happy offenses of modern times and the athletes on both sides of the ball downfield. The rules we know today concerning the play were very much different than they are today. The video covers the early history of tipped pass rules in American football.
Darin Hayes, is interviewing Timothy Brown from Football Archaeology. Besides the video we have the audio on our podcast too. Brown discusses a time in football history, from 1907 to 1911, when a tipped pass was considered a fumble. This means that if a pass was tipped by a player from either team, the ball was live and could be recovered by either team. This rule was implemented to increase player safety, as the forward pass was a new and dangerous play at the time. However, the rule was eventually changed because it led to too many scrambles for the ball, which could be dangerous for the players.
The video also discusses other interesting facts about the early days of the forward pass, such as how teams would sometimes try to create a circle of players around the receiver to protect him from being tackled.
Modern rules concerning a tipped pass go along these lines. A pass tipped by a defender can be caught by anyone on the field, including a previously ineligible offensive player. Only an eligible offensive player or any defender can legally bring a tipped pass by the offense.
-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on When Tipped Passes Were Live Balls[b]
Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome again to The Pig Pen, your portal for positive football history. It is Tuesday, and we have another special treat: Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com will join us to discuss one of his most recent tidbits. And this one is recent and fresh.
Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Hey, thank you, Darin. Yeah, this is a good one.
This is kind of one of the more bizarre rules or one that most people had no idea was out there because, you know, I just recently came across it. So, yeah, when I read it, I had no idea. You enlightened me.
And I thought I knew, you know, a lot about especially the rules and things like that, but this one caught me off guard. And you've titled it when tip passes were live balls as a little bit of a mystery, but also, you know, sells a point and just sounds odd to our modern year for football. So why don't you explain this to us a little bit? Yeah, so, as I tried to explain in the article itself, you know, with the forward pass, which had been around for a long time.
You know, it just was illegal. You know, if you threw a forward pass and what we would think of as forward lateral, you know, now, but if you did that, you lost possession of the ball. And then, in trying to, you know, open the game following the 1905 season, the rule makers made just a host of different changes to the game.
But one of them was a legalized forward pass. And, you know, the rule book for six only laid out six or seven rules related to the passing game. You know, they just couldn't see what this might become in the future.
And for them, they were thinking of forward laterals, this short little right in the area, kinds of, you know, not not the down downfield passing, which, you know, a couple of teams actually did in 1906. So they had just a really simple set of rules. But, you know, they were and mostly, you know, the game.
They risked the forward pass a lot. You know, if you threw an incomplete pass, it was a turnover and a spot foul. So it returned to the spot of the pass.
If the pass hit an ineligible receiver turnover, if the pass crossed the goal line on the fly, or if it bounced turnover. So, you know, things like that. And then you couldn't throw the ball until you were five yards to the left or the right of the center.
You know, so it was consistent with the checkerboard pattern field. And, you know, the first person to get the ball couldn't run until they were five yards left or right. So so anyways, you know, it just there were a lot of things, restrictions that just are inconceivable today.
But then, you know, they kind of went through a season and they decided to add a few rules. And one of them that they added in 1907 was that if the ball was in the air and touched an an eligible receiver, so an eligible offensive person or defense, then the ball and it it then hit the ground. That ball was locked.
So basically any kind of batted ball by a defender, but, you know, a tipped ball, a dropped ball, you know, from an offensive player, was essentially a fumble. And so, you know, there'd be a pass and somebody would tip, you know, try for it. They wouldn't get it, but they'd touch the ball.
So then, you know, the balls are rolling on, you know, like any kind of situation where there's a fumble, it's a mad scramble to get to the thing. And since the pass was probably a little bit more in the open field because it had to be five yards right or left, you know, all that kind of stuff. There were guys flying in all over the place, trying to get to that ball.
So so it's just one of the it's one of those rules. It just it seems so bizarre that they that they did that. And yet, you know, it was.
So the 1907 season, you know, it's always, you know, if you read through, you know, some of the commentaries, you'll just're reading like an old newspaper report of a game and saying, you know, the ball bounced off of Smith, and there was a mad scramble for the ball. And, you know, Pittsfield State recovered or, you know, whatever. And so then, you know, again, the whole rule of the game rule changes were supposed to be for player safety, and they recognized that there were too many scrambles.
So they made a change for 1908 where they said only the first offensive player that touches the ball. Can you recover it, right? So if you think about it, you know, the football rule that only you know, like if an offensive player touches the ball or touches a forward pass, then it has to have a defensive player touch that pass before an offense can then before a second offensive player can grab it. However, that originated in the 1908 rule, which was trying to eliminate some of the scrambles.
So and then, you know, so it remained in place until 1911, and then they then they cut the rule out. But so you had, you know, so you had seven, eight, nine. So you had a four year period where.
The tip ball was a fumble, you know, effectively. And the other thing that's just funny about that is, you know, talking about teams being unable to really conceive how to throw the pass and how, you know, how do you create a pass route if you've never seen anyone throw a forward pass before? And one of the things that teams did fairly frequently back then until, I think, it was maybe 32. The offensive lineman could go downfield on a pass.
One of the approaches that the teams took was to you'd send all your offensive linemen to the left or something. And then whoever the receiver was, you know, maybe an end, would get in the middle of those offensive linemen. They kind of form a circle around them.
And then they try to pass the ball to, you know, to the middle while the offensive line blocked. The difference is trying to get at him because, again, there was no pass interference yet. So it is probably while the quarterbacks get mauled by like five guys that aren't getting blocked because they often lose the line.
I mean, yeah. So it's just crazy when you think about, you know, what that had to be. You know, plus, you know, again, most guys weren't wearing numbers.
If they had numbers, it was only on the back of their jerseys. But even like Carlisle, as far as I can tell, Carlisle was the first school to paint their helmets. And they did it because they wanted to be able to identify who their players were, you know, in, you know, as they ran downfield, you know, for passes.
That old Glenn Warner was a clever guy. Well, he wasn't there yet. He wasn't.
He was OK. Yeah, he went back and forth between Cornell. You know, he started Cornell, went to Carlisle, and went back to Cornell.
And then he was back at Cornell or Carlisle in 07, but no six. One of the former players, you know, the coach. But they.
They had, well, one of the other things that teams did was like when they circle the guy, some lift them up in the air, like in a, you know, the rugby lineouts, you know, when they're tossing the ball in. And, you know, which was just a few years before, had still been away. One of the ways that football teams brought the ball in from the sideline, you know, from out of bounds, was the law.
Or they call it a fair as well. Anyways, they'd lift the guy up in the air and throw him the ball. But so it's just one of those things that just, again, made sense at the time, maybe, you know, I mean, they were just trying to make some up some things, you know.
But the idea of a tipped pass being effectively a fumble is just kind of bizarre. Yeah, you know, maybe four or five years ago, if you would have said that with the guy in the circle and everybody else, you know, helping him with the before the tush push and brotherly shove or whatever you call it, maybe we would have said, oh, you're out of your mind. That wouldn't happen.
But maybe it's a little bit more the normal activity we see in football these days, which I hope they get rid of because I hate it. But go back to the rule. I'm OK with it.
I'm OK. You don't like the tush pusher. No, I like when they used to have the rule, you know, you can't aid the runner.
You know, that's. Yeah, yeah. Let him know you can block guys in front of you.
You can't pull, push or otherwise move that runner, help them go. I I still I'm a traditionalist. I think that should be the maybe it's not so traditionalist.
Maybe they were helping the runner long before that rule, as you're saying. But yeah, the football I grew up with, you couldn't do it. Yeah, no, exactly.
I mean, it it it went away, you know. Quite a while ago, but I mean, it was part of the original game and then they then they got rid of it really as a player safety issue. I blame it.
I blame it on Matt Leinert and Reggie Bush against Notre Dame in 2005 or whenever it was. That's because they're like the next year that they changed. Right.
Right. Plus, they beat Notre Dame on that play. Yeah.
Well, well. But, you know, back in the day, they. You know what? At the time that they instituted, you know when they.
Said you couldn't aid the runner. Part of it was, you know, you only had three officials on the field. And so that call, you know, officials were reluctant to make the call.
Right. And so anyways, that's part of it. I'm kind of getting a little bit confused now, but anyway, so, you know, it was one of those things where the trying to force the officials to make the calls that that's actually one of the justifications for why they brought it back, because people, you know, nobody wants to make that call.
But yeah, that's true. That's true. But it's getting crazy.
Somebody's going to get hurt. That's my theory. And that's when the rule all of a sudden change and be banned again.
But I don't want somebody to get hurt. You know, it could be offense, defense, alignment, whatever. But somebody's going to get hurt.
But, Tim, you know, we love how you bring up some of these, you know, oddities of football and things, unique aspects or something maybe a team did, you know, a hundred years ago that we never heard of before. And including this rule here, you know, that's just part of football. And it's a great history.
And you do things like this each and every day that you write about and explain very thoroughly, and a lot of times with images that you find in old yearbooks and newspapers. And how can people share in these tidbits that you put on to see them as they're coming out? Real simple. Just go to footballarchaeology.com and subscribe.
Then you'll get an email. Alternatively, you can follow me on Twitter. You can also get the Substack app on threads or through the Substack app because, you know, my blog newsletter is on Substack, and you can follow me on Substack as well.
So, whatever floats your boat. All right. Well, his name is Timothy Brown.
Footballarchaeology.com is his website. And Tim, we appreciate you coming here this Tuesday. And we hope to talk to you again next Tuesday about some more great football.
Very good. Thank you, sir.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
The Football Archaeology of Changes in Pass Interference
One of the most hated/loved calls in all of football is the Offensive Pass Interference call or OPI. It is football at its finest with one player against another battling for position and ultimately the ball.
The calls on OPI and even DPI have changed like the wind over the years to the point that today, it is hard for the average fan and coach to even know what exactly constitutes a foul and what is fair game.
Timothy Brown did his research and went to work on the Changes of Pass Interference in September of 2023. Tim also paid us a visit to chat about the subject.
-[b]Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on Changes to 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 Tuesday where we get to visit with our friend Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.
It's good to see you and hear from you. Oh, wait, I'm getting a little interference. Yes? No, okay. I didn't think you'd have. Okay, I'll stop doing that.
I didn't have a segue into this one, but folks, he did it again. His tidbit was titled, back in September, changes in pass interference penalties, and that's why Tim was really stretching it out there to get the interference for his customary intro into his tidbit.
So, Tim, pass interference has really been a big play for decades. I think that in our generation, that's probably the biggest penalty, where people gain the most yardage in our era, and people almost anticipate every time a long pass is being thrown; they're hoping for one of two things. Either if you're on offense, pass interference on the defense, or the guy catches the ball.
So, what can you tell us about the pass interference back in this era that you're talking about? Yeah. So, one of the most interesting things about pass interference is that the forward pass was legalized in 1906, but for the first two years, they did not have a pass interference penalty. So, they just didn't foresee the need to have a penalty.
And part of it is, I mean, again, you got to go back to, okay, what were they thinking when they introduced and legalized pass interference? They were not thinking about the downfield passing game that we have today. They were thinking about a short toss to somebody who's ahead of you, kind of like an option quarterback who's flicking it to the guy behind him. They were thinking the forward pass would be like that: just little dumps and basketball shots to somebody.
And initially, the ineligible receivers were not limited in terms of where they could go. They could go downfield, they could block. I mean, they could block defenders.
And so, some of the initial pass plays were basically guys who the offensive line would let everybody go. And then, the receiver would get in the middle and be guarded by his teammates. And then they kind of took the ball into the middle of that circle.
And then he'd catch it, and they'd block for him. So, the defensive players were coming in there, flying in, trying to break it apart, break it up because there wasn't any defensive pass interference. And the offensive guys were blocking like they would because there was an offensive pass interference.
So, it took them two years, but then they figured out, okay, well, maybe we shouldn't allow this to be the case. And while the linemen still were able to go downfield, that didn't change. Blake and I would say it started changing in the 30s.
So, there was a long time when linemen could be downfield. And so, in 1908, they said, okay, pass interference was like a 15-yard penalty on the offense and a five-yard penalty on the defense. And I forget exactly why they distinguished the two.
Maybe it's just because the offense was the one who's throwing the ball. And so, they had more control. But then in 1910, then pass interference became a loss of a down for the offense and a 10-yard penalty on the D. So, that became the norm.
One of the things that I always find interesting is that there are bits of the game and elements of how players make decisions, as well as things that are considered unsportsmanlike in an earlier era. But then, now we treat it as, well, that's smart play. And so, one of those was as when there was a loss of down for the or a 10-yard penalty on the defense, they kind of figured, okay, hey, if I'm getting beat on a pass, I'm just tackling a guy.
I'm just going to tackle the receiver. And because I'd rather take and accept the 10-yard penalty than allow a touch pass. And so, I mean, we do that today, right? I mean, a smart D-back is going to do that.
But at the time, once they started doing that—I mean, it took them a few years to do that—it was viewed as really unsportsmanlike. You're cheating, or you're, it was outside the spirit of the rules.
So, in 1916, the colleges increased the penalty to 15 yards from 10. And then, in 1917, they made it a spot. So, you tackle somebody 35 yards downfield, or you interfere 35 yards downfield, then that's where the ball's spotted.
That stayed the case for a long time, but then they started having concerns. Another regular recurring theme in football is the idea that the officials don't want to make calls for really long penalties, severe penalties, or questionable penalties.
So, they swallow their flags. And so, on these long pass interference penalties, when it's a spot foul, people felt like the referee swallowed flags. And so, they finally said, no, you know, we got to get rid of that situation.
And so, in 1984, then the colleges went to a 15-yard penalty, whereas the pros retained, you know, it's still a spot foul, you know, in the pros. So, and let me, I'll just interject by saying this whole issue of the long penalty or that it doesn't even have to be a long penalty, but one that, you know, feels like has an impact on the game. That was one of the reasons why they got rid of, you know, the penalty for what now is being called the tush push, you know, that aiding the runner and helping the runner.
One of the reasons they got rid of that was because it was difficult. You know, sometimes they called it, and sometimes they didn't. It's a judgment call. And obviously, it's, you know, it's either somebody's going for a first down or somebody's going for a touchdown.
So, it had a big impact. And so, and, you know, they just felt like, you know, the referee's officials were reluctant to call it. So, they basically got, took that out of the game, you know, and then later, you know, add it back in.
But it's just, you know, those things are kind of interesting to me. So, both the idea of people like you, referees who swallow their whistles or their flags when, you know, on a long, you know, longer, you know, important penalty situation. So, just that idea.
And then, you know, the change from unsportsmanlike behavior to, hey, that's a smart play. You know, hey, guys, you know, tackle the receiver, do whatever you got to do. Don't let them get the long one.
Yeah. It's interesting when you're talking early in this conversation, and you were telling, you know, how the evolution of the forward pass in the first couple of years of bringing this about. And you sit there, and you got to think back, you know, with these folks, these rules makers, they had no idea, like you said, what the forward pass was going to end up being.
And they had no idea what people were going to try to do to gain an advantage. And so, that's why you see these changes in everything. So, it really is kind of fun to go back and try to look at it from their perspective.
And I think you do that in a lot of the articles that you put on here and, you know, by explaining the rules the way you do. And it's really an interesting endeavor to go back and think that way. You know, God, these guys didn't even think the ball was going to go downfield.
So, why would anybody interfere with them? You know, you're just playing football. Yeah. And so, it's funny.
I've got it; it's an article I've been making notes on for two years, probably. But it's basically, the article is, the gist of it is, what were people thinking in 1906? So, if you were a coach and, you know, speculating on how the forward pass is going to work, both, you know, offense and defense, you know, how did you prepare? You know, because you hadn't seen it. It hadn't happened, right? And so, there's a lot of really interesting newspaper articles from all these experts, you know, respected people who said, oh, here's the way it's going to work.
You know, most of them are wrong. You know, their conception of what a forward pass was going to be and how it would change the game was just off. And most people, you know, thought that the onside kick from scrimmage was going to have much more, you know, substantial effect.
And, in fact, for the first couple of years, it probably did. But, you know, the other thing about, like, rules like this is, it's a reminder that when you're playing a game, no matter if it's Monopoly or Parcheesi or, you know, Hopscotch or whatever, but football, there are lots of rules and every one of them is arbitrary. You know, you could change that rule tomorrow.
And, you know, it's like the tush push, you know, it's a considerable controversy, but you can change it tomorrow. And there's nothing sacred about it. There's nothing preordained.
It's just that people decided to make the rules. And so, change whenever and however you want. And for penalties as well, what's a penalty, and what's the relative punishment that should be tied to each penalty?
All arbitrary. Right. I tell people all the time, you know, it's the most complicated athletic event in the world.
It's got the most complicated rules. Let's say that. And the most complicated of those rules of the game are the plays that only happen once in a while, the kicking game.
That's where all the crazy stuff happens. It's the offensive defense. That's, you know, a piece of cake.
It's you get in the kicking game rules. It's, you know, bar the doors because it's some craziness is going to happen and we see it all the time. And so it's interesting.
Yeah. All right. Well, Tim, you have some great articles, you know, just like this every day that talk about an aspect of football, mainly from antiquity and, you know, explaining how it got to the point of where it is today, or maybe an advertisement or piece of equipment, you know, how can other people share and read your tidbits? Maybe you could give them some information.
So the easiest thing is just to go to www.footballarchaeology.com. You can subscribe here and get an email every night at seven o'clock Eastern. And with that day's story, if you don't want the emails that can follow me on Twitter or threads, because I posted both those or, you know, set up a Substack account and, you know, they've got a reader. And so you'll get, you know, whichever Substack you, you know, apply to or follow, you'll get those coming through your feed as well as the ability to browse for others.
So, you know, that's a great way to do it too. So, whichever one works for you, have a look at it. All right.
Well, Tim Brown, www.footballarchaeology.com. Your link is in our show notes. You know, listeners, you can go there and look at Tim's stuff and enjoy his work. And we will talk to you again next Tuesday.
Thanks, Tim. Thank you.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
The calls on OPI and even DPI have changed like the wind over the years to the point that today, it is hard for the average fan and coach to even know what exactly constitutes a foul and what is fair game.
Timothy Brown did his research and went to work on the Changes of Pass Interference in September of 2023. Tim also paid us a visit to chat about the subject.
-[b]Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on Changes to 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 Tuesday where we get to visit with our friend Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.
It's good to see you and hear from you. Oh, wait, I'm getting a little interference. Yes? No, okay. I didn't think you'd have. Okay, I'll stop doing that.
I didn't have a segue into this one, but folks, he did it again. His tidbit was titled, back in September, changes in pass interference penalties, and that's why Tim was really stretching it out there to get the interference for his customary intro into his tidbit.
So, Tim, pass interference has really been a big play for decades. I think that in our generation, that's probably the biggest penalty, where people gain the most yardage in our era, and people almost anticipate every time a long pass is being thrown; they're hoping for one of two things. Either if you're on offense, pass interference on the defense, or the guy catches the ball.
So, what can you tell us about the pass interference back in this era that you're talking about? Yeah. So, one of the most interesting things about pass interference is that the forward pass was legalized in 1906, but for the first two years, they did not have a pass interference penalty. So, they just didn't foresee the need to have a penalty.
And part of it is, I mean, again, you got to go back to, okay, what were they thinking when they introduced and legalized pass interference? They were not thinking about the downfield passing game that we have today. They were thinking about a short toss to somebody who's ahead of you, kind of like an option quarterback who's flicking it to the guy behind him. They were thinking the forward pass would be like that: just little dumps and basketball shots to somebody.
And initially, the ineligible receivers were not limited in terms of where they could go. They could go downfield, they could block. I mean, they could block defenders.
And so, some of the initial pass plays were basically guys who the offensive line would let everybody go. And then, the receiver would get in the middle and be guarded by his teammates. And then they kind of took the ball into the middle of that circle.
And then he'd catch it, and they'd block for him. So, the defensive players were coming in there, flying in, trying to break it apart, break it up because there wasn't any defensive pass interference. And the offensive guys were blocking like they would because there was an offensive pass interference.
So, it took them two years, but then they figured out, okay, well, maybe we shouldn't allow this to be the case. And while the linemen still were able to go downfield, that didn't change. Blake and I would say it started changing in the 30s.
So, there was a long time when linemen could be downfield. And so, in 1908, they said, okay, pass interference was like a 15-yard penalty on the offense and a five-yard penalty on the defense. And I forget exactly why they distinguished the two.
Maybe it's just because the offense was the one who's throwing the ball. And so, they had more control. But then in 1910, then pass interference became a loss of a down for the offense and a 10-yard penalty on the D. So, that became the norm.
One of the things that I always find interesting is that there are bits of the game and elements of how players make decisions, as well as things that are considered unsportsmanlike in an earlier era. But then, now we treat it as, well, that's smart play. And so, one of those was as when there was a loss of down for the or a 10-yard penalty on the defense, they kind of figured, okay, hey, if I'm getting beat on a pass, I'm just tackling a guy.
I'm just going to tackle the receiver. And because I'd rather take and accept the 10-yard penalty than allow a touch pass. And so, I mean, we do that today, right? I mean, a smart D-back is going to do that.
But at the time, once they started doing that—I mean, it took them a few years to do that—it was viewed as really unsportsmanlike. You're cheating, or you're, it was outside the spirit of the rules.
So, in 1916, the colleges increased the penalty to 15 yards from 10. And then, in 1917, they made it a spot. So, you tackle somebody 35 yards downfield, or you interfere 35 yards downfield, then that's where the ball's spotted.
That stayed the case for a long time, but then they started having concerns. Another regular recurring theme in football is the idea that the officials don't want to make calls for really long penalties, severe penalties, or questionable penalties.
So, they swallow their flags. And so, on these long pass interference penalties, when it's a spot foul, people felt like the referee swallowed flags. And so, they finally said, no, you know, we got to get rid of that situation.
And so, in 1984, then the colleges went to a 15-yard penalty, whereas the pros retained, you know, it's still a spot foul, you know, in the pros. So, and let me, I'll just interject by saying this whole issue of the long penalty or that it doesn't even have to be a long penalty, but one that, you know, feels like has an impact on the game. That was one of the reasons why they got rid of, you know, the penalty for what now is being called the tush push, you know, that aiding the runner and helping the runner.
One of the reasons they got rid of that was because it was difficult. You know, sometimes they called it, and sometimes they didn't. It's a judgment call. And obviously, it's, you know, it's either somebody's going for a first down or somebody's going for a touchdown.
So, it had a big impact. And so, and, you know, they just felt like, you know, the referee's officials were reluctant to call it. So, they basically got, took that out of the game, you know, and then later, you know, add it back in.
But it's just, you know, those things are kind of interesting to me. So, both the idea of people like you, referees who swallow their whistles or their flags when, you know, on a long, you know, longer, you know, important penalty situation. So, just that idea.
And then, you know, the change from unsportsmanlike behavior to, hey, that's a smart play. You know, hey, guys, you know, tackle the receiver, do whatever you got to do. Don't let them get the long one.
Yeah. It's interesting when you're talking early in this conversation, and you were telling, you know, how the evolution of the forward pass in the first couple of years of bringing this about. And you sit there, and you got to think back, you know, with these folks, these rules makers, they had no idea, like you said, what the forward pass was going to end up being.
And they had no idea what people were going to try to do to gain an advantage. And so, that's why you see these changes in everything. So, it really is kind of fun to go back and try to look at it from their perspective.
And I think you do that in a lot of the articles that you put on here and, you know, by explaining the rules the way you do. And it's really an interesting endeavor to go back and think that way. You know, God, these guys didn't even think the ball was going to go downfield.
So, why would anybody interfere with them? You know, you're just playing football. Yeah. And so, it's funny.
I've got it; it's an article I've been making notes on for two years, probably. But it's basically, the article is, the gist of it is, what were people thinking in 1906? So, if you were a coach and, you know, speculating on how the forward pass is going to work, both, you know, offense and defense, you know, how did you prepare? You know, because you hadn't seen it. It hadn't happened, right? And so, there's a lot of really interesting newspaper articles from all these experts, you know, respected people who said, oh, here's the way it's going to work.
You know, most of them are wrong. You know, their conception of what a forward pass was going to be and how it would change the game was just off. And most people, you know, thought that the onside kick from scrimmage was going to have much more, you know, substantial effect.
And, in fact, for the first couple of years, it probably did. But, you know, the other thing about, like, rules like this is, it's a reminder that when you're playing a game, no matter if it's Monopoly or Parcheesi or, you know, Hopscotch or whatever, but football, there are lots of rules and every one of them is arbitrary. You know, you could change that rule tomorrow.
And, you know, it's like the tush push, you know, it's a considerable controversy, but you can change it tomorrow. And there's nothing sacred about it. There's nothing preordained.
It's just that people decided to make the rules. And so, change whenever and however you want. And for penalties as well, what's a penalty, and what's the relative punishment that should be tied to each penalty?
All arbitrary. Right. I tell people all the time, you know, it's the most complicated athletic event in the world.
It's got the most complicated rules. Let's say that. And the most complicated of those rules of the game are the plays that only happen once in a while, the kicking game.
That's where all the crazy stuff happens. It's the offensive defense. That's, you know, a piece of cake.
It's you get in the kicking game rules. It's, you know, bar the doors because it's some craziness is going to happen and we see it all the time. And so it's interesting.
Yeah. All right. Well, Tim, you have some great articles, you know, just like this every day that talk about an aspect of football, mainly from antiquity and, you know, explaining how it got to the point of where it is today, or maybe an advertisement or piece of equipment, you know, how can other people share and read your tidbits? Maybe you could give them some information.
So the easiest thing is just to go to www.footballarchaeology.com. You can subscribe here and get an email every night at seven o'clock Eastern. And with that day's story, if you don't want the emails that can follow me on Twitter or threads, because I posted both those or, you know, set up a Substack account and, you know, they've got a reader. And so you'll get, you know, whichever Substack you, you know, apply to or follow, you'll get those coming through your feed as well as the ability to browse for others.
So, you know, that's a great way to do it too. So, whichever one works for you, have a look at it. All right.
Well, Tim Brown, www.footballarchaeology.com. Your link is in our show notes. You know, listeners, you can go there and look at Tim's stuff and enjoy his work. And we will talk to you again next Tuesday.
Thanks, Tim. Thank you.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
Unveiling the Origins of Intentional Grounding with Timothy Brown
Intentional Grounding is not something you see every game, especially in the NFL, where once a QB leaves the pocket, the foul becomes non-existent. The histo... — www.youtube.com
Intentional Grounding is not something you see every game, especially in the NFL, where once a QB leaves the pocket, the foul becomes non-existent. The history of the foul is almost as old as the forward pas itself, and our Guest Timothy Brown has written about this football no-no in a recent Tibit titled: How Intentional Grounding Came to Pass How Intentional Grounding Came to Pass
What is Intentional Grounding?
Intentional grounding is a penalty called against the offense when a passer throws a forward pass that meets these two criteria:
-Facing Imminent Loss of Yardage: The passer is facing pressure from the defense and is likely to lose significant yardage if he sacks the ball (takes a knee) or throws it away.
-No Realistic Chance of Completion: The pass is thrown towards an area of the field where there are no eligible receivers in the vicinity, or the receiver has little chance of catching the ball.
-Why is the Rule in Place?
The intentional grounding rule protects quarterbacks from unnecessary hits. Without this rule, quarterbacks under pressure might be more likely to force throws into tight coverage, risking interceptions and injuries.
-Exceptions:
There are a few exceptions to the intentional grounding rule:
-Spike: A quarterback can legally throw the ball directly into the ground to stop the clock (spike the ball) if he begins the throwing motion immediately after receiving the snap. Note this must be a hand to hand snap, as shotgun would make this be intentional grounding.
-Batted Ball: If a defender tips the ball at the line of scrimmage, it's not considered intentional grounding even if there's no receiver in the vicinity.
-NFL rules allow a QB to escape the pocket and void intentional grounding rules.
-Penalty:
The penalty for intentional grounding is a loss of yardage, typically 15 yards from where the passer released the pass. If the pass is intentionally grounding in the end zone, it results in a safety scoring two points for the defense.
The Fumble Fiasco Out-of-Bounds Oddities in Early Football
Before 1926, the ball remained live when fumbles, blocked kicks, or other circumstances sent the ball across the sideline or beyond the goal line (or end line after 1911). Ten months ago, I wrote about the days ten in a story focused on the obstacles surrounding football fields — www.footballarchaeology.com
In the hazy days of early American football, before forward passes soared and helmets resembled leather buckets, a curious rule reigned supreme: the fumble out of bounds. Unlike today's automatic touchback, a loose ball crossing the sidelines triggered a bizarre dance of possession.
Fumbles were not over until they were possessed by a player, even if they went out of bounds. This led to some crazy plays that Timothy P Brown of Football Archaeology discusses.
If the offense fumbled near their own end zone, the opposing team gained the ball at the point of recovery, no matter how deep it sailed out. Imagine the frantic scramble, desperation dives into sideline bleachers, and potential chaos as defensive players chased a wayward pigskin like oversized puppies after a chew toy.
However, if the fumble happened near the opponent's end zone, the offensive team retained possession even if it bounced through the stands and landed on a passing pigeon. This paradoxical scenario rewarded sloppiness near enemy territory, potentially turning fumbles into first downs through sheer serendipity.
This strange rule, abolished in the 1930s, reflected the nascent nature of the sport, where improvisation and quirky quirks abounded. While it introduced an element of slapstick into the game, it also highlighted the ever-evolving nature of football's laws, constantly adapting to the growing complexity and athleticism on the field. So, the next time you see a fumble careen towards the sideline, remember: it could have been a winning lottery ticket in the gridiron gamble of a bygone era.
-Transcription of Timothy Brown on Live-Fumbles-Out Bounds
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 have another great evening with Timothy P. Brown of Football Archeology, discussing one of his great tidbits that he shares with us each and every evening on Twitter and on email.
Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.
Hey, thank you, Mr. Hayes. Looking forward to chatting once again about oblate spheroid stuff.
Wow, we're getting into the geometry of the game a little bit. That's right. I got an A in high school geometry.
Did you really? Well, I believe you did because this topic that you have tonight involves a little bit of the geometry of the ball, I'm sure. You never know which way that ball is going to bounce. And you have a very interesting subject of football from yesteryear that we probably wouldn't recognize today.
If we saw this happen and officials let it go, we would be screaming and ripping our hair out from the stands and throwing things at our TV set. So why don't you share with us the topic tonight and the story behind it? Yeah. So the issue here is that when football began, they basically adopted a rule from rugby that when the ball went into touch, what we now call out of bounds, the ball remained live.
So for us now, we think, oh, the ball is out of bounds, so it's dead. Well, no, that wasn't the case. And so, if you think about it, it's comparable to the original rules for scoring a touchdown.
When you got into the end zone, the guy with the ball had to touch the ball down to the ground, which is why we call it a touchdown. And so until he did that, the ball remained live. And so they had much the same rule in place for the ball crossing the boundary line and on the sidelines, not just the end lines or the goal lines, that in order for the ball to become dead, somebody on one of the two teams had to be out of bounds and touch the ball to the ground.
So that's when the ball went dead. So it's just one of those things that we can't fathom. But when you think about it, the consequences of that rule mean that if the ball tumbles out of bounds, there could be obstacles.
Depending on the field, there could be trees. There could be players on your side or on the opposing side. There could be water buckets.
There could be carts and cars and horses and buggies and running tracks. A lot of the fans, you see some of those games where the fans are right on the sidelines. This could really cause some calamity there.
Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of fields. Virtually every field early on, where the sidelines, and I've got a bunch of pictures of these, the sidelines are just ropes.
There's a rope. And even the rule book talks about people behind the ropes. They're talking about fans behind the ropes.
Because they were just roped off, anyway, there's even a great story. In 1892, the University of Chicago took a train across the country, went out to play Stanford a couple of times, and they got a couple of other games in there.
But they were playing Stanford in San Francisco, and the ball went out of bounds and bounced over a fence. And one of the Stanford players would start to go for it. And Chicago had a guy who was a hurdler on the track team, and he hurdled the fence.
And ended up getting the ball before the Stanford guy could. But if you just think about it, in the tidbit itself, I've got some images like you described of the fans and the perimeter. I've got a picture of the University of Maine.
They had a 25-piece band sitting right along the sideline. So the ball could have gone running in there, and the sousaphone or tuba player or piccolo player or whatever could have gotten in the way. Yeah, your image of the Iowa State game with the fans on it.
I think there are fans like five deep all the way around the field, it looks like. I'm surprised that if you were standing on the outside, you wouldn't be able to see any of the players. That's for sure.
Yeah, and if you went and got concessions, there weren't TV screens up there showing you what was going on either. Anyways, all that continued until 1926. And that's when they finally changed the rule.
And at that point, they made it so that the last person to touch it, their team, got possession of it once it was out of bounds. And then later on, it was the last team to possess the ball while in bounds. So initially it was touch, then it became possession before it went out of bounds.
So anyways, it's one of those old-time rules that you just can't believe was in place. But it made sense based on the game's origins. But I just can't imagine some of the things that must have happened.
You know, the guys fighting and everything to get to the ball amid crowds and fans and teammates and whatever. Yeah, it had to be. Now, I just want some clarification on what you said early on.
The rugby term for being in touch, you're saying that's when the man's on the ground touching the ball. That's when the ball's in touch, or when it goes out of bounds, it's in touch. So, out of bounds, I was in touch.
So, the sidelines were called the touchlines. Okay. So, you know, that was just for whatever reason.
I mean, it gets a little bit confusing, too. Just, you know, but so I'm not sure exactly why they called it in touch, but they did. And then, but that was for the sidelines.
That's the out-of-bounds side. And then, you know, once you cross the goal line, you still, you know, old-time films and even in rugby today, you sometimes you see the guy, he'll kneel down and plant the ball to the ground. That's what was the case in football, too.
You had to, you had to for the touchdown. I was just trying, I was looking more from the sideline, what we call the sideline point of view, seeing in touch it, seeing if there was a correlation to try to understand it better.
So, okay. Hey, that's great stuff, as always. You know, that's definitely a fascinating thing.
And it's a way of really looking foreign to us today. As we said, in the beginning, for a ball to go out of bounds, people, you know, 22 guys were chasing it through the trees, the crowds, the bleachers, and everything else. Yeah.
We remember, you know when this stuff was first happening, and when it was really early on, the rest didn't have whistles yet. So, you know, it was all just, you know, they were fighting in there, and somehow, they figured out who had the ball. Yeah.
Officiating nightmare. Thank God I didn't officiate back then. So that's rude.
Well, Tim, that is some great stuff, as always. And your tidbits are coming out each and every day. Tell us how to share those.
And why don't you tell us also about your book, you know, that's still on sale? You know, the hot, hot hike a little bit about that, where people can get that too. Yeah.
So, you know, you can. The easiest thing is to subscribe, you know, go to footballarchaeology.com, and you know, there is a free process to subscribe. And that'll get you an email every night with the story. And again, you don't have to read it that night.
You can read it two weeks later, or you can read whatever you want. But at least you have access to it. And if you want to read it, you've got it.
Otherwise, follow me on Twitter. And then, you know, the book is available. All three of my books are available on Amazon.
So hot, hot hike, you know, either search for that or search Timothy P. Brown. There are a couple of Timothy P. Browns, but I'm the only one who writes books on football. So you should be able to find me.
And, you know, in particular, if you're somebody, you know, if you've got a Kindle Unlimited plan, you know, you can read it for free. So, you know, it's just like streaming anything else. You know, nowadays you just, it's available.
So, of course, I'm more than happy to sell you a paper copy, which is. Yeah, that's great to have too. It's a great reference, especially, you know, hike and when football became football are great reference points.
I use it all the time to look up things, and people have questions, or I have questions. It's an excellent source. So, it was very well done tonight.
We thank you for your time and for sharing your knowledge, Tim. And we'll talk to you again next Tuesday. Hey, look forward to it.
See you in a week.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
Football’s Longest Half-The-Distance Penalty
Football instituted its first half-the-distance penalty in 1889 for intentionally tackling below the knees, butting, tripping, and throttling (choking). Teams guilty of those offenses were penalized 25 yards. However, if the 25-yard penalty would take the ball over the goal line, they limited the penalty to half the distance. — www.footballarchaeology.com
Ever seen a penalty flag thrown and wondered, "Wait, why'd they move the ball THAT far?" Well, friends, get ready to dive into the strange world of "half-the-distance" penalties in American football!
These penalties, often triggered by infractions inside a team's own territory, can result in some truly eye-opening yardage assessments. Today, we'll be tackling some of the longest half-the-distance penalties in NFL history. We'll be dissecting the plays, the penalties, and the impact they had on the game. Were they backbreakers for the offending team? Did they create crazy scoring opportunities for the defense?
So, buckle up, football fans! Let's get ready to analyze some of the most unusual and potentially game-changing penalties the NFL has ever seen!
Let's listen to some of the most extended half-the-distance penalties in Football History by Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology.
-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on the Longest Half-Distance Penalties
Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. We also have another great episode where we get to talk to Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Talk about one of his most recent tidbits. Some of those unique aspects of football history.
Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.
Thank you, Darin. I Look forward to talking about the penalty situation in football.
Yeah, this is a very fascinating tidbit you had back in late May. It was titled football's longest half the distance penalty. Now we're we're sitting there, you know, in our modern times, we think of a half a distance penalty.
You know, somebody gets penalized and gets the penalty, gets walked back towards their own goal line. And usually, maybe they're at the nine-yard line, and it's, you know, a holding call, and they got to walk back to the four and a half or whatever. That's what we're doing.
But you're talking about something entirely different here as far as yardage. It's not a four-and-a-half-yard walk-off. These are some of the massive jaunts for the teams to travel.
So please do tell. You know, I mean, so early football didn't necessarily have distance penalties as we think of them today. Typically, the penalty for the fouls that were called was the loss of the ball.
You know, it was a turnover. But then they, you know, kind of recognized those were too severe. So then they started, you know, especially after the field got marked with yard lines, and they started doing distance penalties.
And so in 1889, there were they created that was the first half the distance penalties, and that was for, you know, intentionally tackling below the knees because you couldn't tackle below the knees, then budding, tripping and throttling, which was choking. And so that penalty was 25 yards or half the distance. And then, you know, later on, they started doing some things where it was.
Like in 1908, they kind of bundled all the unsportsmanship penalties together, and they made it if you committed an unsportsmanlike penalty, then you were disqualified and your team was penalized half the distance. And that that stayed in place till like 1947. And then then they limited the half distance to to 15 yards.
Right. So you couldn't be more than it was, whichever was 15 yards or half the distance, but Max was 15 yards. And so that's, you know, like you said in the open, it was, we think of a half a distance, half the distance penalty is applying when you're inside your own 30.
Right. If you're at the 45, either either 45, it doesn't matter. It's just whatever the normal penalty is.
And, you know, we cap them at 15 yards nowadays, but 25-yard penalties used to be pretty common. So, you know, before we kept them, there was the opportunity in a half-the-distance world for some really long penalties. And now, I mean.
I'm kind of limited by the way I can search in these newspaper databases, so I'm searching for keywords and strings of words. So I can't say that I found the longest. It's what I found that was the longest that I found, but it's still pretty long.
So the longest one that I came across was in a 1901 game Northwestern against Minnesota. Northwestern was in the red zone. They were on Minnesota's eight yard line.
A Northwestern player jumped off the side and slugged a Minnesota player. So they called the penalty. So they were on the eight.
This was in the days of the 110-yard field. So that meant that you know, 110 minus eight was 104 or no, I'm sorry, 102. And so they walked off a 51-yard penalty against Northwestern, which took the ball, as it turned out, it took the ball all the way back to Northwestern's 51-yard line.
Right. And then, in 1906, I found Vanderbilt got nailed for a 32-yard penalty in the same year Penn State got hit with a 30-yard penalty. And then, at that point, I stopped looking.
You know, I mean, I found a couple of instances, and then, in 1912, they reduced the length of the field to 100 yards. So there's no way you were going to have a 50 another 51 yard penalty. So anyway, it's possible that there was a 52, 53, or 54-yard penalty at some point out there.
I didn't find it. But if somebody else wants to go look at it and let me know if you find it. But, you know, it's still it's just kind of, you know, really fun.
And that that these existed. And then, but even after the field was reduced, you know, the thirty-three Pittsburgh Pirates running back was heading into the head, headed towards the end zone. Stiff arms the opponent but stiff arms him in the face.
And he gets called for an unsportsmanlike penalty at the two-yard line. So, there is a forty-nine-yard penalty as they walk off half the distance. Right.
So that's likely the longest or at least ties for the longest. So in the hundred yard NFL officials have been against the Steelers even before they were the Steelers back in the Pirates days in the first year. Yeah.
Thirty-three. I'm not going to play your game there with the officials who do not understand your Steelers. But the other thing that's just kind of funny is, OK, so now this half-the-distance thing is capped, you know, at 15 yards.
But you mentioned your favorite Steelers and now I grew up a Packer fan, but I've lived in Detroit long enough that there is a certain amount of lioness that has become part of my body. So I can appreciate, given the Lions history, that in 2015, a cornerback to the Lions incurred a 66 yard pass interference penalty. Because, you know, in the NFL, pass interference is a spot foul, right? Right.
So 66 yards downfield, he committed a little P.I. And so it was the Packers, which was OK by my standards. So, you know, 66 yards on a penalty. Yeah, those are astounding facts.
I did an article last year. I did some of the NFL's longest fourth and yardage to go penalties. It was it was fascinating.
I mean, we had a fourth and twenty nine that was converted by Ray Rice in 2012. The Oakland Raiders had a third and forty eight against Kansas City that I think they end up getting first down back in 2013. But in 1971, the Patriots had fourth and sixty three against the Cowboys.
And the biggest one, though, was my Steelers had fourth and seventy four against the Raiders in 1970. And they punted and the punt only traveled fifty five yards. So they were still 20 yards behind the sticks after the fun.
There were no half-the-distance penalties. I was going through that earlier to see if I could find something in there that helps your story, but that's just part of the thing. Like before, like in college football, you really don't have much in the way of there are no consistent statistics until thirty-six or thirty-eight, which it is.
But even then, it was just a subset of all the major colleges. So so, you know, the things so looking for like the longest half the distance penalty, there's no source. You know, there's no database that has that.
You know, you can only search for it using like newspaper databases and, you know, those kinds of things. But the other thing that it brings up and I wanted to ask you about it as a former official. Is, you know, one of the one of the problems football had over the years was.
The lengthier the penalty, the more reluctant officials often were to call the penalty. Because, you know, they you know, they didn't want to be the ones deciding the game. I mean, they would if need be.
But on things like, you know, a lot of the early clipping calls, they weren't, and they didn't want to call clipping. You know, it's kind of just the nature of the game. People accepted it.
So things like that, you know, that. So, that was one of the reasons they got rid of those 25-yard penalties. You know, it just was too much of they felt like it put too much power in the hands of an official who often were overworked back then, especially, you know, they you had three or four men, four-man crews trying to figure out what, you know, watching everybody on the field.
You know, it just wasn't possible. Yeah, I think it's a lot of human nature. I mean, most people, and I will put most before that, don't want to inflict the ultimate sentence upon their fellow man.
So, I mean, it's just human nature. You don't want to do it. I mean, one of the things I guess we could compare in modern times is somebody getting a little loose with their arms against another player.
It's taking a swing at them. And, you know, in high school football, even a swing and a miss is an automatic ejection. And most states have it where you will not play the next game after if you're ejected in a game, you're disqualified not only for that game but for the following game.
So you're really punishing him. So so that goes to the back of officials minds. I mean, it's got to be something very blatant to to get ejected from a game for the most part, especially when you know you're going to get dequeued for the following contest.
But I think that has some merit to what you're saying. A 25-yard penalty. That's that's pretty substantial.
You know, that's a quarter of the field. And could definitely change a game in a heartbeat. Well, you know, but if you think about, you know, back to the origins of penalties, penalties were turnovers or fouls, you know, were turnovers.
The penalty was the loss of the ball. So, you know, forward passes until 1906 forward passes the turnover, you know, on sportsmanship on sportsmen like, you know, conduct until 1889 was a turnover. So, you know, and then dequeues were, you know, much more common.
I mean, people should get up in arms about targeting disqualifications now. But, you know, hey, to me, if, you know, if you if you're going to endanger, you know, if you're going to endanger another player, then that's not good. And I personally love what college football does with the targeting.
And, you know, it's called on the field, and they really take a great look at it to make sure that the official on the field was calling it on the spot to get it right, says it is going to be an impactful thing. It might be the star linebacker getting ejected or staying in the game. You know, it's so many times you see that happen in the last couple of years since they've been doing that and enforcing it and even getting rid of the penalty.
Sometimes I think it's a great thing for football. And I'm glad that they do that. Yeah.
And I mean, people go, and people make a lot of arguments against it. And, you know, hey, you know, when I played, I was aggressive with Bob about, you know, whatever, go ahead and tell your story. But it's like.
You know, you just have to learn not to hit that way in that situation. You know, they all know where the sideline is. They all know, you know, things like when the ball's coming and you can't hit the pass receiver until he gets a ball, all those things.
They're aware. And so, to me, I don't buy the argument that, you know, it can't be controlled. Right.
Go lower. Go higher. Don't hit the guy in the head.
A good legal tackle has just as much impact, I think, as somebody crushing somebody in the head or whatever. And the guy's probably not going to be hurt, you know, by a good tackle on the midsection. You know, just a good wrap-up.
So, yeah, I think that goes a lot to teach the teaching technique of modern coaches. You know, just teach them to hit and wrap up and take a guy down instead of trying to take him down with a blow. Yeah.
You don't need to decapitate. Right. Right.
Well, Tim, great stuff. Great discussion. You know, I know we got a little bit off-topic with the half-distance penalties, but it brings up so many great elements of football, of the game of yesteryear and today.
And you do that each and every day with some of these tidbits, just like this one, where you bring up something that's maybe not the mainstream talk of football history or even modern-day football, but you bring it into a new light and a story of its own. And we'd love for you to share with the listeners how they, too, can enjoy these on a daily basis. Yeah.
Yeah. So, I mean, I just try to find things that I think are interesting every day and that shed light on past practices and hopefully illuminate something about the current game, at least something that we can compare ourselves to. And so, you know, if you're interested in following, just go to footballarchaeology.com and subscribe.
You'll get an email every day in your inbox at 7 o'clock Eastern that has that story. And otherwise, you can follow me on Twitter at football archaeology. Either way, if you're interested, consume it however it is that makes you happy.
Well, Tim, we thank you for once again joining us here. And I'm going to throw this out here, Tim, and hopefully you won't get angry with me. But these are such interesting things.
And I'm sure there are a lot of listeners who may have questions about where something started in football. And maybe we could get them in contact with you. And maybe on a future show, we could answer some of those questions.
So either you go on to Tim's website, footballarchaeology.com, or you can email me at pigskin-dispatch at gmail.com. And send in your questions about where something started. And maybe Tim has it in one of his multiple books or on one of his tidbits. And if not, he loves to put on that research hat and hit the library hard and the newspaper archives.
And we'll try to find something for you. So, Tim, thanks again. And we will talk to you again next week.
Very good. Darin, thank you very much, as always.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
House of the Setting Sun with Timothy Brown
When I was researching information for my book World's Greatest Pro Gridiron Team, I kept seeing games where the time of the first half was much different from he second half.
It occurred almost every game, and though the first half was almost always the same time from game to game, the second stanza was all over the place. There had to be a reason.
Tim Brown over at Football Archaeology had the answer and he also shared it in a post he wrote and in a conversation on our podcast.
-Transcribed Conversation of Timothy Brown on the House of the Setting Sun
Tcf Bank College Football Stadium Minnesota Golden Gophers Sunset Panorama Panoramio is courtesy of mjdemay via Wikimedia Commons
Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to Tuesday, FootballArcheology.com day. We have Timothy P. Brown, the founder of FootballArcheology.com, joining us as he does each and every week to talk about one of his famous tidbits.
Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Darren, good to see you, see your smiling face. It is about time.
About time. Yeah, great segue. Your segue-isms are getting better and better each and every time.
I am upping segue game. The dad jokes are a-flying, that's for sure. But Tim, now that you set it up, you have an interesting article from back in September that maybe back in September didn't mean as much as it does this time of year as we're getting closer to the winter season.
The sun going down affected the timing of games. I'll let you take it from there and tell us all about your tidbit. Yeah, so actually, the interesting thing is there is an unidentified reader.
I can't say who that is unless the reader gives permission. The reader gives you permission, Tim. Go ahead.
Oh, OK. So, one time, Darin asked me. Why is it always me? So, yeah, so just, you know, it's like anything else.
You know, you question, you go like, how did this work? So, as he was doing his own research on some things, he kept on seeing in the old newspapers. You know, 1800s and early, you know, 1900s. Oftentimes, the box score would have a little thing right at the bottom of the box, and it would say, you know, time of halves or time of quarters.
It would say 15 minutes, 15 and 10, or something like that. And so, and then typically, if there was a short quarter or a short half, it was the second half. So, you know, the question is basically, well, why the heck did they do that? Why did they shorten games? And so sometimes that happened because one team was getting blown out, but that was not generally the reason, you know, so even in tight games, it wasn't unusual to shorten, shorten a quarter or a half.
And so, you know, when I wrote it, I kind of used the, you know, the old terminology of de jure versus de facto. So de jure means, you know, by the rule or by the law, whereas de facto is in practice. Right.
And so when football first started, when we first brought it in, you know, when we were playing rugby. Football was just one of those stew of games that came out of, you know, 18th-century England and the norm was to play 45-minute halves. And so soccer still plays 45-minute halves, and rugby still plays 45-minute halves.
And when football got started here, we were playing 45-minute halves even though there was nothing in the rules that said that's how long it was. You know, the original football rules don't mention how long a game is supposed to last, but everybody knew it was 45 minutes. So that's what you did.
When football kind of, you know, as partly safety measures, you know, they were trying to give people rest and just reduce the amount of time that they're on the field. You know, football started, it went to 45 minutes and then 35 and then 30. And it's perhaps so.
Now, another tradition that was quite common was that, a lot of times, games started at about 2 o'clock or 2:30 in the afternoon. And so part of that was, you know, you had a lot of people, you know, fans who, you know, if they were factory people, they and, you know, clerks and whatnot, they work six days a week, as did their bosses. And if they were rural folks, well, farm chores have to be done.
You know, if you got a dairy herd, well, guess what you're doing every day. You know, so just from a lifestyle standpoint, a lot of people had things to do in the morning. On top of that, a lot of teams didn't have the budget to send their team to an away game and stay overnight.
So, you know, they would want to be able to take the train in the morning of the game, show up, play the game, turn around, and get home. And so not only did that mean they had to schedule a game a little bit later, but then there were times where they needed to, you know, the only way they would get home and make their connections that night was to be at the train station at, you know, 430 and or, you know, five o'clock or whatever it was. So, you know, for a combination of reasons, they ended up needing to cut games short.
And eventually, the rule makers, you know, it was kind of an understood thing. It wasn't. Again, it's one of those traditions.
It was, you know, in fact, people cut games short, even though the rules didn't say, you know, didn't allow it. But everybody did it. Right.
So, then we end up in a situation where, you know, during World War One, the government instituted light savings time, daylight saving, no S on that, daylight saving time. And so that came into effect in 1918. And so that was the first time that anybody had experienced that, at least, you know, in the US.
So you just kind of put yourself. I mean, we know what happens when daylight saving kicks in. But they just didn't anticipate it.
So there were teams that showed up at practice on Monday afternoon, right after daylight saving kicked in for the first time. And it was dark, you know. And so it's just one of those things where, you know, and then obviously that applied on Saturdays, too, because, you know, it gets dark on game day just as much as it does on practice.
But, you know, and in the tidbit, there's a discussion of like. And the USC and somebody, you know, playing in a game, and it's just like nobody could see by the end of the game; it was just so dark. And it's it's one of those things, you know, we take for granted that everybody's going to have lights.
Well, guess what? Very few places had lights. And if they did, it was jerry-rigged like the Navy used naval searchlights to light up the field for practice, you know. And, you know, so you have examples like that.
And that's that's one. I mean, some people had used them earlier, but they were painted white balls and yellow balls that came in right around. Yeah, that really became popular around that time.
That's when you start seeing them showing up in sporting goods catalogs. And it's really, you know, like. I know it's one of these things depending on where you have lived in the US; if you have not moved around a fair amount, you don't realize how much where you are in the time zone from an east, west, and north-south standpoint.
You don't realize how much impact that can have on how dark it gets early. So like Chicago is right on the east side of the central island. So it's like it's getting dark where it's like I'm in Detroit.
So, you know, still across the state, but if you're on the west side of Michigan, you know, it's light in the summer. It's like until.
You know, 10, 10 o'clock, you know, and, you know, beyond where it's like it's the same thing in Chicago, but it's nine o'clock. Right. So anyway, I mean, it's just one of those things you just and if you're northern, you know, then it's great in the summer, but then it gets darker early if you're further up north, because that whole sun, you know, the earth rotates and it tilts and not enough.
So anyway, it's just one of those things you don't think about, but like. Daylight saving was a big story in 1918. So then, because of that, in 1922, they formalized the rule that said at halftime, the referee could approach the the two team captains and ask if they wanted to shorten the halves.
And then then they they'll do so as needed. And whether that's because of the lighting or the one team getting blown out. Basically, they had they had the chance to do that.
Yeah, it's just thank God that the football didn't adopt what soccer does now with, you know, you have the two 45-minute halves, and then we're going to just kind of arbitrarily throw some time on at the end, you know, just and not tell anybody, you know, how much time is left. Just, you know, whatever that drives me crazy. Drives me nuts, you know, that they don't have that public with how much time is going on there.
But yeah, very interesting stuff, Tim. And I'm glad you mean you really cleared up mine because I kept seeing this, you know, you'd have like a 25-minute first half and, you know, something like 10 minutes for the second half. I'm like, why are they doing that? You know, you have a 13-to-nothing game.
You know, it's still still a ball game. You know, it's just driving me crazy. So, I'm glad you could clear that up for me and the listener.
So that's that's great. So, yeah, again, it's just one of those things you just don't even think about because, you know, basically, there are very few people living today if there's anybody, you know, that that's that, you know when Daylight Savings first showed up. So.
Yeah, crazy. And there are probably more people who see live games under the lights, you know, at your local high school than you do in the daytime anyway nowadays. So we're so used to the lights.
It's taken for granted, I guess. Yeah, but Tim, you have interesting items like this each and every day on your tidbits and people really love reading them. And maybe there's some listeners out there that aren't familiar with how to reach you and get ahold of your tidbits.
So maybe you could help them out with some information. Yeah, so easiest and best thing is just hit my website, footballarchaeology.com in order to find it, you got to put the WWW in front of it. And then, you know, you can every, you know, every story gives you the opportunity to subscribe.
You can subscribe for free. And then, as a result, you'll get an email every night in your inbox. And, you know, some people let them pile up, and they'll send it to you.
I know every Monday morning, I get a bunch of hits on my site because people who send them to their work address, you know, don't look at them until Monday morning. So anyways, and then you can also you can follow me on Twitter, on threads or simply, you know, or follow me within the within the Substack app. And so kind of whichever flavor works for you, have at it.
All right. Well, he is Timothy P. Brown, footballarchaeology.com. The links to Tim's site and to the tidbit are in the podcast show notes. You want to enjoy that, you know, the images and some of the great writing that Tim does there and some of those other tidbits.
You have links to get to it that way, too. So, Tim, thanks a lot for joining us again and sharing. And we will talk to you again next week.
Very good. Thank you, Darin.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
It occurred almost every game, and though the first half was almost always the same time from game to game, the second stanza was all over the place. There had to be a reason.
Tim Brown over at Football Archaeology had the answer and he also shared it in a post he wrote and in a conversation on our podcast.
-Transcribed Conversation of Timothy Brown on the House of the Setting Sun
Tcf Bank College Football Stadium Minnesota Golden Gophers Sunset Panorama Panoramio is courtesy of mjdemay via Wikimedia Commons
Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to Tuesday, FootballArcheology.com day. We have Timothy P. Brown, the founder of FootballArcheology.com, joining us as he does each and every week to talk about one of his famous tidbits.
Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Darren, good to see you, see your smiling face. It is about time.
About time. Yeah, great segue. Your segue-isms are getting better and better each and every time.
I am upping segue game. The dad jokes are a-flying, that's for sure. But Tim, now that you set it up, you have an interesting article from back in September that maybe back in September didn't mean as much as it does this time of year as we're getting closer to the winter season.
The sun going down affected the timing of games. I'll let you take it from there and tell us all about your tidbit. Yeah, so actually, the interesting thing is there is an unidentified reader.
I can't say who that is unless the reader gives permission. The reader gives you permission, Tim. Go ahead.
Oh, OK. So, one time, Darin asked me. Why is it always me? So, yeah, so just, you know, it's like anything else.
You know, you question, you go like, how did this work? So, as he was doing his own research on some things, he kept on seeing in the old newspapers. You know, 1800s and early, you know, 1900s. Oftentimes, the box score would have a little thing right at the bottom of the box, and it would say, you know, time of halves or time of quarters.
It would say 15 minutes, 15 and 10, or something like that. And so, and then typically, if there was a short quarter or a short half, it was the second half. So, you know, the question is basically, well, why the heck did they do that? Why did they shorten games? And so sometimes that happened because one team was getting blown out, but that was not generally the reason, you know, so even in tight games, it wasn't unusual to shorten, shorten a quarter or a half.
And so, you know, when I wrote it, I kind of used the, you know, the old terminology of de jure versus de facto. So de jure means, you know, by the rule or by the law, whereas de facto is in practice. Right.
And so when football first started, when we first brought it in, you know, when we were playing rugby. Football was just one of those stew of games that came out of, you know, 18th-century England and the norm was to play 45-minute halves. And so soccer still plays 45-minute halves, and rugby still plays 45-minute halves.
And when football got started here, we were playing 45-minute halves even though there was nothing in the rules that said that's how long it was. You know, the original football rules don't mention how long a game is supposed to last, but everybody knew it was 45 minutes. So that's what you did.
When football kind of, you know, as partly safety measures, you know, they were trying to give people rest and just reduce the amount of time that they're on the field. You know, football started, it went to 45 minutes and then 35 and then 30. And it's perhaps so.
Now, another tradition that was quite common was that, a lot of times, games started at about 2 o'clock or 2:30 in the afternoon. And so part of that was, you know, you had a lot of people, you know, fans who, you know, if they were factory people, they and, you know, clerks and whatnot, they work six days a week, as did their bosses. And if they were rural folks, well, farm chores have to be done.
You know, if you got a dairy herd, well, guess what you're doing every day. You know, so just from a lifestyle standpoint, a lot of people had things to do in the morning. On top of that, a lot of teams didn't have the budget to send their team to an away game and stay overnight.
So, you know, they would want to be able to take the train in the morning of the game, show up, play the game, turn around, and get home. And so not only did that mean they had to schedule a game a little bit later, but then there were times where they needed to, you know, the only way they would get home and make their connections that night was to be at the train station at, you know, 430 and or, you know, five o'clock or whatever it was. So, you know, for a combination of reasons, they ended up needing to cut games short.
And eventually, the rule makers, you know, it was kind of an understood thing. It wasn't. Again, it's one of those traditions.
It was, you know, in fact, people cut games short, even though the rules didn't say, you know, didn't allow it. But everybody did it. Right.
So, then we end up in a situation where, you know, during World War One, the government instituted light savings time, daylight saving, no S on that, daylight saving time. And so that came into effect in 1918. And so that was the first time that anybody had experienced that, at least, you know, in the US.
So you just kind of put yourself. I mean, we know what happens when daylight saving kicks in. But they just didn't anticipate it.
So there were teams that showed up at practice on Monday afternoon, right after daylight saving kicked in for the first time. And it was dark, you know. And so it's just one of those things where, you know, and then obviously that applied on Saturdays, too, because, you know, it gets dark on game day just as much as it does on practice.
But, you know, and in the tidbit, there's a discussion of like. And the USC and somebody, you know, playing in a game, and it's just like nobody could see by the end of the game; it was just so dark. And it's it's one of those things, you know, we take for granted that everybody's going to have lights.
Well, guess what? Very few places had lights. And if they did, it was jerry-rigged like the Navy used naval searchlights to light up the field for practice, you know. And, you know, so you have examples like that.
And that's that's one. I mean, some people had used them earlier, but they were painted white balls and yellow balls that came in right around. Yeah, that really became popular around that time.
That's when you start seeing them showing up in sporting goods catalogs. And it's really, you know, like. I know it's one of these things depending on where you have lived in the US; if you have not moved around a fair amount, you don't realize how much where you are in the time zone from an east, west, and north-south standpoint.
You don't realize how much impact that can have on how dark it gets early. So like Chicago is right on the east side of the central island. So it's like it's getting dark where it's like I'm in Detroit.
So, you know, still across the state, but if you're on the west side of Michigan, you know, it's light in the summer. It's like until.
You know, 10, 10 o'clock, you know, and, you know, beyond where it's like it's the same thing in Chicago, but it's nine o'clock. Right. So anyway, I mean, it's just one of those things you just and if you're northern, you know, then it's great in the summer, but then it gets darker early if you're further up north, because that whole sun, you know, the earth rotates and it tilts and not enough.
So anyway, it's just one of those things you don't think about, but like. Daylight saving was a big story in 1918. So then, because of that, in 1922, they formalized the rule that said at halftime, the referee could approach the the two team captains and ask if they wanted to shorten the halves.
And then then they they'll do so as needed. And whether that's because of the lighting or the one team getting blown out. Basically, they had they had the chance to do that.
Yeah, it's just thank God that the football didn't adopt what soccer does now with, you know, you have the two 45-minute halves, and then we're going to just kind of arbitrarily throw some time on at the end, you know, just and not tell anybody, you know, how much time is left. Just, you know, whatever that drives me crazy. Drives me nuts, you know, that they don't have that public with how much time is going on there.
But yeah, very interesting stuff, Tim. And I'm glad you mean you really cleared up mine because I kept seeing this, you know, you'd have like a 25-minute first half and, you know, something like 10 minutes for the second half. I'm like, why are they doing that? You know, you have a 13-to-nothing game.
You know, it's still still a ball game. You know, it's just driving me crazy. So, I'm glad you could clear that up for me and the listener.
So that's that's great. So, yeah, again, it's just one of those things you just don't even think about because, you know, basically, there are very few people living today if there's anybody, you know, that that's that, you know when Daylight Savings first showed up. So.
Yeah, crazy. And there are probably more people who see live games under the lights, you know, at your local high school than you do in the daytime anyway nowadays. So we're so used to the lights.
It's taken for granted, I guess. Yeah, but Tim, you have interesting items like this each and every day on your tidbits and people really love reading them. And maybe there's some listeners out there that aren't familiar with how to reach you and get ahold of your tidbits.
So maybe you could help them out with some information. Yeah, so easiest and best thing is just hit my website, footballarchaeology.com in order to find it, you got to put the WWW in front of it. And then, you know, you can every, you know, every story gives you the opportunity to subscribe.
You can subscribe for free. And then, as a result, you'll get an email every night in your inbox. And, you know, some people let them pile up, and they'll send it to you.
I know every Monday morning, I get a bunch of hits on my site because people who send them to their work address, you know, don't look at them until Monday morning. So anyways, and then you can also you can follow me on Twitter, on threads or simply, you know, or follow me within the within the Substack app. And so kind of whichever flavor works for you, have at it.
All right. Well, he is Timothy P. Brown, footballarchaeology.com. The links to Tim's site and to the tidbit are in the podcast show notes. You want to enjoy that, you know, the images and some of the great writing that Tim does there and some of those other tidbits.
You have links to get to it that way, too. So, Tim, thanks a lot for joining us again and sharing. And we will talk to you again next week.
Very good. Thank you, Darin.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
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