Bradbury Robinson throws 1st Forward Pass
The first legal forward pass in football was thrown by Bradbury Robinson on September 5, 1906, in a game between Saint Louis University and Carroll College. Robinson was a quarterback for Saint Louis, and he threw the pass to Jack Schneider, who was a wide receiver. The pass was completed for a touchdown, and it helped Saint Louis win the game 22-0.
The forward pass was not originally allowed in football. The rules of the game at the time only allowed players to advance the ball by running or kicking. However, in 1905, there were a number of serious injuries and deaths in college football games. In response, President Theodore Roosevelt called for reforms to the game, and one of the reforms was to allow the forward pass.
Robinson's forward pass was a major turning point in the history of football. It opened up new possibilities for offense, and it made the game more exciting and unpredictable. The forward pass is now an essential part of the game, and it is responsible for many of the most memorable plays in football history.
Robinson was a native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and he played college football at Saint Louis University from 1904 to 1907. He was a two-time All-American, and he led the nation in passing in 1906. After college, Robinson played professional football for the Milwaukee Badgers and the Chicago Cardinals. He retired from football in 1915.
The forward pass was not originally allowed in football. The rules of the game at the time only allowed players to advance the ball by running or kicking. However, in 1905, there were a number of serious injuries and deaths in college football games. In response, President Theodore Roosevelt called for reforms to the game, and one of the reforms was to allow the forward pass.
Robinson's forward pass was a major turning point in the history of football. It opened up new possibilities for offense, and it made the game more exciting and unpredictable. The forward pass is now an essential part of the game, and it is responsible for many of the most memorable plays in football history.
Robinson was a native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and he played college football at Saint Louis University from 1904 to 1907. He was a two-time All-American, and he led the nation in passing in 1906. After college, Robinson played professional football for the Milwaukee Badgers and the Chicago Cardinals. He retired from football in 1915.
The History of the American Football Forward Pass
Author and historian Tim Brown visits the Pigpen to help educate us on how the forward pass became legal in the game of football and why. Tim has some great books : How Football Became Football & Fields of Friendly Strife both of which I highly recommend you get your hands on to learn more about the game's history. Also Tim has a great website also called Fields of Friendly Strife where he shares some brilliantly recorded history of the game.
-Transcript of the Forward Pass History with Timothy Brown
Darin Hayes
Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes at Pigskin Dispatch. Welcome once again to the Pigpen. We have an exciting topic to talk about today. We will go back to the roots of football and, you know, one of the most compelling elements of the game, the passing game. And we're going to go back and look at where it came from, what it's all about, and how it derived to what it is today. And we've got an expert who wrote a very good book called How Football Became Football, the First 150 Years of the Games Evolution. And his name is Timothy P. Brown, and we'll bring him in now. Timothy Brown, welcome to the Pigpen.
Timothy Brown
Hey, Darin. Thank you. Appreciate you having me on.
Looking forward to it.
-Learning More About Timothy Brown
Darin Hayes
Like we were talking before we hit record here, I read your book. It is extremely fascinating. And I love how you grab all the different elements of football history, not just looking at it from the mirror image of a rulesmaker or of a player. You're going even on the officiating side. How officiating evolved with the game really caught my interest.
Timothy Brown
I don't know if I've ever seen anybody do that before, but you caught the interest of all the elements of football. Well done job on that. Yeah, I appreciate it. And I guess, you know, just to me, and a lot of the book is about college football because a lot of the history is about college football. But for me, it goes beyond the game. You know, there are the elements of the fans and the money and, you know, just kind of the, where it fits in society, and how it reflects societal change. I think those are some of the most interesting aspects of football, but it's not just a game on the field that goes beyond that. But of course, the core of it is the game on the field. Now, where did you get the interest to get to the point of writing books on football? I grew up in an athletic family. I played college football. I had a couple played or coached for a couple of years as a graduate assistant or as an assistant while I was going to grad school. And so I've just always had that, you know, kind of football element. And for me, it ended up that I was, you know, I wasn't working in business and collecting Rose Bowl memorabilia. So that's kind of my more my main collecting hobby. And I came across a story that just kind of fascinated me, which is what led to the first book, which covers the military Rose Bowl teams of World War One and World War Two, or I'm sorry, of World War One, not World War Two, but 1918 and 1919 Rose Bowls. And then, you know, in doing the research for that book, I had to really understand football back then rather than the present day. So, that required me to do a bunch of research. And eventually, I realized that the research itself and understanding football back then was a lot of fun. And so I just kind of expanded that. And so the second book that you mentioned, How Football Became Football, reflects really the first 150 years of the game, just how it evolved in multiple dimensions.
-Breaking Down Football into Eras
Darin Hayes
I mean, the other element that I thought you did a really good job on is sort of breaking football into three different segments, time segments of those 150 years. Maybe you could just share with the listeners a little bit about how you broke those up and what differentiates the three.
Timothy Brown
So the reason I broke it into three eras was just that, you know, I just felt like I couldn't just go chronological order, and just, you know, it would just be this recitation of facts, which would be kind of boring. So, I wanted to have some themes about what was happening in football during different time periods. And so the first era, which I just called the early era, was from the game's beginning. So, more or less, in 1869, with Rutgers and Princeton, and then going until 1905, when there were a series of rule changes due to the dangers of the game, etc. And so that's the first period. The second one started in 1906 and continued until 1959. Somebody could argue with me whether it should be 1955 or 1965. But, you know, I have my reasons for choosing 1960. But it's at that point where from 60 on, you know, we have dramatically increased influence of television, and therefore money in the game, we have dramatically increased influence of African American players. Then, there are a couple of other changes, particularly the permanent use of two-platoon football at the college level. Those three things just had a tremendous impact on the game as we know it today. And so, you know, I chose 1960 again; you could argue a slightly different time period, but that's what I worked with. I thought you were spot on. I would totally agree with you that 1960 was a big breaking point. And, of course, 1906, which is sort of what's going to lead us into our discussion today; I guess, though, before we get to 1906, we're going to have to try to figure out what football was the first 30-some years before 1906 that brought us to that point.
Darin Hayes
So maybe if you could describe us, what was football like in the early 1900s? Yeah, so I just want to step back a little bit further first to just say people say all the time football evolved from rugby.
-Early 20th Century American Football
Timothy Brown
And yes, that's true. But I just want to emphasize football was rugby. So, in the early days of what we now think of as gridiron, North American football, US and Canada, it was rugby. And you know, when they started the game, they made some minor tweaks, but it was right. So the game remained very much rugby-esque until, say, 1890. They made some rule changes, including allowing tackling below the waist and things like that, which made it harder to do the outside wide-open and running of rugby. And so the game started steering towards this, which ultimately became mass and momentum football. So mass meaning, you know, it was basically like playing goal line football, you know, the goal line offensive goal against goal line defense, all 110 yards of the field at the time. The mass refers to the idea of multiple blockers leading the runner through the hole and/or grabbing him by the handles that he had sewn on his pants to pull him through the hole. And the momentum, referring to, you know, back then, they didn't have rules on how many players had to be on the line of scrimmage. So, teams would have guards back or tackle back formations and different things. And there was no limit on the number of men who could be moving forward at the snap, you know, similar to what Canada has in their football. So, you know, they'd have these guys running all at the same time and collapsing into a particular hole, just basically slamming into to basically overrun one or two players on the defense. And so it became a very dangerous game. And as a result, there were lots of injuries and, ultimately, deaths, you know, resulting from the nature of the play at the time. Okay, so that sort of takes us to when we always hear about, you know, President Theodore Roosevelt became involved because of the high death count and injury count. And you know, many schools were, you know, canceling their football programs. I guess that sort of takes us up to the 1905 season. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think the whole thing with Roosevelt is a little bit overblown. But, you know, it was more, I think it was a high-profile act on his part. I mean, he really, there's nothing he could do to ban football, right? Right. But, you know, he was a football sport. He was a fan, you know, he, he was at the 1905 Army-Navy game at the end of the season. His son played for Harvard, at least the freshman team at the time. Oh, and he was a big believer in, you know, kind of that whole mass masculinity thing that was behind, you know, football at the time. So, he was a fan. So he wanted to make sure the game continued. At the end of the day, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton controlled the game. They were still even in 1904 and 1905; they were the three schools. Penn, maybe a little bit, but they were the three; they were the schools that controlled the game. And they had, they, they had core responsibility for the rulemaking bodies. It wasn't until 1904 that a non-Easterner, Amos Alonzo Stagg, who had played at Yale but was coaching at Chicago, was the first non-Easterner on the rules committee. So, you know, anything that was wrong with football was due to the guys out east. Okay. The good things about football were due to the guys out east, too. Right. So, there was sort of a reluctance on their part to want to change the game, that I take it. They liked having that game. I guess the flying wedge was gone by that point, but just like you said, the massive collision goal line play, every play, they sort of liked that, and they didn't want to see that change. I take it. Yeah. So, you know, one of their big arguments and, and, and with, with a fair amount of truth to it, but, you know, the, the, the whole death count thing came from a series of newspapers, you know, they, they would track what was happening around the country. And so the death count really was not; it wasn't a bunch of college players from your top-notch college teams. They counted anything from, you know, a lot of the deaths were just kids playing sandlot football or backyard football. A lot of them, you know, weren't; they had no coaching. They were just playing. They didn't know how to tackle the death count. Also included kids who maybe got cut or spiked on the field and got an infection while they couldn't treat infections like we can today. And so some of those guys died from an infection they sustained on the football field. So, on the one hand, the death numbers are exaggerated, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it was a dangerous game. And here and there, there were some college athletes who were killed playing the game. And some of what brought it to a head at the end of the 1905 season was an NYU player, a New York University player, who was killed, and their college president, you know, basically took up the banner and really pushed for change and started organizing change in what ultimately became the organized group that ultimately became the NCAA.
Darin Hayes
So I take it, though, even though Roosevelt's threat was a little bit idle, it was sort of a pivotal point in getting these groups to talk about the revisions and reform that was needed in football. Is that a fair statement?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, yeah, I think that that's true. I mean, it put pressure on the big schools to make changes. And then what ended up happening was like with NYU and some others, they just basically got to a point where they just said, you know, we're not paying attention to you anymore. You're not gonna make the rules anymore. We're gonna make the rules. Eventually, those two groups agreed to get together, you know, compromise on some of the rule changes that ended up taking place.
Darin Hayes
So, if I'm looking at this correctly, we have, you know, the Yale camp, Harvard, and Penn, and we would say Columbia was the other one? Princeton. So we have the Walter camps of the world on that side. And then, on the other side, who wants to have the reform?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, it could be; it was mostly schools that would now be considered V3 schools or V2. You know, they're just, but it was a mishmash. You know, by and large, the folks at the Army and Navy kind of supported the old world, too. You know, the old-school game. So it is more or less that the teams that were at the top of the heap at the time really had no reason to change. And the truth is that in those schools where they had effective coaching, the guys were conditioned before practice. They had the best of the equipment and training. They really had, you know, a limited number of serious injuries and deaths. So they kind of felt like, look, the problem isn't us. The problem is everybody else who doesn't know what they're doing. You know, I think that was really kind of the crux of the argument, but at the end of the day, even those folks realized that they needed to make some changes. And so it was really gonna be a matter of how do we compromise? How do we find ways to allow change without overturning the game that they had grown to love? You know, back then, people, you know, you go back and read newspaper articles from 1903, 1904, and they'll just go on and on about the virtues of some great punter. Now, we think of a punter as the guy of last resort; nobody wants to punt, right? They'll punt it on first down, third, second down all the time. And it was just such an integral part of the game that if you were a good punter, you were a star, you know? Now, typically, you were also the fullback or halfback on the team, but punting was a very highly regarded activity. That explains why I know we talked about a game where they had, I think, no second downs. They punted on first down every plague in Clement weather. I forget what it was, but we've talked about that in one of the podcasts recently. Okay, so we're at this meeting now. I take it after the end of the 1905 season before 1906 starts. And we have these two groups getting together. So, I'm taking it that the forward pass was one of the suggestions that were brought to the table to help open up the game and make it a little bit safer. Is that true? Yeah, so, you know, there were a lot of different suggestions, right? So, and really kind of coming despite the fact that the Easterners controlled things, there was input coming in from across the country. You know, I mean, anything ranged from the forward pass, which ultimately got implemented in 1906, though heavily restricted 1906, they also approved the onsite kick from scrimmage. So it was essentially a punt. in which any member of the offensive team could recover the punt and advance it. So, just like we think about an onside kick today, the kicking team can recover it. Well, they had opened up the game by allowing the kicking team to recover punts as well. And there had been a forerunner to that that was a little bit more restrictive, but that kind of what they call the quarterback kick, that carried on until 1922. So, it remained a part of the game for a while. Well, there are some good things that people would want to be punting on first down, then have to advance the ball a long way because you don't have the pass at that point in time. So maybe that's a good way to get a good chunk of yardage if you're in a stalemate. So interesting. Yeah, and if you think about it, punting was a natural part of the rugby-ish game. So, every team had skilled punters. And so what you wanted, in this case, was a punter who could kind of kick it off to the side in one of your ends, or somebody else could run down and get it. The forward pass was either something that didn't really change the game much or entirely brand new, depending on how you define the forward pass, which I think is one of, which is another big misconception in terms of people's understanding of how that changed the game. Before 1905 or before 1906, the game was not filled with forward passes, but the forward pass was common. It was just illegal. And the reason I say that is because what we now think of as laterals, a term that entered football all about 1914, or pitches, what we think of laterals and pitches, they call passes, right? So the quarterback got the snap from the center, and he tossed it to a half-back or a full-back. That was a pass. And so a forward pass was just those instances where they were running around the field, and they pitched it inadvertently or deliberately tossed it forward. And so it was a penalty, and they'd call the penalty, and they'd lose possession of the ball and that kind of thing. And if you look at old newspaper reports, it's all over the place. Forward passes almost every game; somebody's being penalized for a forward pass. So the game or the game had a forward pass. It was illegal. And so when they were thinking about the new forward pass in 1906, they were pretty much thinking of that. They were thinking of forwarding laterals. So they weren't viewing it as this thing that was gonna revolutionize the game. It was, and a number of committee members thought, yeah, we need it for a couple of years, and we can get rid of it. So, there was no notion of what was going to come down the road and how it would dramatically change the game.
-The Passing Game
Darin Hayes
It was more of a, well, yeah, you can pitch the ball forward and whatever. So it wasn't what you think of it today. They weren't thinking of Aaron Rodgers dropping back and dropping a 45-yard pass on a dime to a receiver who was streaking down the field.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, well, that's right. And so some of it is even. There are some great illustrations of the period that show and discuss the most effective way to throw the forward pass, right? And so, really, I mean, in 1906, there was only one team I'm aware of who threw the ball in the overhand spiral motion that we think of as the forward pass today. Everybody else was trying to figure out, like, okay, well, I'm only gonna toss it a couple of yards or whatever. And so they were. Some thought the best way to throw it was tossing it like a great grenade with a stiff arm or some basketball set shot. There were a variety of different techniques like that, but it was all within a 10-yard kind of radius, maybe flipping it 15 yards downfield to somebody, and just conceptually, nobody had. The skies did not open up, and a stone tablet did not come down, giving the football world a passing tree, right? I mean, nobody had any idea what any of that would have looked like. That was Sid Gillman and 40 or 50 yards in the future before that happened. Okay, 1906, you said the forward pass came in with some restrictions on it.
Darin Hayes
Maybe you could describe some of those restrictions. When the forward pass first came in, at that point, that was during the era of the checkerboard field. And so, probably a fair number of your listeners have seen a checkerboard field at one point or another.
Timothy Brown
But so beyond the normal stripes every five yards, there were lines running perpendicular to those. There were also five yards. So the reason those were there is in 1903, they instituted a rule that said that the first person to receive the ball from the center could not run forward or could not cross the line of scrimmage with the ball unless they were five yards right or left at the center. This was to try to eliminate some fakery that was going on in the center area and to keep them from running up the gut all the time. But so when the forward pass was adopted, they basically followed that same rule and said that in order to throw a forward pass, the passer has to be five yards right or left of the center before they can throw the ball. There were other restrictions, and some of these changed a little bit over time, but there were restrictions. Prior to 1912, it was a more restricted game. So, you know, they had things like you couldn't throw the ball more than 20 yards downfield. You couldn't; if the ball crossed the goal line on the fly or on a bounce, it was a turnover. If you threw a pass and it was not touched by an offensive or defensive player before it touched the ground, it was a turnover. So, you know, if you think about the implications of that, you've got guys who don't really know how to throw a forward pass very well, trying to throw it to people who don't know how to run passing routes. And if they throw it too far, it's a turnover. If they miss, if they have an incompletion, it's a turnover. So it's really not surprising that for the first half dozen or so years of football, the forward pass didn't get used very much other than by a couple of select teams. And some of those did very well. And they were playing with a watermelon ball, too, I imagine, right? More of a rugby, okay. Yeah, I guess that would make it very difficult to try to figure out how to throw that ball, wouldn't it? It'd be tough for us today, I think, to try to figure out how to throw that. Yeah, well, I mean, it really was one of the things. Early on, the ball was so thick that they basically kind of felt like unless the passer had big hands, they couldn't be, in effect, the passer just because they couldn't get a grip on the ball. You know, and the lacing, you know, the laces were just, you know, relatively thin pieces of leather that laced the ball together. They weren't like, you know, we've got polyvinyl chloride laces now that are stiff as, you know, stiff as a brick.
Darin Hayes
So it's very easy to get, you know, to spin on the ball and do those kinds of things. That wasn't the case back then. It reminds me of we had a gentleman who, one of my PFRA friends, Simon Herrera, has a vintage football game. They replicate the games played in the early 1920s in the pro game. And he wanted to try to get it so they wouldn't throw passes. So he had a ball developed for these games that he has every year. That's even a wider girth than the balls that you're talking about in the, you know, 1906. So they can't pass the ball. I forget what it was, like 24-inch girth or something. It's ridiculous, like a medicine ball. So, it was effective. They can't throw a pass with it. So, it sounds like this is a similar situation here for these folks who were trying to throw a pass.
Timothy Brown
Well, the flip side of it is that, you know, as long as you had that rounded ball, you could still continue to dropkick. But once you got to the, you know, there were successive changes to the dimensions of the ball. Once the ball got too pointy, drop-kicking went away because you couldn't predict where the ball was going to bounce anymore. Unless you're Doug Flutie, right? Well, he's playing on Astroturf, not on some muddy field that guys played on back in the day. Right. So, who did throw the first pass successfully? And how did that come about? It seems like everything's against them, wanting to throw a pass. Well, so, you know, one of the things, an interesting thing that happened as the committee was kind of as people are tossing out ideas on the changes that should occur in 1906, there were two teams out in Kansas that decided to play a game, a test game to experiment and institute some of the potential rule changes. So Fairmont, which now is Wichita State, and Washburn played one another. The coach of Washburn was a guy named John Outland; the Outland Trophies were named after them. And so they played a test game on Christmas Day, 1905. You know, it's unclear, exactly, you know, so they threw forward passes, but it's unclear what that means. You know, it's hard to believe that they would have really restructured their offense in a significant way. It probably meant that they just tossed the ball forward on a couple of occasions. I think only one forward pass was completed, and the game ended up in a 0 -0 tie or 6 -6 tie, you know, whatever it was. So, it's not a very good test of the process, but it points out the fact that you really have time to let things sink in and conceptualize the changes that you had as a coach. The last names were Eddie Coach and Coaches. He had played at Wisconsin and, I think, was an all-American or, you know, whatever. He was a star there, but he ended up with a guy named Bradbury Robinson, who transferred from Wisconsin down at St. Louis U. Bradbury Robinson was a big, pretty big guy who had big hands, and he had learned to throw the overhand spiral. I guess he'd learned it by throwing the ball back when he was retrieving punks. But so he all said, you know, here's this guy who has this capability that nobody else had. And so St. Louis U basically and Coaches, you know, built this offense around, you know, it's not like they just went to a passing offense, but, you know, they threw the ball far more than anybody else. They were undefeated in 1906, and before the season, I used to live in St. Louis. I grew up in Wisconsin, but I used to live there. So, I know the weather in both places, and St. Louis is ungodly in the summer in terms of heat and humidity. So he took his boys up to Wisconsin for training camp back in the days when training camp meant he really did camp. And then, as they were getting ready to go back to St. Louis, they played a local school named Carroll College, which is my alma mater. Now it's Carroll University, but they played a game, and Bradbury Robinson threw the first forward pass in a legal, you know, authorized game. So I always claimed that Carroll invented pass defense, which you would want to guess. Yeah, I guess it would be. Yeah. Although St. Louis U won. So, but so that was, that game was played in early September 1906. And, you know, various teams tried the forward pass. Carlisle was, you know, an early innovator in its use. They always liked anything kind of tricky. Otherwise, it really did not get used much over the next couple of years; just because it was, it was heavily restricted. And, frankly, you know, the Eastern teams didn't really like it that much to begin with. Where it really saw some use was out West, and probably the, you know, one of the seminal moments in the forward pass didn't come until 1913 when, you know, Knute Rockne and Gus Dorius at Notre Dame visited Army for a game, and they were throwing the ball all over the place and the New York sports writers and certainly the West Point football team were surprised at what they could do. And Notre Dame beat Army's butt, and, you know, it brought a lot of attention to what you could do with the forward pass if you think about it differently than most teams thought about it to that point.
Darin Hayes
Now, it was sort of a slow progression, though, from 1906 to, let's say, 1912 to get the passing game to be that way, for Rockne and the rest of Notre Dame to throw the ball like that. Can you describe it? I think 1912 you described as being another pivotal year for the forward pass.
Timothy Brown
Yeah. So, you know, for me, there are three things going on. One is, like I said, you know, that, so when they first approved the forward pass, there's just an inability to conceptualize what it could be. I mean, nobody thought it would be what Don Coryell or somebody else would produce, you know, down the road. There was also just an inability to figure out the techniques to use, which we've talked about a little bit. And then there were restrictions. So, you know, the, we had things like, you know, the, you had to be five yards right or left. And, you know, this will play out again, but in a different form, like in the 40s. But, you know, what we think of is any kind of quick passing, you know, so a quick slant. Right. I mean, that's like. They couldn't even think of a quick slant at the time. But because the passer had to be five yards right or left, he could never have thrown a quick slant. He could never have thrown a bubble screen. He could, you know, there are things that we take it, take for granted as part of football today in the passing game, just they couldn't even think about that as an opportunity because it was, it was, it wasn't legal, you know?
Darin Hayes
So, you know, you basically were forcing the pass to occur only on rollouts. Okay, so 1912 sort of eliminated that rule so that they could throw more of a traditional setting that we know passing as?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, so yeah, by 1912, they dropped that 20-yard downfield rule. They, I believe, also dropped the rule that, so I believe by then, you could throw the ball into the end zone. So, until 1912, there was no end zone, right? So there was this undefined area behind the goal line, but because it was illegal to throw the ball over the goal line, they didn't need an end zone per se. It had to be carried over the goal line. And so, in 1912, they changed that. It was just one of those things where there were just these incredible little tiny steps to make the game more open, but 1912 was a big one. So you can throw the ball as far downfield as you want. You can throw it into the end zone. They later had restrictions where you can only throw one forward pass in a set of downs and things like that. But I think things opened up enough in 1912 that people could see how the forward pass could change the game. They still didn't use that much, but it was getting there. But I guess in a way, I know you described this in the book, the passing restrictions being lifted, and especially that having those end zones defined as being 10 yards, it ended up changing the field from what the Canadians, you know, have the 110-yard field goal line to goal line, still to this day.
-Stadium Evolution
Darin Hayes
But our stadiums in this, like you described, I know Harvard and Yale and of a couple others had the cement stadiums where they were restricted with that only so much room to put a stadium, and they had to change100-yard100 yard field with the two end zones, is that correct?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, a little bit; I added a little bit just to say that Harvard is an example. Harvard built what is still their stadium in 1903, and it was the first, or the largest, reinforced concrete building in the world at the time, blah, blah, blah. But the point was it was there, and it was gonna stay there, right? They had built that stadium so that it could accommodate a regulation football field, a fairly small track, and some sideline area. Well, one of the discussions they had in 1905 was whether we should widen the field like the Canadians had to open up the game. And, you know, with Harvard being one of the dominant forces in the game at the time, they were like, no, we're not changing our stadium, so we need to keep it as is. So, they didn't widen the field in 1905. When it came to 1912, you ran into an issue with the length of the field, not its width. And so there were stadiums like the Polo Grounds in New York City where a lot of college games were played. Back then, a lot of college games were played in baseball parks because that's where the stadium was for, right? Right. And so, depending on the configuration of the ballpark, you might not be able to fit the 110-yard field with 10-yard end zones on the end of it, so 130-yard field. You might only be able to fit a 120-yard field. So what they ended up doing is they eliminated the 55-yard line and, you know, before, you know, kickoffs had been from the midline instead of the 40, and they switched it to the 40 and things like that. So, you know, fairly innocuous kind of change, but, you know, that's one of the, you know, Americans changed to the 50-yard line. It wasn't the Canadians who bastardized our game; we bastardized the game that we had kind of collectively agreed on. And the same thing with three downs. That's sort of the way that Walter's camp designed it, with three downs. And, uh, we also changed that out here. So that occurred in 1912 as well. So we switched to four downs to gain 10 yards at that point. So, actually, probably 1912 is almost as impactful as, uh, 1906. And maybe, maybe not as much as like the early 18 eighties, but, uh, uh, truly some big changes there. And I can see why you have that incorporated as your next era, the second phase of football. Cause there's a lot of going on there. Yeah. Tremendous changes. And then, and then from then on, you know, I mean, there's more tweaking, some of which, you know, some tweaks are bigger than others, but, uh, 1906 to 1912 was a, you know, a period of turmoil, but they, they kind of game came out of it and, and started moving forward, a combination of thinking about the game differently, new techniques, and then rule chains listened up the passing game.
Darin Hayes
Now, Tim, what do you think would have happened, you know, now that we know the whole story arc of the passing game and all the changes that came because of between 1906 and 1912, uh, in your opinion, would the game of football survived without those revisions?
Timothy Brown
You know, it's one of those where, okay, without revisions, I think the answer is no, you know, I, I just, I think there was enough push for the game too, you know, enough recognition, the game was a dangerous game that, uh, without changes, I think it would have died, um, but I'm not sure that would have happened, you know, I think just like today, you know, yeah, I think football still has a lot of dangers in front of it in terms of CTE and all of that, but I think the game's going to change, you know, it's, it will address it. It's, you know, there are enough people who want the game to survive, and there's enough money behind. You know, people who want the game to survive will adjust as it needs to. Um, it may be slower than some folks would like, but it will adjust. And so I think the same thing there. I think if, if the game, um, if it had not changed in 1906, okay, it probably would have been 1908 or 10 or something, but had it not changed, then, then I think it would have, you know, what we saw with, you know, as you mentioned, teams drop the drop football or schools drop football, you know, Columbia dropped football, Northwestern dropped football, USC dropped football, Cal dropped football, Stanford dropped football, but those out in California, they, they switched immediately to rugby. And so, you know, one of the more interesting questions, I think, is whether America switched from American or gridiron football to rugby. How would that have affected the game of rugby? You know, you know, how would the, you know, would, would rugby be the same game it is today if America had been involved? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't, but I guarantee you just based on the, just the sheer population of the country and, and the, you know, I mean, the big game, the California Stanford game in the years that they were playing rugby, that got all the attention that the football game had in the past, big crowds, big press coverage, all of that.
Darin Hayes
Yeah, I believe even to this day, Australia is playing two or three different versions of rugby, just in that much smaller country than ours. So yeah, I guess that would have had a big impact on rugby if the United States had been playing that.
Timothy Brown
So very interesting, very interesting. Canada had a, you know, Canada kind of went off in a different, in its own direction; they played what was called Canadian rugby, which had some elements of American football. It had bounds and a scrimmage, but it was still much more of a wide-open game, no blocking, you know, at that time, whereas American football picked up blocking in the 1880s. So, and then they eventually merged back towards an American-like football, you know, so Canadian football is now very close to American football, but Canadian rugby, until the twenties or so, probably was as similar to rugby as American football. And then that's sort of where the Gray Cup came out. It was the Canadian rugby originally before the CFL.
Darin Hayes
So very interesting. Now, as you said earlier, I, as you said earlier, have a book on the military. Maybe you could tell us what the name of that book is. And I guess we're both your books and where folks could buy them at.
Timothy Brown
So, one book is Fields of Friendly Strife. So, it comes from General MacArthur's quote about the playing fields at West Point. But that's basically a book that follows the teams that played in the 1918 and 1919 Rose Bowls. So it was World War I. And so rather than, for various reasons, rather than having college teams play in the Rose Bowls, they had military teams play. So there was the Marine training camp on the West Coast. It was Mare Island. There was an army training camp up near Tacoma called Camp Lewis. They played in the 1918 game. And then Mirror Island met Great Lakes from near Chicago in the 1919 game. That game included guys like George Halas, who became a fairly famous name in football. But he was on the Great Lakes team, as were a number of others, some pretty talented athletes. So basically, the book kind of follows those teams as they play in their season. Of the guys who had played in 1918, about half of them ended up shipping out and ending up in France during World War I. So it kind of traces them all through that period and then their lives afterward. Wasn't that the game where Patty Driscoll touched on a pass to Halas? That's the game? Okay, okay, okay. All right, great, great.
Darin Hayes
Okay, so you have a website that's named after that original book. Maybe if you could tell us what that is so listeners could go and check that out. Yeah, so Fields of Friendly Strength, it started off really to support my first book.
Timothy Brown
And then, as I kind of turned the corner, a lot of my early information covers World War I and the teams and games. And then I pretty much go right into just various history of football topics. So I would say the last 50 articles or posts that I have are pretty much straight football, but football history. Mostly pre-1960 and a lot of older stuff. I post articles, two or three articles a month. It's available at fieldsoffriendliestrife.com. I've got a Twitter account and Facebook. So, if you either search my name, Timothy P. Brown, or Fields of Friendly Strength, you'll come across it. It's, you know, if you search Fields of Friendly Strength and you're looking for me, you're gonna find it, so.
Darin Hayes
Okay, well, we'll also be listeners. We will have a link to Tim's site on our show notes of the podcast you're listening to, or you can go to pigskindispatch .com. We'll also have some backlinks there to get you there. So we'll make sure we get you in the direction if you need that help. So a great, great site. I highly recommend the site. I highly recommend the book. Just a tremendous job that you did. And coming from an official to an old coach, that's hard to give compliments, I guess, going both ways, but I really enjoyed it.
Timothy Brown
You know, we're natural enemies, you know, as my friend, Josie Ziemba says, you know, so. You know, it's a funny thing. I think for me, some of the stuff I enjoyed most of all in doing the research was the role of officiating. You know, it's just the, so, you know, like things that the book covers, it covers, you know, when did referees start? What did referees wear along the way? What were their uniforms? When did penalty flags come into play? When did whistles or the horns that they used come into play? When did the gun come into play? You know, the referee signals, you know, signal penalties. Well, that had to start, too. So all of those kinds of things, you know, they weren't there when football started. They had to develop. And so we just try to identify as best as I could when those things started and who we can credit with those kinds of changes. Yeah, those evolutions still happen recently because I don't know if you probably remember, but probably about 15 years ago, the NFL went from white knickers to wearing black pants, which in the officiating world was humongous.
Darin Hayes
I had some arguments probably 25 years ago with some people I officiated with that were traditional. I said, no, white knickers are the traditional pants of officials. I said, well, here, let me show you this photograph from 1903, and what's this guy wearing? He's wearing a black suit coat with black pants and dark-colored pants. And I hated the knickers because, especially before, everybody had turf fields, you had grass stains, mud, and you know how washing white is. It's tough, especially if you do a Friday night game; you gotta go do JV games the next day. And you have only so many pairs of white knickers. So it's- Well, one of the things I've got in the book, but one of my favorite aspects of officiating was, you know, until the 20s, maybe the 30s, there was really no training for officials.
Timothy Brown
You were just a former player who knew most of the rules. And so, and you had to be somebody people trusted, kind of thought you were a citizen, right? Most football officials wore their letter sweaters when they were officiating. And it was, and if you look at box scores, really through 19, really through World War II, the box scores of most games would list the officials, and they tell you the school that they attended. And it was because, you know, if you were an Ohio State guy, you did not officiate Ohio State games. You might do Michigan and Indiana and Pitt or whatever. But so you're wearing your letter sweater of a different team was kind of a number one said, I know what I'm talking about because I want a football letter.
Darin Hayes
But secondly, I'm impartial. You know, I'm not rooting for the two teams that are on the field today. Yeah, I know I've read some things where, like, Walter Camp, as he was coaching Yale, would go to New York City to officiate the, you know, the Harvard Princeton game, for instance; I know a couple of instances.
Timothy Brown
So yeah, and, you know, there's, you know, some of the earlier Rose Bowls, you know, USC was a lesser team back then, but you know, they were their head coach, you know, was officiating the Rose Bowl, you know, he was local, didn't have to pay a whole lot more than the bus fare, you know, and so.
Darin Hayes
Yeah, it's just unbelievable. You know, besides the uniform changing, when I started officiating in the early 80s, or I'm sorry, later 80s, you know, we, as a wing official, you know, the head linesman and the line judge, they had you go probably within two yards of the widest offensive player, you know, so if you had a wideout, you'd be tears. Well, that changed probably in the nineties when the offense changed. There are kids getting faster. They said, okay, plant your butts on the sideline. You know, you don't have to be close to officiating. So, that was a big to do in the officiating world. And I can't even imagine, you know, incorporating things like the forward pass and doing it with the two or three officials on the field when you're so used to that, you know, grind it out the game in the middle, so.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, well, I've got one of the articles on the website about the history of down boxes and chains, you know, generally. And so, you know, back in the day, so, you know, what we now call the down box, back in the day, it really was a box. You know, it was a stick with a box on it that had four sides and one, two, three, four. And they spun it around, depending on what down it was. But then, the linesman carried that around with them on the field, you know? And they'd be, you know, he'd be running downfield with the sharp stick with a box on it. And so it just, you know, certain things like that that just seem crazy now. But it's just the way the game evolved, you know? And so, so that kind of stuff, I just think that you know, it's fascinating to figure out, you know, kind of how it happened and why it changed, you know, from one period to another. Well, it definitely is.
Darin Hayes
You do an excellent job of illustrating the changes and how they affected all aspects of the game; as I said, you do a wonderful job and wonderful job of explaining the history of the forward pass today, and I really appreciate you coming on here and, uh, uh, you know, sharing that with us and, uh, we'd love to have you on again sometime if we can to talk about a different subject because you're very interesting and you're very knowledgeable.
Timothy Brown
So I thank you. You name the topic and I'll be there. Okay. It's fun, you know, fun to, fun to share, share information. Cause there's somebody else out there who's got some insight on something that neither of us have.
Darin Hayes
And so let's learn from them, too. Absolutely. So preserve that football history, and we thank you for that. And that's what we're all about. And, uh, thanks for helping us. Let's do that tonight. So thank you very much.
Timothy Brown
Darin, my pleasure.
-Transcript of the Forward Pass History with Timothy Brown
Darin Hayes
Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes at Pigskin Dispatch. Welcome once again to the Pigpen. We have an exciting topic to talk about today. We will go back to the roots of football and, you know, one of the most compelling elements of the game, the passing game. And we're going to go back and look at where it came from, what it's all about, and how it derived to what it is today. And we've got an expert who wrote a very good book called How Football Became Football, the First 150 Years of the Games Evolution. And his name is Timothy P. Brown, and we'll bring him in now. Timothy Brown, welcome to the Pigpen.
Timothy Brown
Hey, Darin. Thank you. Appreciate you having me on.
Looking forward to it.
-Learning More About Timothy Brown
Darin Hayes
Like we were talking before we hit record here, I read your book. It is extremely fascinating. And I love how you grab all the different elements of football history, not just looking at it from the mirror image of a rulesmaker or of a player. You're going even on the officiating side. How officiating evolved with the game really caught my interest.
Timothy Brown
I don't know if I've ever seen anybody do that before, but you caught the interest of all the elements of football. Well done job on that. Yeah, I appreciate it. And I guess, you know, just to me, and a lot of the book is about college football because a lot of the history is about college football. But for me, it goes beyond the game. You know, there are the elements of the fans and the money and, you know, just kind of the, where it fits in society, and how it reflects societal change. I think those are some of the most interesting aspects of football, but it's not just a game on the field that goes beyond that. But of course, the core of it is the game on the field. Now, where did you get the interest to get to the point of writing books on football? I grew up in an athletic family. I played college football. I had a couple played or coached for a couple of years as a graduate assistant or as an assistant while I was going to grad school. And so I've just always had that, you know, kind of football element. And for me, it ended up that I was, you know, I wasn't working in business and collecting Rose Bowl memorabilia. So that's kind of my more my main collecting hobby. And I came across a story that just kind of fascinated me, which is what led to the first book, which covers the military Rose Bowl teams of World War One and World War Two, or I'm sorry, of World War One, not World War Two, but 1918 and 1919 Rose Bowls. And then, you know, in doing the research for that book, I had to really understand football back then rather than the present day. So, that required me to do a bunch of research. And eventually, I realized that the research itself and understanding football back then was a lot of fun. And so I just kind of expanded that. And so the second book that you mentioned, How Football Became Football, reflects really the first 150 years of the game, just how it evolved in multiple dimensions.
-Breaking Down Football into Eras
Darin Hayes
I mean, the other element that I thought you did a really good job on is sort of breaking football into three different segments, time segments of those 150 years. Maybe you could just share with the listeners a little bit about how you broke those up and what differentiates the three.
Timothy Brown
So the reason I broke it into three eras was just that, you know, I just felt like I couldn't just go chronological order, and just, you know, it would just be this recitation of facts, which would be kind of boring. So, I wanted to have some themes about what was happening in football during different time periods. And so the first era, which I just called the early era, was from the game's beginning. So, more or less, in 1869, with Rutgers and Princeton, and then going until 1905, when there were a series of rule changes due to the dangers of the game, etc. And so that's the first period. The second one started in 1906 and continued until 1959. Somebody could argue with me whether it should be 1955 or 1965. But, you know, I have my reasons for choosing 1960. But it's at that point where from 60 on, you know, we have dramatically increased influence of television, and therefore money in the game, we have dramatically increased influence of African American players. Then, there are a couple of other changes, particularly the permanent use of two-platoon football at the college level. Those three things just had a tremendous impact on the game as we know it today. And so, you know, I chose 1960 again; you could argue a slightly different time period, but that's what I worked with. I thought you were spot on. I would totally agree with you that 1960 was a big breaking point. And, of course, 1906, which is sort of what's going to lead us into our discussion today; I guess, though, before we get to 1906, we're going to have to try to figure out what football was the first 30-some years before 1906 that brought us to that point.
Darin Hayes
So maybe if you could describe us, what was football like in the early 1900s? Yeah, so I just want to step back a little bit further first to just say people say all the time football evolved from rugby.
-Early 20th Century American Football
Timothy Brown
And yes, that's true. But I just want to emphasize football was rugby. So, in the early days of what we now think of as gridiron, North American football, US and Canada, it was rugby. And you know, when they started the game, they made some minor tweaks, but it was right. So the game remained very much rugby-esque until, say, 1890. They made some rule changes, including allowing tackling below the waist and things like that, which made it harder to do the outside wide-open and running of rugby. And so the game started steering towards this, which ultimately became mass and momentum football. So mass meaning, you know, it was basically like playing goal line football, you know, the goal line offensive goal against goal line defense, all 110 yards of the field at the time. The mass refers to the idea of multiple blockers leading the runner through the hole and/or grabbing him by the handles that he had sewn on his pants to pull him through the hole. And the momentum, referring to, you know, back then, they didn't have rules on how many players had to be on the line of scrimmage. So, teams would have guards back or tackle back formations and different things. And there was no limit on the number of men who could be moving forward at the snap, you know, similar to what Canada has in their football. So, you know, they'd have these guys running all at the same time and collapsing into a particular hole, just basically slamming into to basically overrun one or two players on the defense. And so it became a very dangerous game. And as a result, there were lots of injuries and, ultimately, deaths, you know, resulting from the nature of the play at the time. Okay, so that sort of takes us to when we always hear about, you know, President Theodore Roosevelt became involved because of the high death count and injury count. And you know, many schools were, you know, canceling their football programs. I guess that sort of takes us up to the 1905 season. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think the whole thing with Roosevelt is a little bit overblown. But, you know, it was more, I think it was a high-profile act on his part. I mean, he really, there's nothing he could do to ban football, right? Right. But, you know, he was a football sport. He was a fan, you know, he, he was at the 1905 Army-Navy game at the end of the season. His son played for Harvard, at least the freshman team at the time. Oh, and he was a big believer in, you know, kind of that whole mass masculinity thing that was behind, you know, football at the time. So, he was a fan. So he wanted to make sure the game continued. At the end of the day, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton controlled the game. They were still even in 1904 and 1905; they were the three schools. Penn, maybe a little bit, but they were the three; they were the schools that controlled the game. And they had, they, they had core responsibility for the rulemaking bodies. It wasn't until 1904 that a non-Easterner, Amos Alonzo Stagg, who had played at Yale but was coaching at Chicago, was the first non-Easterner on the rules committee. So, you know, anything that was wrong with football was due to the guys out east. Okay. The good things about football were due to the guys out east, too. Right. So, there was sort of a reluctance on their part to want to change the game, that I take it. They liked having that game. I guess the flying wedge was gone by that point, but just like you said, the massive collision goal line play, every play, they sort of liked that, and they didn't want to see that change. I take it. Yeah. So, you know, one of their big arguments and, and, and with, with a fair amount of truth to it, but, you know, the, the, the whole death count thing came from a series of newspapers, you know, they, they would track what was happening around the country. And so the death count really was not; it wasn't a bunch of college players from your top-notch college teams. They counted anything from, you know, a lot of the deaths were just kids playing sandlot football or backyard football. A lot of them, you know, weren't; they had no coaching. They were just playing. They didn't know how to tackle the death count. Also included kids who maybe got cut or spiked on the field and got an infection while they couldn't treat infections like we can today. And so some of those guys died from an infection they sustained on the football field. So, on the one hand, the death numbers are exaggerated, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it was a dangerous game. And here and there, there were some college athletes who were killed playing the game. And some of what brought it to a head at the end of the 1905 season was an NYU player, a New York University player, who was killed, and their college president, you know, basically took up the banner and really pushed for change and started organizing change in what ultimately became the organized group that ultimately became the NCAA.
Darin Hayes
So I take it, though, even though Roosevelt's threat was a little bit idle, it was sort of a pivotal point in getting these groups to talk about the revisions and reform that was needed in football. Is that a fair statement?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, yeah, I think that that's true. I mean, it put pressure on the big schools to make changes. And then what ended up happening was like with NYU and some others, they just basically got to a point where they just said, you know, we're not paying attention to you anymore. You're not gonna make the rules anymore. We're gonna make the rules. Eventually, those two groups agreed to get together, you know, compromise on some of the rule changes that ended up taking place.
Darin Hayes
So, if I'm looking at this correctly, we have, you know, the Yale camp, Harvard, and Penn, and we would say Columbia was the other one? Princeton. So we have the Walter camps of the world on that side. And then, on the other side, who wants to have the reform?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, it could be; it was mostly schools that would now be considered V3 schools or V2. You know, they're just, but it was a mishmash. You know, by and large, the folks at the Army and Navy kind of supported the old world, too. You know, the old-school game. So it is more or less that the teams that were at the top of the heap at the time really had no reason to change. And the truth is that in those schools where they had effective coaching, the guys were conditioned before practice. They had the best of the equipment and training. They really had, you know, a limited number of serious injuries and deaths. So they kind of felt like, look, the problem isn't us. The problem is everybody else who doesn't know what they're doing. You know, I think that was really kind of the crux of the argument, but at the end of the day, even those folks realized that they needed to make some changes. And so it was really gonna be a matter of how do we compromise? How do we find ways to allow change without overturning the game that they had grown to love? You know, back then, people, you know, you go back and read newspaper articles from 1903, 1904, and they'll just go on and on about the virtues of some great punter. Now, we think of a punter as the guy of last resort; nobody wants to punt, right? They'll punt it on first down, third, second down all the time. And it was just such an integral part of the game that if you were a good punter, you were a star, you know? Now, typically, you were also the fullback or halfback on the team, but punting was a very highly regarded activity. That explains why I know we talked about a game where they had, I think, no second downs. They punted on first down every plague in Clement weather. I forget what it was, but we've talked about that in one of the podcasts recently. Okay, so we're at this meeting now. I take it after the end of the 1905 season before 1906 starts. And we have these two groups getting together. So, I'm taking it that the forward pass was one of the suggestions that were brought to the table to help open up the game and make it a little bit safer. Is that true? Yeah, so, you know, there were a lot of different suggestions, right? So, and really kind of coming despite the fact that the Easterners controlled things, there was input coming in from across the country. You know, I mean, anything ranged from the forward pass, which ultimately got implemented in 1906, though heavily restricted 1906, they also approved the onsite kick from scrimmage. So it was essentially a punt. in which any member of the offensive team could recover the punt and advance it. So, just like we think about an onside kick today, the kicking team can recover it. Well, they had opened up the game by allowing the kicking team to recover punts as well. And there had been a forerunner to that that was a little bit more restrictive, but that kind of what they call the quarterback kick, that carried on until 1922. So, it remained a part of the game for a while. Well, there are some good things that people would want to be punting on first down, then have to advance the ball a long way because you don't have the pass at that point in time. So maybe that's a good way to get a good chunk of yardage if you're in a stalemate. So interesting. Yeah, and if you think about it, punting was a natural part of the rugby-ish game. So, every team had skilled punters. And so what you wanted, in this case, was a punter who could kind of kick it off to the side in one of your ends, or somebody else could run down and get it. The forward pass was either something that didn't really change the game much or entirely brand new, depending on how you define the forward pass, which I think is one of, which is another big misconception in terms of people's understanding of how that changed the game. Before 1905 or before 1906, the game was not filled with forward passes, but the forward pass was common. It was just illegal. And the reason I say that is because what we now think of as laterals, a term that entered football all about 1914, or pitches, what we think of laterals and pitches, they call passes, right? So the quarterback got the snap from the center, and he tossed it to a half-back or a full-back. That was a pass. And so a forward pass was just those instances where they were running around the field, and they pitched it inadvertently or deliberately tossed it forward. And so it was a penalty, and they'd call the penalty, and they'd lose possession of the ball and that kind of thing. And if you look at old newspaper reports, it's all over the place. Forward passes almost every game; somebody's being penalized for a forward pass. So the game or the game had a forward pass. It was illegal. And so when they were thinking about the new forward pass in 1906, they were pretty much thinking of that. They were thinking of forwarding laterals. So they weren't viewing it as this thing that was gonna revolutionize the game. It was, and a number of committee members thought, yeah, we need it for a couple of years, and we can get rid of it. So, there was no notion of what was going to come down the road and how it would dramatically change the game.
-The Passing Game
Darin Hayes
It was more of a, well, yeah, you can pitch the ball forward and whatever. So it wasn't what you think of it today. They weren't thinking of Aaron Rodgers dropping back and dropping a 45-yard pass on a dime to a receiver who was streaking down the field.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, well, that's right. And so some of it is even. There are some great illustrations of the period that show and discuss the most effective way to throw the forward pass, right? And so, really, I mean, in 1906, there was only one team I'm aware of who threw the ball in the overhand spiral motion that we think of as the forward pass today. Everybody else was trying to figure out, like, okay, well, I'm only gonna toss it a couple of yards or whatever. And so they were. Some thought the best way to throw it was tossing it like a great grenade with a stiff arm or some basketball set shot. There were a variety of different techniques like that, but it was all within a 10-yard kind of radius, maybe flipping it 15 yards downfield to somebody, and just conceptually, nobody had. The skies did not open up, and a stone tablet did not come down, giving the football world a passing tree, right? I mean, nobody had any idea what any of that would have looked like. That was Sid Gillman and 40 or 50 yards in the future before that happened. Okay, 1906, you said the forward pass came in with some restrictions on it.
Darin Hayes
Maybe you could describe some of those restrictions. When the forward pass first came in, at that point, that was during the era of the checkerboard field. And so, probably a fair number of your listeners have seen a checkerboard field at one point or another.
Timothy Brown
But so beyond the normal stripes every five yards, there were lines running perpendicular to those. There were also five yards. So the reason those were there is in 1903, they instituted a rule that said that the first person to receive the ball from the center could not run forward or could not cross the line of scrimmage with the ball unless they were five yards right or left at the center. This was to try to eliminate some fakery that was going on in the center area and to keep them from running up the gut all the time. But so when the forward pass was adopted, they basically followed that same rule and said that in order to throw a forward pass, the passer has to be five yards right or left of the center before they can throw the ball. There were other restrictions, and some of these changed a little bit over time, but there were restrictions. Prior to 1912, it was a more restricted game. So, you know, they had things like you couldn't throw the ball more than 20 yards downfield. You couldn't; if the ball crossed the goal line on the fly or on a bounce, it was a turnover. If you threw a pass and it was not touched by an offensive or defensive player before it touched the ground, it was a turnover. So, you know, if you think about the implications of that, you've got guys who don't really know how to throw a forward pass very well, trying to throw it to people who don't know how to run passing routes. And if they throw it too far, it's a turnover. If they miss, if they have an incompletion, it's a turnover. So it's really not surprising that for the first half dozen or so years of football, the forward pass didn't get used very much other than by a couple of select teams. And some of those did very well. And they were playing with a watermelon ball, too, I imagine, right? More of a rugby, okay. Yeah, I guess that would make it very difficult to try to figure out how to throw that ball, wouldn't it? It'd be tough for us today, I think, to try to figure out how to throw that. Yeah, well, I mean, it really was one of the things. Early on, the ball was so thick that they basically kind of felt like unless the passer had big hands, they couldn't be, in effect, the passer just because they couldn't get a grip on the ball. You know, and the lacing, you know, the laces were just, you know, relatively thin pieces of leather that laced the ball together. They weren't like, you know, we've got polyvinyl chloride laces now that are stiff as, you know, stiff as a brick.
Darin Hayes
So it's very easy to get, you know, to spin on the ball and do those kinds of things. That wasn't the case back then. It reminds me of we had a gentleman who, one of my PFRA friends, Simon Herrera, has a vintage football game. They replicate the games played in the early 1920s in the pro game. And he wanted to try to get it so they wouldn't throw passes. So he had a ball developed for these games that he has every year. That's even a wider girth than the balls that you're talking about in the, you know, 1906. So they can't pass the ball. I forget what it was, like 24-inch girth or something. It's ridiculous, like a medicine ball. So, it was effective. They can't throw a pass with it. So, it sounds like this is a similar situation here for these folks who were trying to throw a pass.
Timothy Brown
Well, the flip side of it is that, you know, as long as you had that rounded ball, you could still continue to dropkick. But once you got to the, you know, there were successive changes to the dimensions of the ball. Once the ball got too pointy, drop-kicking went away because you couldn't predict where the ball was going to bounce anymore. Unless you're Doug Flutie, right? Well, he's playing on Astroturf, not on some muddy field that guys played on back in the day. Right. So, who did throw the first pass successfully? And how did that come about? It seems like everything's against them, wanting to throw a pass. Well, so, you know, one of the things, an interesting thing that happened as the committee was kind of as people are tossing out ideas on the changes that should occur in 1906, there were two teams out in Kansas that decided to play a game, a test game to experiment and institute some of the potential rule changes. So Fairmont, which now is Wichita State, and Washburn played one another. The coach of Washburn was a guy named John Outland; the Outland Trophies were named after them. And so they played a test game on Christmas Day, 1905. You know, it's unclear, exactly, you know, so they threw forward passes, but it's unclear what that means. You know, it's hard to believe that they would have really restructured their offense in a significant way. It probably meant that they just tossed the ball forward on a couple of occasions. I think only one forward pass was completed, and the game ended up in a 0 -0 tie or 6 -6 tie, you know, whatever it was. So, it's not a very good test of the process, but it points out the fact that you really have time to let things sink in and conceptualize the changes that you had as a coach. The last names were Eddie Coach and Coaches. He had played at Wisconsin and, I think, was an all-American or, you know, whatever. He was a star there, but he ended up with a guy named Bradbury Robinson, who transferred from Wisconsin down at St. Louis U. Bradbury Robinson was a big, pretty big guy who had big hands, and he had learned to throw the overhand spiral. I guess he'd learned it by throwing the ball back when he was retrieving punks. But so he all said, you know, here's this guy who has this capability that nobody else had. And so St. Louis U basically and Coaches, you know, built this offense around, you know, it's not like they just went to a passing offense, but, you know, they threw the ball far more than anybody else. They were undefeated in 1906, and before the season, I used to live in St. Louis. I grew up in Wisconsin, but I used to live there. So, I know the weather in both places, and St. Louis is ungodly in the summer in terms of heat and humidity. So he took his boys up to Wisconsin for training camp back in the days when training camp meant he really did camp. And then, as they were getting ready to go back to St. Louis, they played a local school named Carroll College, which is my alma mater. Now it's Carroll University, but they played a game, and Bradbury Robinson threw the first forward pass in a legal, you know, authorized game. So I always claimed that Carroll invented pass defense, which you would want to guess. Yeah, I guess it would be. Yeah. Although St. Louis U won. So, but so that was, that game was played in early September 1906. And, you know, various teams tried the forward pass. Carlisle was, you know, an early innovator in its use. They always liked anything kind of tricky. Otherwise, it really did not get used much over the next couple of years; just because it was, it was heavily restricted. And, frankly, you know, the Eastern teams didn't really like it that much to begin with. Where it really saw some use was out West, and probably the, you know, one of the seminal moments in the forward pass didn't come until 1913 when, you know, Knute Rockne and Gus Dorius at Notre Dame visited Army for a game, and they were throwing the ball all over the place and the New York sports writers and certainly the West Point football team were surprised at what they could do. And Notre Dame beat Army's butt, and, you know, it brought a lot of attention to what you could do with the forward pass if you think about it differently than most teams thought about it to that point.
Darin Hayes
Now, it was sort of a slow progression, though, from 1906 to, let's say, 1912 to get the passing game to be that way, for Rockne and the rest of Notre Dame to throw the ball like that. Can you describe it? I think 1912 you described as being another pivotal year for the forward pass.
Timothy Brown
Yeah. So, you know, for me, there are three things going on. One is, like I said, you know, that, so when they first approved the forward pass, there's just an inability to conceptualize what it could be. I mean, nobody thought it would be what Don Coryell or somebody else would produce, you know, down the road. There was also just an inability to figure out the techniques to use, which we've talked about a little bit. And then there were restrictions. So, you know, the, we had things like, you know, the, you had to be five yards right or left. And, you know, this will play out again, but in a different form, like in the 40s. But, you know, what we think of is any kind of quick passing, you know, so a quick slant. Right. I mean, that's like. They couldn't even think of a quick slant at the time. But because the passer had to be five yards right or left, he could never have thrown a quick slant. He could never have thrown a bubble screen. He could, you know, there are things that we take it, take for granted as part of football today in the passing game, just they couldn't even think about that as an opportunity because it was, it was, it wasn't legal, you know?
Darin Hayes
So, you know, you basically were forcing the pass to occur only on rollouts. Okay, so 1912 sort of eliminated that rule so that they could throw more of a traditional setting that we know passing as?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, so yeah, by 1912, they dropped that 20-yard downfield rule. They, I believe, also dropped the rule that, so I believe by then, you could throw the ball into the end zone. So, until 1912, there was no end zone, right? So there was this undefined area behind the goal line, but because it was illegal to throw the ball over the goal line, they didn't need an end zone per se. It had to be carried over the goal line. And so, in 1912, they changed that. It was just one of those things where there were just these incredible little tiny steps to make the game more open, but 1912 was a big one. So you can throw the ball as far downfield as you want. You can throw it into the end zone. They later had restrictions where you can only throw one forward pass in a set of downs and things like that. But I think things opened up enough in 1912 that people could see how the forward pass could change the game. They still didn't use that much, but it was getting there. But I guess in a way, I know you described this in the book, the passing restrictions being lifted, and especially that having those end zones defined as being 10 yards, it ended up changing the field from what the Canadians, you know, have the 110-yard field goal line to goal line, still to this day.
-Stadium Evolution
Darin Hayes
But our stadiums in this, like you described, I know Harvard and Yale and of a couple others had the cement stadiums where they were restricted with that only so much room to put a stadium, and they had to change100-yard100 yard field with the two end zones, is that correct?
Timothy Brown
Yeah, a little bit; I added a little bit just to say that Harvard is an example. Harvard built what is still their stadium in 1903, and it was the first, or the largest, reinforced concrete building in the world at the time, blah, blah, blah. But the point was it was there, and it was gonna stay there, right? They had built that stadium so that it could accommodate a regulation football field, a fairly small track, and some sideline area. Well, one of the discussions they had in 1905 was whether we should widen the field like the Canadians had to open up the game. And, you know, with Harvard being one of the dominant forces in the game at the time, they were like, no, we're not changing our stadium, so we need to keep it as is. So, they didn't widen the field in 1905. When it came to 1912, you ran into an issue with the length of the field, not its width. And so there were stadiums like the Polo Grounds in New York City where a lot of college games were played. Back then, a lot of college games were played in baseball parks because that's where the stadium was for, right? Right. And so, depending on the configuration of the ballpark, you might not be able to fit the 110-yard field with 10-yard end zones on the end of it, so 130-yard field. You might only be able to fit a 120-yard field. So what they ended up doing is they eliminated the 55-yard line and, you know, before, you know, kickoffs had been from the midline instead of the 40, and they switched it to the 40 and things like that. So, you know, fairly innocuous kind of change, but, you know, that's one of the, you know, Americans changed to the 50-yard line. It wasn't the Canadians who bastardized our game; we bastardized the game that we had kind of collectively agreed on. And the same thing with three downs. That's sort of the way that Walter's camp designed it, with three downs. And, uh, we also changed that out here. So that occurred in 1912 as well. So we switched to four downs to gain 10 yards at that point. So, actually, probably 1912 is almost as impactful as, uh, 1906. And maybe, maybe not as much as like the early 18 eighties, but, uh, uh, truly some big changes there. And I can see why you have that incorporated as your next era, the second phase of football. Cause there's a lot of going on there. Yeah. Tremendous changes. And then, and then from then on, you know, I mean, there's more tweaking, some of which, you know, some tweaks are bigger than others, but, uh, 1906 to 1912 was a, you know, a period of turmoil, but they, they kind of game came out of it and, and started moving forward, a combination of thinking about the game differently, new techniques, and then rule chains listened up the passing game.
Darin Hayes
Now, Tim, what do you think would have happened, you know, now that we know the whole story arc of the passing game and all the changes that came because of between 1906 and 1912, uh, in your opinion, would the game of football survived without those revisions?
Timothy Brown
You know, it's one of those where, okay, without revisions, I think the answer is no, you know, I, I just, I think there was enough push for the game too, you know, enough recognition, the game was a dangerous game that, uh, without changes, I think it would have died, um, but I'm not sure that would have happened, you know, I think just like today, you know, yeah, I think football still has a lot of dangers in front of it in terms of CTE and all of that, but I think the game's going to change, you know, it's, it will address it. It's, you know, there are enough people who want the game to survive, and there's enough money behind. You know, people who want the game to survive will adjust as it needs to. Um, it may be slower than some folks would like, but it will adjust. And so I think the same thing there. I think if, if the game, um, if it had not changed in 1906, okay, it probably would have been 1908 or 10 or something, but had it not changed, then, then I think it would have, you know, what we saw with, you know, as you mentioned, teams drop the drop football or schools drop football, you know, Columbia dropped football, Northwestern dropped football, USC dropped football, Cal dropped football, Stanford dropped football, but those out in California, they, they switched immediately to rugby. And so, you know, one of the more interesting questions, I think, is whether America switched from American or gridiron football to rugby. How would that have affected the game of rugby? You know, you know, how would the, you know, would, would rugby be the same game it is today if America had been involved? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't, but I guarantee you just based on the, just the sheer population of the country and, and the, you know, I mean, the big game, the California Stanford game in the years that they were playing rugby, that got all the attention that the football game had in the past, big crowds, big press coverage, all of that.
Darin Hayes
Yeah, I believe even to this day, Australia is playing two or three different versions of rugby, just in that much smaller country than ours. So yeah, I guess that would have had a big impact on rugby if the United States had been playing that.
Timothy Brown
So very interesting, very interesting. Canada had a, you know, Canada kind of went off in a different, in its own direction; they played what was called Canadian rugby, which had some elements of American football. It had bounds and a scrimmage, but it was still much more of a wide-open game, no blocking, you know, at that time, whereas American football picked up blocking in the 1880s. So, and then they eventually merged back towards an American-like football, you know, so Canadian football is now very close to American football, but Canadian rugby, until the twenties or so, probably was as similar to rugby as American football. And then that's sort of where the Gray Cup came out. It was the Canadian rugby originally before the CFL.
Darin Hayes
So very interesting. Now, as you said earlier, I, as you said earlier, have a book on the military. Maybe you could tell us what the name of that book is. And I guess we're both your books and where folks could buy them at.
Timothy Brown
So, one book is Fields of Friendly Strife. So, it comes from General MacArthur's quote about the playing fields at West Point. But that's basically a book that follows the teams that played in the 1918 and 1919 Rose Bowls. So it was World War I. And so rather than, for various reasons, rather than having college teams play in the Rose Bowls, they had military teams play. So there was the Marine training camp on the West Coast. It was Mare Island. There was an army training camp up near Tacoma called Camp Lewis. They played in the 1918 game. And then Mirror Island met Great Lakes from near Chicago in the 1919 game. That game included guys like George Halas, who became a fairly famous name in football. But he was on the Great Lakes team, as were a number of others, some pretty talented athletes. So basically, the book kind of follows those teams as they play in their season. Of the guys who had played in 1918, about half of them ended up shipping out and ending up in France during World War I. So it kind of traces them all through that period and then their lives afterward. Wasn't that the game where Patty Driscoll touched on a pass to Halas? That's the game? Okay, okay, okay. All right, great, great.
Darin Hayes
Okay, so you have a website that's named after that original book. Maybe if you could tell us what that is so listeners could go and check that out. Yeah, so Fields of Friendly Strength, it started off really to support my first book.
Timothy Brown
And then, as I kind of turned the corner, a lot of my early information covers World War I and the teams and games. And then I pretty much go right into just various history of football topics. So I would say the last 50 articles or posts that I have are pretty much straight football, but football history. Mostly pre-1960 and a lot of older stuff. I post articles, two or three articles a month. It's available at fieldsoffriendliestrife.com. I've got a Twitter account and Facebook. So, if you either search my name, Timothy P. Brown, or Fields of Friendly Strength, you'll come across it. It's, you know, if you search Fields of Friendly Strength and you're looking for me, you're gonna find it, so.
Darin Hayes
Okay, well, we'll also be listeners. We will have a link to Tim's site on our show notes of the podcast you're listening to, or you can go to pigskindispatch .com. We'll also have some backlinks there to get you there. So we'll make sure we get you in the direction if you need that help. So a great, great site. I highly recommend the site. I highly recommend the book. Just a tremendous job that you did. And coming from an official to an old coach, that's hard to give compliments, I guess, going both ways, but I really enjoyed it.
Timothy Brown
You know, we're natural enemies, you know, as my friend, Josie Ziemba says, you know, so. You know, it's a funny thing. I think for me, some of the stuff I enjoyed most of all in doing the research was the role of officiating. You know, it's just the, so, you know, like things that the book covers, it covers, you know, when did referees start? What did referees wear along the way? What were their uniforms? When did penalty flags come into play? When did whistles or the horns that they used come into play? When did the gun come into play? You know, the referee signals, you know, signal penalties. Well, that had to start, too. So all of those kinds of things, you know, they weren't there when football started. They had to develop. And so we just try to identify as best as I could when those things started and who we can credit with those kinds of changes. Yeah, those evolutions still happen recently because I don't know if you probably remember, but probably about 15 years ago, the NFL went from white knickers to wearing black pants, which in the officiating world was humongous.
Darin Hayes
I had some arguments probably 25 years ago with some people I officiated with that were traditional. I said, no, white knickers are the traditional pants of officials. I said, well, here, let me show you this photograph from 1903, and what's this guy wearing? He's wearing a black suit coat with black pants and dark-colored pants. And I hated the knickers because, especially before, everybody had turf fields, you had grass stains, mud, and you know how washing white is. It's tough, especially if you do a Friday night game; you gotta go do JV games the next day. And you have only so many pairs of white knickers. So it's- Well, one of the things I've got in the book, but one of my favorite aspects of officiating was, you know, until the 20s, maybe the 30s, there was really no training for officials.
Timothy Brown
You were just a former player who knew most of the rules. And so, and you had to be somebody people trusted, kind of thought you were a citizen, right? Most football officials wore their letter sweaters when they were officiating. And it was, and if you look at box scores, really through 19, really through World War II, the box scores of most games would list the officials, and they tell you the school that they attended. And it was because, you know, if you were an Ohio State guy, you did not officiate Ohio State games. You might do Michigan and Indiana and Pitt or whatever. But so you're wearing your letter sweater of a different team was kind of a number one said, I know what I'm talking about because I want a football letter.
Darin Hayes
But secondly, I'm impartial. You know, I'm not rooting for the two teams that are on the field today. Yeah, I know I've read some things where, like, Walter Camp, as he was coaching Yale, would go to New York City to officiate the, you know, the Harvard Princeton game, for instance; I know a couple of instances.
Timothy Brown
So yeah, and, you know, there's, you know, some of the earlier Rose Bowls, you know, USC was a lesser team back then, but you know, they were their head coach, you know, was officiating the Rose Bowl, you know, he was local, didn't have to pay a whole lot more than the bus fare, you know, and so.
Darin Hayes
Yeah, it's just unbelievable. You know, besides the uniform changing, when I started officiating in the early 80s, or I'm sorry, later 80s, you know, we, as a wing official, you know, the head linesman and the line judge, they had you go probably within two yards of the widest offensive player, you know, so if you had a wideout, you'd be tears. Well, that changed probably in the nineties when the offense changed. There are kids getting faster. They said, okay, plant your butts on the sideline. You know, you don't have to be close to officiating. So, that was a big to do in the officiating world. And I can't even imagine, you know, incorporating things like the forward pass and doing it with the two or three officials on the field when you're so used to that, you know, grind it out the game in the middle, so.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, well, I've got one of the articles on the website about the history of down boxes and chains, you know, generally. And so, you know, back in the day, so, you know, what we now call the down box, back in the day, it really was a box. You know, it was a stick with a box on it that had four sides and one, two, three, four. And they spun it around, depending on what down it was. But then, the linesman carried that around with them on the field, you know? And they'd be, you know, he'd be running downfield with the sharp stick with a box on it. And so it just, you know, certain things like that that just seem crazy now. But it's just the way the game evolved, you know? And so, so that kind of stuff, I just think that you know, it's fascinating to figure out, you know, kind of how it happened and why it changed, you know, from one period to another. Well, it definitely is.
Darin Hayes
You do an excellent job of illustrating the changes and how they affected all aspects of the game; as I said, you do a wonderful job and wonderful job of explaining the history of the forward pass today, and I really appreciate you coming on here and, uh, uh, you know, sharing that with us and, uh, we'd love to have you on again sometime if we can to talk about a different subject because you're very interesting and you're very knowledgeable.
Timothy Brown
So I thank you. You name the topic and I'll be there. Okay. It's fun, you know, fun to, fun to share, share information. Cause there's somebody else out there who's got some insight on something that neither of us have.
Darin Hayes
And so let's learn from them, too. Absolutely. So preserve that football history, and we thank you for that. And that's what we're all about. And, uh, thanks for helping us. Let's do that tonight. So thank you very much.
Timothy Brown
Darin, my pleasure.
The 1st Legal Forward Pass Sept 5, 1906
The first legal forward pass in football was thrown by Bradbury Robinson on September 5, 1906, in a game between Saint Louis University and Carroll College. ... — www.youtube.com
September 5 is a special day in gridiron history, as it was the occurrence of something big!
The first legal forward pass in football was thrown by Bradbury Robinson on September 5, 1906, in a game between Saint Louis University and Carroll College. Robinson was a quarterback for Saint Louis, and he threw the pass to Jack Schneider, who was a wide receiver.
The pass was completed for a touchdown, and it helped Saint Louis win the game 22-0.
The First Extra Point Conversion by Forward Pass?
When football adopted its point-based scoring system in 1883, kicking goals from the field (field goals) were primary. They earned five points, touchdowns were worth two points, and goals from touchdowns (extra points) were worth four points. Although touchdowns gave teams two points, they also gave a chance at a free kick for the try after the touchdown. (The defense had to stand in the end zone and could rush the kicker only after the holder placed the ball to the ground.) — www.footballarchaeology.com
They say necessity is the mother of invention, and in the world of football, that invention sometimes comes wrapped in a pigskin and launched downfield. Today, we delve into a groundbreaking moment – the first ever extra point conversion by forward pass in American football history.
This wasn't just another point attempt; it was a play that challenged the status quo and redefined the way points were scored. Join us on a podcast journey with Timothy Brown and article exploration as we dissect this pivotal moment. We'll meet the players and coaches who dared to defy convention, analyze the strategic thinking behind the play call, and explore the impact it had on the game's evolution.
Was it a stroke of genius or a desperate gamble? Did it spark a revolution in offensive strategy, or was it a one-off act of audacious improvisation? We'll uncover the story behind the throw, the roar of the crowd, and the lasting legacy of this innovative play that forever changed the way extra points were scored. So, buckle up, football fans, and get ready to revisit a moment where forward-thinking met football history!
Could this be the first instance of a converted extra-point attempt after a TD via a forward pass? Timothy P. Brown tells the play's story as the Washington & Jefferson Presidents played the Lafayette Leopards in 1921.
-Transcription of Extra Point via the Forward Pass with Timothy Brown
Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And guess what? It's Tuesday again.
And we are here with Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. And he has some great tidbits from some of his past writings that he's going to come on and chat a little bit about. Tonight, we're going to be talking about a very interesting one that came out in March. Tim Brown, welcome to The Pig Pen.
Darin, good to see you again and get a chance to chat about old-time football stuff. Always fun. Yeah, old time football.
There's nothing like it. And there's so much that we don't know about it that your tidbits really bring to light. And, you know, I learned so much from really enjoying them.
And you always have something that I'm going to take out of each one of those and, you know, store it in the old crock pot because it's something interesting from football yesteryear. And tonight is no exception. You really have an interesting one, sort of a development of the game that, in some cases, we still see today.
Yeah. You know, so this one's about the first. Extra point conversion by forward pass.
Right. And so, you know, there's a lot of stuff in football, and sometimes when I'm writing stuff, it's like, well, this was the first time this happened. OK, well, this is the first time we know it happened.
In a number of cases, you know, did it happen another time before that could be, you know, and especially earlier on, we get the more it's dependent on, you know, it happens when there was a reporter there when they wrote it in the newspaper. So, I just wrote fairly recently about the first crisscross or reverse in a football game. And that occurred in 1888 at Phillips Handover, the prep school, you know, in the east.
And but, you know, big time school, wealthy kids, wealthy alums got reported in Boston newspapers. And therefore, we know what happened. Did somebody else pull it off somewhere else beforehand? Could have been.
But, you know, the received wisdom is this is when it happened. So now, with the first extra point conversion by forward passes, the timing is a lot easier to figure out than when that first happened because until 1922, if you were going to convert the, you know, after scoring a touchdown, if you were going to do the goal after touchdown, you had to kick it there. You couldn't run it.
You couldn't pass it. So it had to be by kick. So we know that the first conversion bypass couldn't have occurred until 1922.
So then we get into, OK, well, when in 1922 did it happen? And so I at least don't have it. I mean, try as I might, I could search every newspaper archive and comb through every book that I own. I don't have a real effective way to try to find that first time. So, in this case, I'm relying on a newspaper report from 1954.
So a look back article saying, hey, here's what happened in 1922. But the cool thing was it wasn't a high-profile game. By two teams that you might not think of as high profile teams nowadays, but in 22, they were.
So it was a game, you know, kind of, you know, maybe the fourth week of the season, a game between Lafayette and Washington and Jefferson. So, you know, nowadays you go, OK, Lafayette and Washington and Jefferson. But at the time, Lafayette was riding a 17-game winning streak.
Washington and Jefferson was on a 17 point unbeaten streak. And I say unbeaten because they had tied California in the 1922 Rose Bowl or. Yeah, so.
So anyway. You know, they. You know, so really, two top teams are playing, and they're playing on the polo grounds.
So in until 1922, I guess, you know, you had to you had to kick it. Typically, people drop-kicked it, but they did the placement kick as well. So then in 22, you got the ball at the five-yard line.
You could kick it, you could drop kick it, you could snap it to a holder in place, kick it, you could run it, or you could pass it in for a touchdown or not for a touchdown, but for the conversion. But of course, you know, since it's starting from the five. The kick is probably your better option unless you don't have a good drop kicker, or you don't have a good place kicker, a good snapper, or a good holder.
Right. So, as it turned out, in this game, Lafayette went ahead 13 to nothing in the first half. And so, you know, Washington Jefferson's kind of chugging along a little bit.
But then in the third quarter, they score a touchdown and convert. So now it's 13 to seven in the fourth quarter. Lafayette, Washington Jefferson's quarterback, a guy named Brinkert.
He throws a touchdown pass. So now it's a 13-13 tie. And so the game depends on their ability to convert.
So he had the previous time they scored; he had drop-kicked it. The quarterback had drop-kicked for the extra point. So this time around, he sets up, you know, the team sets up just like he's going to dropkick again.
They snap it to him. And one of their ends, who are playing in tight as they typically did, then, you know, scoot out into the end zone all alone, and he tosses him the P, and they convert the extra point bypass. So again, we think that's the first conversion by a forward pass.
And they, you know, they ended up winning the game. That was that was the last score of the game. And so all the.
You know, all the other W and J fans leave happily in the Lafayette fans are disappointed. So what? So I have a trivia question for you. But if about what's well about Washington Jefferson.
But I'm going to set that aside to see if you want to cover it. If you have questions about the game or anything like that, we need to discuss. Well, I guess one of the questions is not particularly about the forward pass, but it's right about that time, as you share in your story, and you just mentioned it is one of the ways was the kick for the extra point similar to what we know today. Maybe the scoring was a little bit different.
Now, where's how was I'm interested in how the holder may have been because I know on free kicks, the holder was lying flat on their stomach, which I'm not exactly sure why, why they laid on their stomach to do that. You know, we said that we have holders today for free kicks on a windy day when, in the NFL, you have a holder on the ball. But I was just wondering, would did they take a snap from their stomach while the holder was on a stomach for those kicks? Or is it more similar on a knee like we do today? Yeah, I think I've seen different versions of that.
Initially, they may have tried to do the thing on the stomach. So, you know, the reason they did it on the stomach was on the free kick. The defense had to be 10 yards back of the ball.
And so as soon as as soon as the holder or they used to call him a placer, but as soon as the holder set the ball on the ground or as soon as the ball touched the ground, the defense could rush. So what they what the holder would do is lay prone. You know, you basically run on it.
You'd lay on his stomach and perpendicular to the path of the kicker. Right. Then he put one hand under the ball and one hand over the ball, balanced it, and held it right close to the ground.
And then, when the kicker was ready, he pulled the underhand out. And then, you know, so the ball was sitting on the ground, held by his upper hand. And then the kicker would come through, you know, follow the path and kick it.
So, you know, I think. You know exactly why it developed that way. It's kind of hard to know, but it does make sense.
You know, I mean, in a nun or in a free-kick situation, that particular method of holding makes sense. Now, once you introduce the snap. So, the snap to the holder originated in 1896.
And, you know, it's just one of those nobody thought about it before. So two brothers who, you know, played at Otterbein in Ohio developed it and then it spread quickly. But they but still most people still drop kicked anyways, because that's what, you know, the guys were trained to do.
So in those situations, I mean, early on, I believe mostly what they did was you know, the football was still transitioning from rolling the ball on its side. There was still some of that or tumbling it back rather than really kind of a long snap like we think of it today. So they a lot of times a holder would kind of squat like a catcher in baseball.
And, you know, so you could move a little bit to grab the ball and then set it down. And then they started switching to, you know, what we think of today as a holder. I don't know what you call that position, you know, one knee on the ground or one knee.
Raised, but, you know, I've got pictures of even into the late 30s. I believe it is. I've got a picture of an Arizona player still doing it.
The squatter, you know, the squatting catcher's way. So it probably depended on how accurate your long snapper was, you know, all that kind of stuff. So, you know, it's one of those that, you know, when we think of the snapping position or the holder's position, that's the only way that makes sense.
But, you know, they tried different things along the way. But the catcher's position definitely makes a lot of sense. You know, adopting it from baseball, you know, you have a wild pitch, which is much like a snap.
You don't know where it's going to go sometimes. And they can maneuver a little bit. And probably they probably had a guy that played catcher on the baseball team, maybe as a holder to he's familiar from maneuvering that.
So that makes a good sense. So, all right. Well, thank you for that.
That's a good explanation. So, OK, what do you get for your trivia question? OK, so this may be one of my favorite trivia questions, but, you know, we've talked enough that maybe this is an obvious answer to you, but maybe not so much for your audience. So, you probably should allow the audience a little bit of time to figure it out.
OK, so the question is, there are four teams that do not currently play. FBS football has played in the Rose Bowl game. What are those four teams that are not currently in the FBS and played in a Rose Bowl game? Yeah.
OK, folks, before I answer, if you want to hit pause and answer it yourself, and I'm going to proceed to answer. I think I mentioned one of them earlier in the podcast. OK, well, let me let me say, does it does it count military teams? Are you counting military teams in that? Yes, I am.
OK. All right. Well, after spending almost 50 days of Rose Bowl coverage just a few months ago, I hope I get this right.
So, I think the Great Lakes team, I'm going to say Washington and Jefferson because we're talking about them tonight. That's two.
Let's see. Was it Columbia? No, no, Cornell, the other Ivy League. No, neither one of them ever played.
Well, Cornell or Columbia played in the 34. Yeah, Columbia. I must say, but it's not them.
No. OK, Harvard, because they're not FBS. No.
OK, I'm trying to think about who the other military team that played in the World War One era was. Well, actually. OK, so I asked the question, which should be, are you currently not playing Division One because there are teams like Harvard and Columbia?
OK. All right. OK.
FCS. Yeah. OK.
OK. Not a problem. No problem.
All right. OK, so they're so they're they're not playing in Division One football at all. So.
All right. So, OK, so you said Great Lakes, W and W and J, W and J. I'm trying to think of the military team from California that the one starts with an M. I took my tongue out. I'm not it's like Miramont or something.
And it's not. Yeah. So Mare Island, Mare Island, that's what they played twice.
They played in 18 and 19. And then. Another military team.
Great Lakes, I'm stumped on the last one; I'm stumped on the last military team. Great Lakes and Mare Island played in the 1919 game, and Mare Island and Camp Lewis played. OK, in the 18 game.
Camp Lewis is sometimes referred to as the 91st Division because that's where that Division was stationed. OK, you took away my easy bunnies with the Ivy League schools. I thought I had.
Yeah, I screwed up with the way I asked the question. So, I apologize. And to all the listeners that are scouring their brains trying to figure out the answer.
So it should have been like FBS or FCS schools. Yeah, or just D1. So normally, you know, there are some people when I ask this question, who either just draw a blank, or they might know there are these military teams.
But hardly anybody knows about Washington Jefferson. They're typically the toughest ones. The only reason I know about Washington Jefferson is because I'm in the process of doing a lot of research on a book that has a lot of W and J players in it.
However, from the late 1890s and early 1900s, they played with W and J. But I have a couple of books on W and J football. It's kind of still fresh in my mind. So, I know you're a PA guy.
That's right. They're the Western PA team. So, for the South Southern team from us, I think you can be a Western PA, and we're the first Norse.
But hey, that's true. Hey, great question, though. I really like the fact that it was a good one.
So, Tim, your tidbits are, you know, bringing up items like this constantly every single day, sometimes a couple of times a day. Why don't you share with the listeners how they, too, can share in on all the fun of hearing these? Yeah, so, you know, best way is just to go to my website, footballarchaeology.com, subscribe. And that by doing that, you'll you'll get an email every night at like seven o'clock.
I may actually push that a little bit later. But anyways, we'll get an email that with, you know, with the story for that that evening. And, you know, if you if you don't want the emails, then just you can follow me on Twitter, though, that's becoming less and less useful as the days go on.
I even did a blue checkmark, which, you know, I normally wouldn't have done. But, you know, that doesn't seem to help. I did the same and had mixed results myself, but we'll see how it goes.
So. All right, Tim, I appreciate it. And we'll talk to you again next week with some more great football history.
Hey, thank you, sir. I appreciate it and look forward to it.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
Before Football Had Pass Interference
It isn’t easy to get things right on the first go-around, as shown when the forward pass became legal in 1906. The rules heavily restricted the forward pass, and the game lacked proven throwing, catching, and route-running techniques we now consider obvious. Also missing were rules concerning pass interference. — www.footballarchaeology.com
Timothy P. Brown, in his FootballArchaeology.com Daily Tidbit, reveals the evolution of pass interference in football. An interesting origin and need for the rule arose as the forward pass morphed.
-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown Football Before Pass Interference
Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to another edition where we get to go down that historic road into some football archaeology with the host and founder of FootballArchaeology.com, Timothy P. Brown. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.
Thank you, Darin, for this beautiful summer evening. Glad to be sitting inside in my basement talking with you. And I, too, am in a basement where it's much cooler than the rest of the house and 80-degree weather that we're not used to, going from 50s to 80s in a couple of days.
It's kind of a shock to the system. But we've got a little bit of a shock to the system in one of your recent tidbits that we're going to discuss tonight. And you have a great title to it, and it's called Before There Was Pass Interference.
And I don't think any of us listening or talking on the subject remember before pass interference. So we're really interested to hear what it was like. Yeah.
Yeah. And I still, I've got an article that I've been working on for quite some time to try to describe the difficulty of coming up with a passing attack in 1906. So, the forward pass was new.
And the fact that they, well, they didn't have a pass interference penalty when the forward pass was first legalized. And so, you know, just to kind of set the scene for that or, you know, to describe why, you know, it's the fact that, you know, I think we now tend to think of, we think of passing the way we've always known it, you know, the overhand spiral, throwing the ball down the field, airing it out. And that's not what they conceived of at the time.
You know, football had, you know, all basically always had forward passing. It was just legal. And for them, a forward pass was a forward lateral.
So it was these, you know, just short little, either inadvertent or, you know, on purpose, they tossed the ball forward. And if the referee caught it, they were penalized for it. And it was actually, you know, a loss, you know, they lost the ball.
So when the forward pass was first legalized, most people were thinking in terms of fairly short-range kind of tosses, you know, pitch kinds of approaches. And, you know, the techniques were, you know, there was kind of the basketball two-hand set shot, sort of, you know, pushing the ball to another guy, the grenade toss, things like that. So, and so, you know, if you think of the forward pass in those very short-range kinds of dimensions, you probably weren't thinking in terms of pass interference.
I mean, people were getting jostled around, you know, I mean, they were, somebody was tackling you, and the guy in front of you was blocking and, you know, maybe you pitched the, you know, you pitched the ball to the guy who was blocking. And so, you know, pass interference didn't kind of make sense conceptually. The other thing that was related to that is that in 1906, they also expanded the onside punt.
So, making every player on the offense eligible to run downfield and get and recover a punt for the off or for the kicking team, regardless of whether they were offside or onside relative to the punter. So, you know, and football already had, you know, they didn't call them gunners that didn't come till maybe the fifties or something. But they had, you know, their ends would split out oftentimes on punts if it was, you know, a planned punt.
And so then, you know, that guy would get jostled by a defender all the way down. And so, you know, the expectation was somebody running downfield like that was going to get hit. So there was just not a, you know, they just didn't conceive of a forward, the forward passing game we know and love today.
And so they didn't think of pass interference the same way. And so they played the first two seasons without really without any rules regarding pass interference. And then in in 1908, they adopted a new rule that said the defense can push the offense out of the way to get to the ball and to try to catch the ball.
But there were no restrictions on the offense. So they could they didn't even have to, you know, they could push the guy so he wouldn't catch the ball, you know, the defender to not catch the ball. And so that stuck around until 1910.
That sounds like a whole lot more fun to watch than what we have today. Yeah. Well, you just I mean, you think about it.
I mean, like the, you know, press coverage and, you know, some of the things, you know, where now, you know, the defenders can't hit the receiver, you know, five after five yards downfield, things like that. You know, those rules, you know, weren't around until like, you know, I think it was the early 70s when those rules came into being, you know, and then that was obviously, you know, when the so you couldn't be in contact when the ball was in the air. Prior to that, it was kind of anything goes.
So that was, you know, maybe to some extent, the remnant of it. But yeah, I don't think the five-yard chuck rule in the NFL came into maybe the late 70s or early 80s. I think it was pretty prevalent during the 70s.
You could have contact, and yeah, right. Yeah, because I mean, the Raiders were the, you know, probably the foremost that, yeah, Lester Hayes and Mel Blount were guilty of it, too. All of them were big corners.
So then, in 1910, they said, OK, you can't, you can't make contact. You can't push or shove, you know, but you could kind of use your body if you're making a bona fide attempt to catch the ball, which is fundamentally the rule that we have today. You know, they also just for 1910, they got rid of it in 1911.
They also added the rule that the defender could not tackle the receiver until he had taken one step after catching the ball, which kind of presages, you know, the targeting or defenseless player, you know, sort of sort of thing. But they got rid of it, you know, after just one year and, you know, just left it at, you know, basically at that point, they said, OK, once he catches the ball or touches the ball, then it's Katie bar the door. But so, you know, it's really, you know, it took a couple of years for pass interference to come into being.
And then, you know, by basically 1910, are pretty much our current. Handling and view of pass interference came into being, you know, now what happens in the hand chucking and all that kind of stuff, press coverage that has changed. But pass interference is pretty much what it is.
Yeah, that's that's an interesting look at it. And, you know, it's stayed pretty consistent through all the years. It's too bad that the definition of a catch hasn't stayed that same way because it seems like recently we've lost what, you know, catching the ball is a legal catch anymore.
At least the NFL has. I think college still has it right in high school as a right. But it's a little bit confusing in the NFL anymore.
Yeah, I don't I don't even try to understand that one. I wait for the call on the field and then or from the box and, you know. Well, hopefully they're getting closer and closer to get it back to what it should be, what we all know is a catch and what isn't a catch.
And you just know it's not hard to describe, but you know, when somebody catches the ball. Yeah, it's, but, you know, that's kind of the tough thing for referees to have a basis for their rulings. And that's that's true.
Or officials, I should say. But yeah, it's a it's a difficult one to try to figure out. But, you know, so what's, you know, back to the just the pure pass interference thing.
It's just interesting that they kind of settled on something early on that, you know, has worked for one hundred and one hundred and ten years. And it's really, really pretty remarkable because there aren't that many rules where that has been the case. Yeah.
When you can have a bunch of football minds around the country and throughout the ages all agreeing on something, that is pretty remarkable. Well, Tim, that was another fascinating tidbit that you had recently. Now, folks would love to get their hands on your tidbits each and every day.
And maybe you could give them some information that you can share with them. Yeah. So, you know, I release the stories every day at seven o'clock Eastern.
And all you got to do if you're interested is go to footballarchaeology.com. There's an opportunity to subscribe on every page. And so you sign up and it's free. You get an email in your inbox at seven o'clock Eastern each night.
And so, you know, you can pile them up for the week or read them that minute, whichever you prefer. And if you're not, you know, if you don't want me invading your inbox, you can follow me on Twitter at footballarchaeology.com or not, or just footballarchaeology is my name there. Right.
OK. Well, Tim Brown, footballarchaeology.com. Thank you very much for joining us. And we will talk to you again next Tuesday.
Very good. Thank you, sir.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
A Tale of Football’s First Legal Forward Pass 1906
Bradbury Robinson and the play that set the game of American football on a whole new course. #shorts @pigskindispatch7110 — www.youtube.com
It wasn't just a toss, it was a revolution. On September 5, 1906, amidst the mud and roar of St. Louis's World's Fair, Bradbury Robinson hurled a leather-bound rebellion. That seemingly simple act – the first legal forward pass in American football history – wasn't just a technicality; it was a seismic shift, a crack in the dam of a ground-bound game.
Before the pass, football was a battlefield of trenches and brute force. Running attacks dominated, often leaving players mangled and crowds bored. But Robinson, quarterback for Saint Louis University, saw a future painted in the sky. He saw the potential for aerial ballet, for strategy soaring beyond the scrum.
His first attempt, sailing incomplete, was a whisper amidst the rumble, but it carried the weight of change. His second, a 20-yard touchdown to Jack Schneider, echoed across the gridiron like a sonic boom. It was a turning point, a declaration that the air itself could be conquered, that touchdowns could be painted on the canvas of the sky.
The pass faced resistance. Purists cried sacrilege, clinging to the game's ground-bound traditions. But the genie was out of the bottle. The forward pass spread like wildfire, transforming the game into a three-dimensional chess match. Quarterbacks became generals, receivers their agile pawns, and the vertical threat altered defensive landscapes forever.
Alternating Sets Of Downs
A Tidbit published a few days ago described how American football transitioned between 1906 and 1912 from requiring teams to gain five yards in three downs to ten yards in four downs. Some prominent coaches argued that teams should gain eight or fifteen yards in four downs, but they adopted the four downs to gain ten yards approach, which remains the rule today. — www.footballarchaeology.com
Timothy P Brown takes Football Archaeology into the thought of one innovative coach to alternate the number of downs teams would have and even eliminate the game clock.
