Football History

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Football officials get a bad rap. Okay I am not saying they are without error, nobody is perfect, but the zebras get ill feelings thrown their way even when they are correct in their calls.

One of the top experts in early football rules history Timothy P. Brown joins us on the discussion to identify some of the stories of the communication regulation of some pioneering football officials. Timothy Brown's FootballArchaeology.com has a daily football factoid that he shares that are really quite interesting in a short read. They preserve football history in a very unique way and we are quite happy that Tim has agreed to join us each week to go over some of his Today's Tidbits.

A recent Tidbit that Tim had titled Herb Dana and the Associated Football Question Box, is our subject today.

-Transcribed Conversation on Officiating Signals of Herb Dana with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal for positive football history. It's Tuesday and we are going to join our friend Timothy Brown, the great historian and author that digs into the archaeology of football each and every day, but shares a little tidbit with us each week.

And today, Tim's got a great topic. Tim Brown, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Thank you very much. Looking forward to chatting once again and seeing where the conversation goes. Yeah.

You know how I'm a former official, so I've got the zebra blood still flowing in me. It's been a few years, but I'm still in the brotherhood, I think. I don't think they kicked me out yet.

And you have some great history on the officiating of the game. And we talked a few weeks ago about it, but you have some more insight and some more gentlemen that are responsible for some of the things that officials do. So, I was hoping you could talk about that today.

Yeah. So a couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about a guy named Herb Dana, and it was called Herb Dana and the Associated Football Question Box, which is a mouthful of kind of a word salad. So Herb Dana was a guy who played in the end at Nebraska.

He was on their 1921 team. That was his senior season. And then moved to Denver and started officiating there, doing some kind of the Rocky Mountain sorts of games.

Then he moved to San Francisco and very quickly rose up the ranks and became one of the top officials in the Pacific Coast Conference, what's now the PAC-8 or PAC-12 or PAC-10, whatever they are right now. And so part of the reason I raised him or one of the interesting things about his story is that he was not scheduled to officiate in the 1929 Rose Bowl, but the guy who was the scheduled referee, a guy named Frank Birch, we mentioned a couple of episodes ago, and he's the guy who invented the referee's penalty signals that we all know and love today. But a couple of weeks before the Rose Bowl, he tore his ligaments, so he couldn't officiate, so they brought in Herb Dana instead.

And so, you know, the 1929 Rose Bowl doesn't mean a lot to most people, but that is the game when a guy named Roy Regals, who was playing for California, picked up a Georgia Tech fumble and got turned around and ran the wrong way. And then his teammates stopped him in the corner of the field at the one-yard line. And so, and they basically tackled it, stopped him before he went into the end zone and, you know, for safety.

But so the referee then who actually marked the ball in that particular case was this guy, Herb Dana. So that was, you know, he was in on, you know, one of the most important plays or most famous plays in the history of football. So I just, you know, thought that was kind of cool.

But, you know, Dana, the other thing about him is that it was a big part of football back in the, you know, turn of the century through to maybe World War II. Officials often, so a lot of the officials were former players. And many of them were also like sports writers.

And even if they weren't sports writers, a lot of times they would, they'd write columns for the newspapers. And, you know, they became basically media personalities. So there was a guy, George Varnell, who some people called the Walter Camp of the West.

You know, he was a sports writer in Seattle and out there in Pullman prior to that. But he was, you know, I think he officiated more Rose Bowls than anybody else. So he's a big-time referee on the West Coast, he was on the football rules committee, but he was a sports writer, you know, and here he'd be writing all kinds of, you know, he'd be making predictions about upcoming games, including the ones he was going to referee.

He'd name all-conference teams, all kinds of things like that. That gets a little hairy to do that. Well, but, you know, it happened all the time.

You know, another guy, Walter Eckersall, was an All-American halfback at Chicago and became a sports writer for the Chicago Tribune. And he'd travel with the team, you know, he'd travel with the team that was going to play. He traveled with the Great Lakes, you know, team, you know, from 1918 to 1919.

But, you know, again, the same kind of thing. He profiled these teams, made predictions, and all kinds of things. And like he would, he'd referee the game, and then write a column about it, you know, and then editorialize about it, you know, over the next couple of days.

And that's just, you know, it's a conflict of interest that they didn't view as a conflict of interest. But, you know, for us nowadays, I mean, there's no way, you know, you can allow that to happen. So Dana was that same kind of guy on the West Coast.

And one of the things that's included in that particular blog post is, you know, some time back, I bought a postcard. And it was this pre-printed card that gave, you'd go, and you'd pick it up at a local gas station, and it was particular, you know, the Flying A brand of gas. And you'd then take that postcard, you'd write a football question, especially a football rules question, and you'd mail it to Dana.

And he would answer that either in the newspaper column or he also hosted a 90-minute radio show at the time that was then syndicated across, you know, you know, the West Coast and the Rockies. So this, you know, again, this is a guy, he was as big a media personality as most coaches, you know, everybody knew who Herb Dana was. So it's just that, you know, it's a different time.

And he, you know, here he's answering these questions, he's predicting who's going to win the big game this coming weekend. And then he, you know, not too long after all that was happening, he became the head of officials for the Pacific Coast Conference. And he was still doing those radio shows at the time.

So just, you know, just a very different time and place. We can't imagine it today. Yeah, I can see, you know, and I think he's done it, you know, Mike Pereira has done. That's probably the face of officials that we get used to nowadays. And he's got a great way of explaining the rules and everything.

But I don't know if I'd ever hear Mike Pereira saying, hey, I'm officiating a game today. And I think, you know, Stanford's going to win by three, you know, that's, I just can't, that blows my mind. But okay.

The other thing is the same thing happened with coaches. So John Heisman was a big, you know, very, very smart guy. And he wrote all kinds of columns.

And some of it was just, you know, things where he diagrams plays and da da da. But you know, he offered his opinion on lots of different things. Any number, you know, there are a lot of coaches. They would write a series of 20 different articles, just quick little things, diagram plays, and talk about some techniques.

And those would be published, you know, syndicated newspapers across the country, you know, for a season. So, a lot of coaches did that. Rockne did that.

And Rockne used to predict, you know, he'd talk about who the better team was, teams he never saw because they didn't have television at the time. Now, some of them, obviously, he had seen, and he'd compare them. He saw somebody playing week two and another playing week eight, and he'd offer his opinion on who was going to win the game, you know.

But so, you know, coaches did all that kind of stuff, too. Zupke at Illinois was another one that published a lot of articles. And so... Well, even Walter Kemp, you know, wrote for Colliers quite a bit back in the day.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Kemp, you know, Kemp's authority came as much from his writing as anything else. Well, obviously, you know, his role is in the rules-making, you know, organizations. But, you know, he was, you know, if you think about it, he was like, you know, Vince Lombardi and Paul Zimmerman and a couple of other guys all rolled into one because he was a successful coach.

He was a big time official. He was, you know, the top writer, you know, prior to like Grantland Rice and those kinds of guys coming along. So, you know, it was their writing was a really big time way of their gaining influence.

Then, it transitioned to radio. And now we have, you know, guys, former coaches or somebody who's knocked out of the playoffs, they come and commentate, you know, during halftime of particular games or before the game. So same kind of thing going on.

But at least now we wait until they're out of the... Now we wait till their team's no longer playing before we let them start talking. Right. Well, fascinating stuff.

And we appreciate you coming on here and sharing that football history with us each week. And why don't you let everybody know once again where they can read your stuff and find you each day? Yeah. So footballarchaeology.com, that's my website.

There's a daily Today's Tidbit that comes out typically very quickly, hitting 30-second 40-second reads with the picture, too. A couple of times a month, I'll also be posting additional long-form information. So, the best thing to do is just subscribe to that.

And you'll get an email every day about typically about seven o'clock in the Eastern time zone in the evening. You can also follow me on Twitter at footballarchaeology.com. And that's, you know, that's my name there as well. Well, I can tell you or my wife can tell you, it's exactly at seven o'clock Eastern each day because we'll be sitting on a couch watching television or something, and she'll hear the ding go off on my phone.

And she goes, what's that? And I said that's Tim getting my tidbit for the day. Yeah. Sometimes, there are a few occasions where I've got something going at seven o'clock.

So, I sent it out earlier, or I just made a mistake, and I didn't schedule it correctly. You mess up my entire evening that way. I don't know what time it is.

I set my clock by you. Once again, thank you very much, Tim. And we'll talk to you again next week.

Okay. Darin, thank you very much. Look forward to it.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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Timothy P. Brown brings the scoop on the history of the football official's starters pistol, how it entered the game, and its purpose.