Football History

One of the most hated/loved calls in all of football is the Offensive Pass Interference call or OPI. It is football at its finest with one player against another battling for position and ultimately the ball.

The calls on OPI and even DPI have changed like the wind over the years to the point that today, it is hard for the average fan and coach to even know what exactly constitutes a foul and what is fair game.

Timothy Brown did his research and went to work on the Changes of Pass Interference in September of 2023. Tim also paid us a visit to chat about the subject.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on Changes to Pass Interference

Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to another Tuesday where we get to visit with our friend Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

It's good to see you and hear from you. Oh, wait, I'm getting a little interference. Yes? No, okay. I didn't think you'd have. Okay, I'll stop doing that.

I didn't have a segue into this one, but folks, he did it again. His tidbit was titled, back in September, changes in pass interference penalties, and that's why Tim was really stretching it out there to get the interference for his customary intro into his tidbit.

So, Tim, pass interference has really been a big play for decades. I think that in our generation, that's probably the biggest penalty, where people gain the most yardage in our era, and people almost anticipate every time a long pass is being thrown; they're hoping for one of two things. Either if you're on offense, pass interference on the defense, or the guy catches the ball.

So, what can you tell us about the pass interference back in this era that you're talking about? Yeah. So, one of the most interesting things about pass interference is that the forward pass was legalized in 1906, but for the first two years, they did not have a pass interference penalty. So, they just didn't foresee the need to have a penalty.

And part of it is, I mean, again, you got to go back to, okay, what were they thinking when they introduced and legalized pass interference? They were not thinking about the downfield passing game that we have today. They were thinking about a short toss to somebody who's ahead of you, kind of like an option quarterback who's flicking it to the guy behind him. They were thinking the forward pass would be like that: just little dumps and basketball shots to somebody.

And initially, the ineligible receivers were not limited in terms of where they could go. They could go downfield, they could block. I mean, they could block defenders.

And so, some of the initial pass plays were basically guys who the offensive line would let everybody go. And then, the receiver would get in the middle and be guarded by his teammates. And then they kind of took the ball into the middle of that circle.

And then he'd catch it, and they'd block for him. So, the defensive players were coming in there, flying in, trying to break it apart, break it up because there wasn't any defensive pass interference. And the offensive guys were blocking like they would because there was an offensive pass interference.

So, it took them two years, but then they figured out, okay, well, maybe we shouldn't allow this to be the case. And while the linemen still were able to go downfield, that didn't change. Blake and I would say it started changing in the 30s.

So, there was a long time when linemen could be downfield. And so, in 1908, they said, okay, pass interference was like a 15-yard penalty on the offense and a five-yard penalty on the defense. And I forget exactly why they distinguished the two.

Maybe it's just because the offense was the one who's throwing the ball. And so, they had more control. But then in 1910, then pass interference became a loss of a down for the offense and a 10-yard penalty on the D. So, that became the norm.

One of the things that I always find interesting is that there are bits of the game and elements of how players make decisions, as well as things that are considered unsportsmanlike in an earlier era. But then, now we treat it as, well, that's smart play. And so, one of those was as when there was a loss of down for the or a 10-yard penalty on the defense, they kind of figured, okay, hey, if I'm getting beat on a pass, I'm just tackling a guy.

I'm just going to tackle the receiver. And because I'd rather take and accept the 10-yard penalty than allow a touch pass. And so, I mean, we do that today, right? I mean, a smart D-back is going to do that.

But at the time, once they started doing that—I mean, it took them a few years to do that—it was viewed as really unsportsmanlike. You're cheating, or you're, it was outside the spirit of the rules.

So, in 1916, the colleges increased the penalty to 15 yards from 10. And then, in 1917, they made it a spot. So, you tackle somebody 35 yards downfield, or you interfere 35 yards downfield, then that's where the ball's spotted.

That stayed the case for a long time, but then they started having concerns. Another regular recurring theme in football is the idea that the officials don't want to make calls for really long penalties, severe penalties, or questionable penalties.

So, they swallow their flags. And so, on these long pass interference penalties, when it's a spot foul, people felt like the referee swallowed flags. And so, they finally said, no, you know, we got to get rid of that situation.

And so, in 1984, then the colleges went to a 15-yard penalty, whereas the pros retained, you know, it's still a spot foul, you know, in the pros. So, and let me, I'll just interject by saying this whole issue of the long penalty or that it doesn't even have to be a long penalty, but one that, you know, feels like has an impact on the game. That was one of the reasons why they got rid of, you know, the penalty for what now is being called the tush push, you know, that aiding the runner and helping the runner.

One of the reasons they got rid of that was because it was difficult. You know, sometimes they called it, and sometimes they didn't. It's a judgment call. And obviously, it's, you know, it's either somebody's going for a first down or somebody's going for a touchdown.

So, it had a big impact. And so, and, you know, they just felt like, you know, the referee's officials were reluctant to call it. So, they basically got, took that out of the game, you know, and then later, you know, add it back in.

But it's just, you know, those things are kind of interesting to me. So, both the idea of people like you, referees who swallow their whistles or their flags when, you know, on a long, you know, longer, you know, important penalty situation. So, just that idea.

And then, you know, the change from unsportsmanlike behavior to, hey, that's a smart play. You know, hey, guys, you know, tackle the receiver, do whatever you got to do. Don't let them get the long one.

Yeah. It's interesting when you're talking early in this conversation, and you were telling, you know, how the evolution of the forward pass in the first couple of years of bringing this about. And you sit there, and you got to think back, you know, with these folks, these rules makers, they had no idea, like you said, what the forward pass was going to end up being.

And they had no idea what people were going to try to do to gain an advantage. And so, that's why you see these changes in everything. So, it really is kind of fun to go back and try to look at it from their perspective.

And I think you do that in a lot of the articles that you put on here and, you know, by explaining the rules the way you do. And it's really an interesting endeavor to go back and think that way. You know, God, these guys didn't even think the ball was going to go downfield.

So, why would anybody interfere with them? You know, you're just playing football. Yeah. And so, it's funny.

I've got it; it's an article I've been making notes on for two years, probably. But it's basically, the article is, the gist of it is, what were people thinking in 1906? So, if you were a coach and, you know, speculating on how the forward pass is going to work, both, you know, offense and defense, you know, how did you prepare? You know, because you hadn't seen it. It hadn't happened, right? And so, there's a lot of really interesting newspaper articles from all these experts, you know, respected people who said, oh, here's the way it's going to work.

You know, most of them are wrong. You know, their conception of what a forward pass was going to be and how it would change the game was just off. And most people, you know, thought that the onside kick from scrimmage was going to have much more, you know, substantial effect.

And, in fact, for the first couple of years, it probably did. But, you know, the other thing about, like, rules like this is, it's a reminder that when you're playing a game, no matter if it's Monopoly or Parcheesi or, you know, Hopscotch or whatever, but football, there are lots of rules and every one of them is arbitrary. You know, you could change that rule tomorrow.

And, you know, it's like the tush push, you know, it's a considerable controversy, but you can change it tomorrow. And there's nothing sacred about it. There's nothing preordained.

It's just that people decided to make the rules. And so, change whenever and however you want. And for penalties as well, what's a penalty, and what's the relative punishment that should be tied to each penalty?

All arbitrary. Right. I tell people all the time, you know, it's the most complicated athletic event in the world.

It's got the most complicated rules. Let's say that. And the most complicated of those rules of the game are the plays that only happen once in a while, the kicking game.

That's where all the crazy stuff happens. It's the offensive defense. That's, you know, a piece of cake.

It's you get in the kicking game rules. It's, you know, bar the doors because it's some craziness is going to happen and we see it all the time. And so it's interesting.

Yeah. All right. Well, Tim, you have some great articles, you know, just like this every day that talk about an aspect of football, mainly from antiquity and, you know, explaining how it got to the point of where it is today, or maybe an advertisement or piece of equipment, you know, how can other people share and read your tidbits? Maybe you could give them some information.

So the easiest thing is just to go to www.footballarchaeology.com. You can subscribe here and get an email every night at seven o'clock Eastern. And with that day's story, if you don't want the emails that can follow me on Twitter or threads, because I posted both those or, you know, set up a Substack account and, you know, they've got a reader. And so you'll get, you know, whichever Substack you, you know, apply to or follow, you'll get those coming through your feed as well as the ability to browse for others.

So, you know, that's a great way to do it too. So, whichever one works for you, have a look at it. All right.

Well, Tim Brown, www.footballarchaeology.com. Your link is in our show notes. You know, listeners, you can go there and look at Tim's stuff and enjoy his work. And we will talk to you again next Tuesday.

Thanks, Tim. Thank you.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown Football Before Pass Interference

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to another edition where we get to go down that historic road into some football archaeology with the host and founder of FootballArchaeology.com, Timothy P. Brown. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very good. Thank you, sir.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

Football History | The History of Football Rules on Pass Interference

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Timothy P. Brown has dug up the dirt on what football looked like before restrictions of interference during a forward pass in this Football Archaeology post.