Together, we'll have a few laughs, talk a little ball, and explore the evolution of the "ready for play" signal, its origins, and how it's become an integral part of the game.

This post is based on Tim's original article titled:The Meaning Behind the Ready-to-Play Signal and Others

We also have a podcast audio version of the discussion found at: Unveiling the History of the Ready for Play in American Football with Timothy Brown or you can find it on your favorite podcast provider in the Pigskin Dispatch Podcast for July 23, 2024.

Transcription of the Ready For Play Signal History with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pigpen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to Tuesday. It's footballarchaeology.com day, and Timothy Brown is bringing us another exciting aspect of football history.

Tim, welcome back to the Pigpen. Hey, Darin. Thank you.

Looking forward to signaling and talking about the ready-to-play signal. Well, actually, it's pretty cool stuff, I think. Yeah, I'm definitely ready to play to hear this and hit play. Have you tell us all about the history of this signal that I'm very familiar with?

Yeah, well, you know, it's one of those where, you know, I think a lot of us non-officials, you know, we tend to think of the official signals as the ones they give for penalties and then obviously scoring opportunities and things like that. But there are other signals that happen on virtually every play of the game that we just kind of don't even think about that very much. This one happens every scrimmage down, but yeah, every kicking down, too.

Yeah, and so it happens all the time, right? And so I forget how I think, you know, I came across an article on this or but so, you know, this is really about the, you know when you go back to the history of football, you know, it came from rugby. And so, you know, back in the day, it was much more of a continuous action game. You know, the game did not stop.

Well, originally, we didn't have downs in football. So, you know, definitely didn't stop. But even after there were downs, you know, I've done a tidbit or a story, at least on, you know, kind of breaking down the 1903 Yale Princeton game film.

And which is really a fun thing to watch and to read if you're interested in the breakdown of it. But one of the things that's really clear from seeing that film is the pace of play. You know, somebody gets tackled, the center gets over the ball, referee never touches the darn thing, center gets over the ball.

And as soon as the quarterback calls the signals, boom, they run the play. So, they're moving, you know, at much more of a rugby sort of pace. You don't have the stupid officials getting in the middle of everything and mucking things up for the players.

All those, the Zebras. I'm plugging my ears as you're saying. Yes, I know.

That's why I'm saying. The Zebras didn't even have stripes in those days. But it was just a very rapid pace of play.

You know, when they played a 45-minute half, they played 45 minutes. So, and even when the ball went out of bounds, originally, you know, the players were the ones that brought the ball back in, either by tossing it in like a line out, they could toss it back, they could plunk it onto the field, or they could walk it in after declaring how far they were going to walk it in. So, so anyway, it was just a different animal.

But then, then the 20s came about. And in the 20s, you had a couple of things going on, you had the Notre Dame box or Notre Dame shift, and the Minnesota shift was, you know, popular. So, you had a bunch of teams doing all these shifts before they snapped the ball, which slowed down the pace of play a little bit, right? Because they'd get in formation, then they'd jump and, you know, moved right or left, whatever they were doing.

Then, the other thing that happened in the 20s was that we had the beginning of consistent huddling. You know, there'd been a couple of people that huddled before that, but really, you know, Zupke in Illinois, they're the ones who really made huddling happen. And so that was, again, a thing that while they typically got the playoff almost as fast as teams that didn't huddle, it still kind of slowed the game down a little bit.

So, so then one of the tactics that came about was as the, as things weren't quite as fast as they had been in the past, and as much as anything, teams were starting to use different formations instead of just always aligning in the, in the traditional tee, they were starting to use, you know, like a single wing that either was to the left or to the right. So, you know, they were taking time to move into different formations. And so one thing, and then the defense would take a little bit of time to react and align themselves to, to whatever the offense was doing.

So one of the things the offense started doing was running quickie plays, where they'd like to get into a formation, boom, snap it faster than, you know, to kind of catch the defense off guard, which became problematic because then sometimes the defense was in, they were defensive, defenseless players in today's terminology. So it became a safety issue. The other thing that was happening is that they would sometimes like send, you know, once, then a little bit later when substitutions became, you know, started freeing up, you'd see teams sending three guys off the field and putting two guys on.

So they were missing a player. Well, sometimes they'd have that missing player standing right on the sideline, kind of hiding himself. Sometimes, that was called lonesome pole cat or lonesome, lonesome end.

But, that was also different, but nevertheless, the concept was that there'd be a guy over there all by himself, and they'd snap the ball, and he'd head downfield. So they'd toss him the P and, you know, hopefully, you know, catch a long touchdown pass. So all that stuff led in 1951 to a rule that said the referee has to spot the ball on every play.

And because, again, previously, it was much more of the center doing that. So, with the referee spotting the ball on every play he had, they developed what they called the ready-to-play signal to indicate to the players that the ball was ready to be snapped, right? And until he gave that signal, it couldn't be snapped. And so what I didn't realize until I got into, you know, doing this research was what that signal meant, right? Because there are a lot of signals that are just kind of meaningless.

They're just some kind of arm motion, but they don't really relate to the penalty themselves. There are other things, like the holding penalty, right? One arm, you know, yeah, they grab the wrist or just below the wrist. So, okay, that means holding, that makes sense.

And at least the old clipping rule, you know, made sense. There's others like that, you know, block in the back, maybe face mask. Yeah.

And so, but the, so the ready to play signal, that, the signal, which is some of the drawings make it look like he's kind of going with a full arm motion, but I think of them mostly as like kind of pulling straight down. You know, they raise their arm and then pull straight down. Maybe you can tell me what is proper.

It's the first one that you said because they call it a term on the field, which is chopping the ball in for play. So you're, it's almost like you have a little hatchet, and you're, you're making a chopping motion. Right.

But the whistle is really the true signal, the referee blowing that whistle, every play and chopping the ball and saying it's ready for play. And it's, and I know because of recent timing rules in between plays, it used to be when the 25-second clock would start. Now, you know, a lot of levels have changed that.

So you have 40 seconds or something in between when the ball was last dead to get the next snap off, but that's when that would use to start to at the ready for play. So it was an important, important part. And it also starts the clock.

If you had a play where you got a first down, you had an official's timeout. So you stopped the clock in high school to reset the chains, the ready for play would start the clock again in motion. Okay.

Well, so part of what I liked about the story was just that, that, that chopping signal was supposed to be at least some of the period articles said that that was supposed to be akin to, you know, the conductor on a train pulling the chain that blew the steam whistle or, you know, factories used to have whistles that, you know, to mark the end of a shift or, you know, lunchtime, whatever it may be. So it was pulling the chain and, yeah. And then even like, you know, I know when my kids were younger, sometimes they'd make that signal to truck drivers to get them to honk their horns as we're driving by because horns on trucks, you know, especially the horns that they have on the roof, you know, used to pull a chain to make them, you know, I think you're technically right.

If you look at the official signals, like when they have them on cards or in the back of books or anything, it is more like you're saying this, but I don't know. There are very few that do that. And it's probably because we're, you know, we're doing that a hundred times in a game.

Your blood rushes out of your hand. You're just having it down more towards your chest and your waist to chop it. The original images all show up as a full chop, an extended arm chop.

Okay. Almost like the Florida state people, right? That kind of emotion.

So, but I didn't know if that had evolved over time or not, but that was for sure the early signals. Okay. Yeah.

I know that's the way I always did. And that's the way, and I did it by observing my peers when I was, before I was a referee, when I was a line judge and headlinesman, I would watch the referee would do that. So, but they always called it chopping the ball.

And you know, it's okay. Yeah. Interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, I mean, but part, again, part of the amusement for me is just, and I kind of ended this particular tidbit by saying, okay, so I went through, I think there's 45 or 47 current NCAA signals for the officials and just kind of saying, okay, well, about half of them seem to have an inherent meaning. They kind of match whatever the signal is, right? Or that whatever the infraction is or whatever they're signaling, whereas others, it's like, you know, putting your arms out, you know, there's like, okay, I don't know what that means, but you know, I mean, it's just like any kind of semaphore flags, you know, you're crossing them or waving them, you know, like the guys on aircraft carriers, you know, it's like, okay, well, whatever it was, as long as it means something to somebody.

There you're right. I mean, in it, when you're learning the signals as an official when you're a referee, I mean, that was, it's, that was like the thing that freaked me out when they said, okay, this is your first game, and you're a referee. That was the thing I panicked.

I know the rules. I know what the signals are, but I'm thinking, God, you have that stage fright, you know, everybody's looking at you to signal. And the ones I had problems with is you have the illegal substitution, and you have the signal.

I would get those two mixed up constantly. And I would have to study almost my first, especially that first season. I'm looking at that card every single game.

And before I got there, I'm like, Oh God, I don't want to get, you know, screw this thing up and have the wrong signal. And the PA announcer announced the opposite thing of what I was calling. So it's interesting.

And I love how, you know, the signals match, you know, like face masks, like you said, or horse collar, which is sort of a newer signal that there's no doubt what, what the guy did when you, when you're signaling that holding, you know, you sit there and you think about it very rarely in football. Have I ever called holding because some, uh, some, an opponent grabbed the other opponent's wrist to do it, but you get to just, it's still made, it makes sense? But it's kind of cool that hockey, lacrosse, and sports like that have adopted football officials' signals for holding, and they use the same signals on some of those things.

That's kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Those baseball guys are there. Yeah. They're kind of weird.

Yeah. That's, that's for sure. But Tim, that is fascinating stuff.

I love when, uh, you know, we get into something that happens every day that people maybe just don't really realize it's happening and you bring out that aspect of football and then you take the history of it and how it evolved. That's just such a cool aspect of what you do. And maybe you could share with folks how they could enjoy some of your other work that you've done on some items like this.

Sure. Uh, just basically go to footballarchaeology.com, um, and just subscribe. It's pretty effortless process and you'll, you'll get an email every time that, that, uh, I post a new, new article and then there's different ways to follow me on social media as well.

And then, you know, I'll also just put in a plug. I've got a, a new book coming out called a history of the football that basically just goes back to literally the middle ages and kind of traces how the football has changed shape, size, color, stripes, weight, inflation levels, just kind of all kinds of little dorky little things about the football. But some of them, you know, there's, I think, you know, came across some, found some pretty interesting stuff, interesting stories about how things changed and how, you know, in some cases, some personalities and individuals like George Hallis, you know, had an influence on the ball that we know and love today.

No, right. Sounds like some great stuff. And, uh, we'd love to hear more about it and love to talk to you about some more football history next Tuesday.

Very good. Look forward to it.