Posted on 01/06/2011 12:54:53 PM PST by Leroy S. Mort
Established coaches in the elite Eastern schools like Army, Harvard, Pennsylvania and Yale failed to embrace the pass. It was also a gamble. Passes couldn’t be thrown over the line on five yards to either side of the center. An incomplete pass resulted in a 15-yard penalty, and a pass that dropped without being touched meant possession went to the defensive team. “Because of these rules and the fact coaches at that time thought the forward pass was a sissified type of play that wasn’t really football, they were hesitant to adopt this new strategy,” says Kent Stephens, a historian with the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Indiana.
(snip)
For the 1907 season, Warner created a new offense dubbed “the Carlisle formation,” an early evolution of the single wing. A player could run, pass or kick without the defense divining intent from the formation. The forward pass was just the kind of “trick” the old stalwarts avoided but Warner loved, and one he soon found his players loved as well. “Once they started practicing it, Warner pretty much couldn’t stop them,” “How the Indians did take to it!” Warner remembered, according to Jenkins’ book. “Light on their feet as professional dancers, and every one amazingly skillful with his hands, the redskins pirouetted in and out until the receiver was well down the field, and then they shot the ball like a bullet.”
(snip)
According to Jenkins’ book, the New York Herald reported: “The forward pass was child’s play. The Indians tried it on the first down, on the second down, on the third down—any down and in any emergency—and it was seldom that they did not make something with it.”
Carlisle romped 26-6, outgaining Penn 402 yards to 76.
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
My claim to fame (LOL): My grandfather (played at the University of Detroit) was in Ripley’s “Believe it or not” because in 1927 he “threw a forward pass - 55 yards in the air!”
Back in 1927, the football was more oval shaped and it was unheard of to throw it so far.
I loved “Leather Heads” don’t know how factual it was (don’t go to the movies for historical facts) but it was great comic football I guess as played way back then.
Teddy obviously wasn't a Titans fan.
Does anyone know whether or not the drop kick is still allowed by the rules?(Not that anyone would kick one.)
Thanks for the article. Sometimes a guy just needs the flying wedge.
Was it Knute Rockne who said, “Three things can happen on a foward pass, two of them bad”?
Thanks. I was in Junior High in the late 1940’s and we had the older rounder footballs. We still practised the kick. By the time I got to high school we were using the football as it is currently shaped. The only faulty memory I had about the kick was if sucessful it gave your team two points, and that it could be made from anywhere on the field. Apparently, both those memories were incorrect. The kick must be made from behind the line of scrimmage and if successful gives one’s team three points.
With the return of the wildcat you would assume some of these other traditional strategies would make a comeback.
Not surprised that Roosevelt was sticking his Presidential nose into things he had no business dealing with.
Drop Kicks count for three points from anywhere on the field unless as an Extra Point. Doug Flutie made a Drop Kick as an Extra Point in his last game as a New England Patriot. The Pats lined up as if going for two points and then shifted to put Flutie where the holder would line up. It was good. He practiced them all the time and could hit them from a good ways out.
It had been a dream of his to win a Super Bowl on a Drop Kick.
I heard it was Darrell Royal, coach of the UT Longhorns.
A reporter asked him why he called so many running plays. He supposedly said, “Three things can happen when you pass, and two of them ain’t good.”
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