Terminology... The Receivers

This is article #9 in a series covering the origins of football’s terminology. All are available under the Terminology tab above. My book, Hut! Hut! Hike! describes the emergence of more than 400 football terms.

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Players or teams to whom the ball was thrown or kicked have been called receivers since the mid-1910s. Pass receivers caught forward passes, punt receivers caught punts, and kicking teams booted the ball to the receiving team. Still, it was not until the early 1950s that wide receivers came to describe players who aligned wide.

Besides the end, the first position for a player aligning wide was the flanker, which Stagg introduced a dozen years before the forward pass became legal. Stagg's original flanker was a halfback positioned fifteen yards outside the tackle and behind the line of scrimmage, who often motioned back to the formation to block the defensive end or tackle, like the crackback block of later years. Flankers also came in handy when running reverses.

Stagg undoubtedly borrowed "flanker" from the military, where "flanking" describes maneuvers around the side of enemy positions. When the forward pass became legal in 1906, Stagg resurfaced the flanker, using them on occasion.

So, flankers were few, and most offensive formations had the ends aligned within a foot or two of the tackles, so they were known simply as the left or right end. Then, in the late 1920s, teams began moving one or both ends one or two yards wider than usual. The tactic became known as the split end, though the players were not because teams sometimes split their left end wide and sometimes the right end; neither specialized as a split end.

Split end as a description of the position showed up in 1938 when the University of the Pacific, then coached by the 76-year-old Amos Alonzo Stagg, had an end line up fifteen or more yards wide of the tackle.

The offense aligns in the Single Wing with the right end split an extra yard or two from the tackle. (1937 Kansas State yearbook)