Big Boys on the Run: When Linemen Carried The Ball

Football of the 1890s and early 1900s deserves criticism for its violence, but they did one thing right back then, their linemen toted the rock. Unfortunately, the onset of the passing game, player specialization, and rules to simplify officiating have dimmed a once glorious element of football. Given this injustice, it is time to examine selected points in the game's history when football's formations and plays put the ball into the hands of its noble linemen.

Rugby's free-flowing nature ensures their biggest guys carry the ball on occasion. That was also the case in football's early days when its rules overlapped rugby's, and it remained so as football shifted to regimented plays run from the Traditional T, Guards Back, and Tackles Back formations.

Regardless of the formation, every team had plays in which their guards, tackles, and ends carried the ball by design. For example, George Woodruff, who devised the Guards Back formation at Penn, regularly ran guard sweeps (aka guard arounds). Similarly, Pop Warner, who played left guard at Cornell, claimed he designed a guard around play allowing him to carry the ball against Williams in 1893. His misdirection play had the four backs run wide left while Warner took the handoff and headed right, gaining solid yardage until fumbling on the only carry of his career. Warner's run to the left without blockers presaged the bootleg he pioneered while coaching Stanford in 1927. His Stanford team also gained forty yards on one of several guard around plays in the 1928 Rose Bowl.

Amos Alonzo Stagg and Henry. L. Williams' seminal 1893 book, Treatise on American Football, includes diagrams and instructions for sixty-nine running plays, twenty-one of which put the ball in the hands of guards, tackles, or ends. The guard around shown below is an early example of the play that remained in use as late as the 1950s.

Stagg and Williams' book was among the first to publish diagrammed plays. (Stagg, A. Alonzo and Henry L. Williams. A Scientific and Practical Treatise on American Football for Schools and Colleges. Hartford: Case, Lockwood & Brainerd. 1893.)

Like the fake punt below, some of Stagg and Williams' plays appear harebrained through 21st-century eyes, yet they also demonstrate that some principles transcend time and rule changes. The offense aligns in punt formation, with the ball snapped to the quarterback, who normally lateraled to the fullback/punter in the days before teams long-snapped to the punter. As the quarterback receives the snap, the right offensive guard allows the defensive guard to take an outside route to the punter, and then takes the handoff from he QB, and runs through the hole left by the defensive guard. Odd as the play may seem, the same deception appears several decades later when screen passes and draw plays entered the game.

The ends position as wings in this "Ends Back" formation, leaving only five men are on the line of scrimmage, as with the Guards Back and Tackles Back formations. (Stagg and Williams, 1893)