How Touch and Flag Football Were Born

I had not given the history of touch football a moment's thought until I came across a reference to it while researching the history of spring football. After stumbling upon the topic, I found that few others have written about it, most placing touch football's origins in the 1930s. But my research shows that touch football originated as a direct result of football's safety crisis and the rule changes that occurred between 1906 and 1912.

The game made dramatic rule changes entering the 1906 season and hobbled through several more seasons before a reported thirty players died during the 1909 season. Public pressure to remedy the game's continued ills forced the rule-makers to reconsider substantive changes. One attempt to design a safer game in 1910 came from rules committee member and University of Chicago coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, who spent a few weeks in Arkansas testing various rule changes. Hugo Bezdek, a former fullback at Chicago, was Arkansas' head coach, and he and Stagg used the Arkansas team to experiment with rule combinations, trying to concoct a safer game. Following the tests, the committee considered Stagg's findings before releasing their new rules two months later than usual in May.

The new rules' delay was a problem for some teams, such as Missouri, which completed their spring practice before the big announcement. While every school was pressured to rethink football's rules, the pressure was particularly intense at Missouri because its university president believed colleges should drop football and play rugby instead. Genuine concern existed that Missouri and others in the Missouri Valley Conference might not play football in 1910. To make matters worse, Missouri's coach during their undefeated 1909 season, Bill Roper, left town to return to Princeton, where he would lead them to three national championships besides the one he'd already earned. Meanwhile, Mizzou's new coach, Bill Hollenback, was not yet on campus.

So it was that James A. Gibson, a Lecturer in Chemistry and Assistant Football Coach at Mizzou, devised a new version of football the Tigers played during spring practice. The game had two significant differences from the 1909 football rules. First, the 1909 rules required passers to be five yards right or left of center before legally throwing the ball, making the quick passing game nonexistent. Gibson's game allowed passing from anywhere behind the line of scrimmage. Second and more critical, Gibson's game eliminated tackling. The ball carrier was down by the simple touch of an opposing player. The touch rule virtually eliminated inside runs, forcing teams to rely on sweeps. The combination of liberalized passing and sweeps created a more open game with fewer opportunities for injury.

Back when coaches drilled with their players, Missouri had James A. "Doc" Gibson, Chemistry Lecturer and Assistant Coach (1910 Savitar, University of Missouri yearbook)