Taking the Reverse Quarterback for a Spin

It's a short walk between innovation and crazy, so we never know which of our ideas will prove to be our best or our worst. This story covers the latter and one of the oddest center-quarterback exchanges ever seen on a football field.

To place this oddity in context, we need to step back and review why and how centers snapped the ball in early football. As in rugby, football had a rule prohibiting the person receiving the snap from running with it, so the quarterback took the snap and quickly tossed it to another player, who could run with it.

Also, like rugby, football's original snapping process had centers snap by rolling the ball backward with their feet. Within several years, centers started snapping with their hands while still rolling the ball on its side, and by the mid-1890s, they were handing or short tossing the ball to the quarterback standing a yard behind the line of scrimmage.

A center-quarterback exchange typical of the pre-Single Wing era. (1909 Iowa yearbook)

A 1910 rule change allowed the person receiving the snap to run with the ball. That might have led to the quarterback becoming the featured runner, but the honor went to the tailback who received a direct snap in the newly-devised Single Wing formation. Nevertheless, quarterbacks remained critical to teams running the Notre Dame Box and other shifting and misdirection-oriented offenses requiring high-level ball handling.

Around 1915, teams such as Tufts, Lawrence, and Kansas used the reverse center that had the center squat over the ball facing the backfield and reach between his legs for the ball. This technique allowed the center to accurately snap the ball to backs at wide angles, even those in motion. The reverse center approach died out quickly before being resurrected by Syracuse in 1941. Still, it may have gotten a few folks thinking about new ways to snap the ball, including Bill Alexander at Georgia Tech.