The Emergence of Football's Game Stats

Changes in college football make it difficult to compare players across eras. For example, quarterbacks playing in today's pass-happy, two-platoon game face demands and generate vastly different statistics than those who played in the run-oriented, single platoon college offenses of the 1950s. The 1950s quarterbacks are also difficult to compare to the pre-1940s quarterbacks whose main jobs were to block for the triple-threat halfbacks and fullbacks.

As difficult as it is to compare players across eras, it was once difficult to compare those playing the same year due to the lack of game and summary statistics. Before the late 1930s, teams and newspapers tracked information about their games. Still, each did so idiosyncratically, tracking different game elements without a central clearinghouse to summarize and publish stats to compare one player against another.

The lack of centralized stats reporting reflected a game organized at the conference or regional level. The most significant national reporting before 1905 came in tracking the deaths due to football or the summary reports published by Camp and others that tracked plays (e.g., the twenty players with the longest runs or punts per year) or the players scoring the most touchdowns and field goals in a season. Similarly, no one knew how many players ran for 100 yards in a game or 1,000 yards in a season because no one tracked that information or did so in a regulated manner.

The lack of statistics did not reflect a failure to track game events. Reporters and others tracked every run, pass, kick, fumble, and penalty using forms such as the one below.

A sample sheet illustrating how to track the progress of a game. (Adams, R. G. The Official’s Football Chart And Score Book. Los Angeles Angelus Publishing. 1931.)