The First Forward Pass Revisited

Like many others, I have told the story many times that St. Louis University (SLU) threw the first legal forward pass against Carroll College (now University) on Wednesday, September 25, 1906, sometimes incorrectly reported as happening on September 5, 1906. That game has long received credit because SLU used the forward pass more effectively and, perhaps, more often than anyone else that season. Also, they played the game on the Wednesday before what most considered the 1906 season's opening weekend.

1906 St.Louis U football team (1907 Spalding's Foot Ball Guide)

Part of the attraction of crediting SLU with throwing the first forward pass was that SLU did not initially receive that credit since they were out there in the boonies and did not compete with the Eastern elites. However, once there was documentation showing SLU had thrown multiple passes against Carroll, the powers that be accepted SLU as the forward-passing pioneer. Unfortunately, times change, and so does history.

Those of us who research football history today have the advantage of using online search tools that make the process far more efficient, so we can search for instances of "forward pass" appearing in U.S. newspapers during the second half of September 1906 to find examples of that term appearing in newspapers large and small.

So, in researching the early days of the forward pass recently, I came across news stories of college games that were played on Saturday, September 22, a week before opening weekend and four days before SLU played Carroll. Most of those games involved "minor" teams, so they received little media attention at the time or from football historians since then.