Today's Tidbit... 1903 Purdue Football's Tragic End

A 1903 game at Purdue’s Stuart Field. (RPPC, Personal collection)

The image above shows an RPPC mailed in 1909 from West Lafayette, IN, to Will Hubbard in Bosler, Wyoming. Mailed by a Purdue student named Ralph, the message asks how things are going in his friends’ new home and mentions that Purdue opens the 1909 season playing at UChicago.

Although Ralph mailed the postcard in 1909, the image shows a game played at Purdue's Stuart Field in 1903, the only year football fields had partial checkerboard markings. The partial checkerboard reflected a compromise solution. Football traditionally required the player receiving the snap to give it to another player who could then run with it. Reformers wanted to open things up by allowing the receiver of the snap to carry the ball and cross the line of scrimmage with it, provided they were five yards right or left of the center. Neither side liked the other’s plan, so they applied the new rule only between the 25-yard lines. To help the officials assess compliance, they added stripes running parallel to the yard lines at five-yard intervals, resulting in a checkerboard pattern between the 25-yard lines. The standard gridiron remained from the goal lines to the 25-yard lines. The rule and checkerboard covered the field’s length from 1904 through 1909.