Today's Tidbit... A History of Signal Stealing in College Football

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky the Four Stalions rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Death, Destruction, Pestilence, and Famine.

OK, I lifted part of that passage from Grantland Rice, but it wasn't cheating. It just so happens that my writing style resembles that of ol' Grantland. Anyway, the rest of this story is my work, written without plagiarizing or using Chat GPT. Where appropriate, I appropriately cite the work of others.

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Let's go back to football as played before 1921 when Illinois coach Bob Zuppke first instructed his team to huddle before plays, allowing the quarterback to communicate the upcoming play without the opposing team listening in. (There were other reasons for huddling, but we'll ignore those for now.) Until then, every team called their plays at the line. Offenses did not change formations from one play to the other. Instead, they lined up and played football. The offense lined up. The quarterback yelled a series of coded words or numbers, telling his teammates the coming play and snap count, and the teams played on. The string of words or numbers was called “signals.”

To keep the opposing team from understanding the signals, the string was encoded. For example, a team's signals might be a string of five or six numbers, but the offensive team knew the called play (each play had an assigned number) was the fourth in the sequence or the first number after a two-digit number ending in a 3. Of course, if an opponent deciphered the code, they gained an advantage despite doing so being considered poor sportsmanship.

(Charlotte News, November 1, 1920.=)

Eddie Casey, a College Football Hall of Fame member who played at Harvard in the WWI era, considered signal stealing so contemptuous that no real football coach would consider doing it.

I can hardly think any coach would countenance a team's stealing the other fellow's signals. If a football mentor cannot win games on the merits of his own players, then he would rather take a drubbing than go so low as the larceny of signals.