Today's Tidbit... Football Without An End Zone
www.footballarchaeology.com
Today's Tidbit... Football Without An End Zone
Here’s a great image of the 1909 Yale-Princeton game at Yale Field during the last season football used the checkerboard field. The sharp-eyed will notice the field lacks an end line, which means it also lacks an end zone, an innovation that entered the game in 1912.
Football did not need an end line before 1912 because the only way to score a touchdown was to run the ball over the goal line. Players could score on forward passes if they caught the ball short of the goal line since forward passes thrown over the goal line resulted in touchbacks.
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If researching old newspapers for information like this of interest to you, I highly recommend newspapers.com. It is my primary research tool. Books by coaches and others, and college yearbooks being the other main sources.
Funny that you should ask. I will begin appearing once per week on the Pigskin Dispatch podcast (link below) and your questions will be covered in the first podcast which will appear next week. The host, Darin, asked about these question in relation to this Tidbit:
https://www.footballarchaeology.com/p/todays-tidbit-when-piling-on-was
To answer the questions..
- Early football had the tackler call “held” and runner call “down” to stop play
- After the pea whistle's invention in the late 1880s, ref blew the play dead after the ball carrier stopped advancing and was truly held in place by the tackler. Crawling was common and so was - piling on
- For safety reasons, the dead ball rule changed in 1910 so the ball was dead when any part of the ball carrier's body other than the hands and feet contacted ground AND he was in the grasp of an opponent
- The NCAA dropped the in-the-grasp portion in 1932. That was the last year the NFL used the college yearbook, but they ignored that rule change and retained the in-the-grasp rule when they created their own rule book in 1933.
- NFL changed its rule in 1956 by dropping the in-the-grasp portion and replacing it with “down by contact”
I do not know the details of the Canadian rules on this issue.
https://sportshistorynetwork.com/podcasts/pigskin-dispatch/