Today's Tidbit... Novel Rule Suggestions of 1904

Critics assailed football and its rules committee for ten years due to the increased roughness of the game, and the 1904 and 1905 rules committees received any number of suggestions for how to make the game safer. Some suggested altering the playing rules to encourage or force a more open game. Another argued for changing the penalties meted out for illegal behavior.

Let's review three of those suggestions.

Ten Yards in Three Downs

One suggestion for 1904 came from a committee member, Walter Camp. He advocated for forcing teams to gain ten yards in three downs to earn a first down, believing that doubling the yards to gain would force teams to innovate and play a more open style. Those opposing his suggestion argued that gaining ten yards in three downs was too difficult under the current rules so that this change would lead to endless punting.

1904 Rules Committee (Camp, Walter. Spalding's Official Foot Ball Guide)

The rules committee did not adopt this suggestion in 1904, though they would do so two years later.

Football's Penalty Box

In 1904, a foul such as holding resulted in the offending team being penalized 20 yards. Other penalties, such as a forward pass, resulted in a turnover. With people variously arguing that those penalties were too harsh or lenient, someone suggested following hockey's approach to penalties by removing the offending player from the field for a specific number of downs.

Coaches could not coach from the sideline then, and some suggested banishing coaches and substitute players to boxes further away from the field. So, most did not consider the idea of a football penalty box somewhere along the sideline to be crazy talk at the time. Still, the idea did not gain traction, and they quickly cast it aside.

Playing in the Box

One rule change implemented in 1904 kept the player receiving the ball from the center from carrying the ball over the line of scrimmage until he was five or more yards to the right of the left of where the center snapped the ball. To help the officials judge the ball carrier's compliance, they marked the field in the full checkerboard pattern, including transverse stripes five yards apart. (They had a similar 5-yard rule in 1903, but it and the transverse stripes only applied between the 25-yard lines.)

The checkerboard stripes that marked the fields from 1904 to 1909 led J. Mott Hallowell, Harvard Class of 1888 and Boston lawyer, to suggest placing the transverse stripes four yards apart, with each pair of stripes creating a lane running the length of the field. Hallowell would pair his striping change with a rule requiring each team to position only one player in each lane, effectively forcing players to spread horizontally.

Hallowell's system would have sorted players into lanes covering at least 44 of the 53.33-yard-wide field, opening up running lanes and allowing the game to return to its earlier open form.

Like the idea of sending players to the penalty box, Hallowell's idea went nowhere. Nevertheless, some teams opted to run spread offenses, including Idaho in 1908, but most continued playing close formation football until the more open passing game began flourishing in the 1960s.

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