Today's Tidbit... O Line Blocking and the 1954 Chicago Cardinals Playbook

The partial cover of the 1954 Chicago Cardinals brochure/playbook exemplifies the simplicity of early playbooks. (Personal collection)

Early football offenses using the mass and momentum approach opened holes by crashing multiple backside linemen and running backs through the hole. Rule changes intended to eliminate mass and momentum plays required seven players on the line of scrimmage and required offenses to gain ten rather than five in three plays. (Teams had to gain ten yards in four plays starting in 1912.)

Those and other changes required offenses to find new ways to move the ball and forced changes in blocking schemes. For example, when Pop Warner introduced his Carlisle Formation (aka Single Wing offense), he often had one lineman '“assist“ another when blocking a defender but did not assign a name to that tactic. The tactic was called two-on-one blocking by the late 1920s. Some called it one-two blocking in the mid-1930s, while double-team blocking entered the vocabulary by 1940, though the old terms remained in use after the new names arrived.