Today's Tidbit... Offensive and Defensive Formations in 1938
Today's Tidbit... Offensive and Defensive Formations in 1938
Happy 4th of July!
Following up on yesterday's article about Atlantic Gas's annual booklets and the weekly Dunkel Ratings, we dive deeper into the 1938 booklet and its description of the common offenses and defenses of the day. (I will assume readers at least skim through the text in the images below since I will comment on rather than repeat the contents.) -Click images to enlarge.-
They simplified things, saying there were two offenses, two defenses, and a Kicking Formation. Still, Atlantic Gas thought it was helpful to provide this background information so fans would recognize the offenses and defenses when they saw them on television. Oh, wait. There were no television broadcasts back then, so they intended the information to help radio listeners visualize the events on the field based on the descriptions provided by the radio announcers.
However, before covering the offensive formations, they explained the difference between balanced and unbalanced lines and identified the four offensive back positions. Back then, the hash marks were further apart, and few teams split the ends other than when punting. Teams go unbalanced all the time today, but they seldom flop interior linemen to get there like they did in 1938.
They also discussed kick formation, which meant punt formation. They retained the term “kick formation” since it used to apply to drop kicking, but drop kickers began disappearing after the ball became narrower in 1929 and 1934.
The Single-Wing formation has an unbalanced offensive line on the right and three of four backs on the right side. Power right, spinners, and misdirection were the order of the day.
Like the Single Wing, the Double Wing formation arose in Pop Warner's mind. The football term "reverse" first showed up with the Single Wing. Notre Dame and Rockne gave us "misdirection," while "Single Wing" did not appear in the literature until Bill Roper used the term in 1928. Meanwhile, Pop Warner first used the term "Double Wing" in the early 1930s, though he successfully used the formation at Stanford in the 1920s. (Before then, Warner called it Formation B, and the Single Wing was Formation A.)
Turning to defense, three issues stand out from the discussion. First, since offenses sat in closed formations, seldom splitting their ends, defenses did much the same and covered each offensive player on the line. Second, defenses often split their ends and had them crash to stop sweeps, positioning one or two players as "backers-up," later called linebackers.
Third, the Atlantic Gas writer referred to the backers-up as the secondary defense and the backs as the tertiary defense. That terminology already verged on old-fashioned in 1938 but would have been understood by football fans. When did you last hear a play-by-play announcer mention the tertiary defense?
The game has changed a bit since 1938. The Modern T and dropback quarterback arrived in 1940, and the Split T, football's first option offense, came in 1941. Defenses adapted again and later dominated, requiring rule changes to allow offenses to thrive. Of course, those ebbs and flows have marked the game for 150 years.
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