Today's Tidbit... Peru State Football 1908-1910

Football Archaeology has run a handful of stories about football at normal and teachers' colleges in recent months that covered:

• 1906 UW-Stevens Point

• 1907 Slippery Rock

• 1907 Eastern Illinois

• 1916 UW-River Falls

• 1950 Florence State (North Alabama)

Each resulted from an RPPC or schedule that caused me to dig into the team's story. Readers are fortunate today because I managed to string together RPPCs of the 1908, 1909, and 1910 teams from Nebraska State Normal. Most called it Peru Normal then, and it is now Peru State College and plays NAIA football. I first acquired the RPPC of the 1908 team and have used it to illustrate the exterior pad stage in the development of shoulder pads. I later came across RPPCs of the 1909 and 1910 teams, so I grabbed them to make a set. As it turned out, there are several fun nuggets about Peru's teams during the era.

The first nugget is that the 1908, 1909, and 1910 teams had different coaches, which was not unusual then. Their coach in 1907 and 1908 was Lewis Scherer, who started at right guard on the University of Chicago's 1905 national championship team. Although Scherer graduated before the forward pass became legal, he was an early advocate of its use.