Today's Tidbit... Remembering and Ignoring the Flying Tackle

The final chapter of my book, How Football Became Football, identified the eleven most important rules and other changes in the history of football. Whether or not I identified the top 11 correctly, among the changes I had on the bubble were the revisions to rugby's tackling rules. Like rugby, football initially allowed tackling only above the waist before allowing tackles above the knees in 1888. The change in regulations led to more effective tackling in general and by defensive ends in particular, so the game saw fewer open-field runs, pushing it toward power-oriented, mass and momentum play.

Even after that change, tackling below the knee remained illegal, but the rule was largely ignored, so it remained common practice. It's never a good thing to have rules that are ignored. Either enforce them or take them off the books, as should occur today with pants that do not cover the knees.

Another aspect of the tackling rules that suffered from the lack of enforcement was the flying tackle, which the regulations defined as occurring when both feet left the ground when making a tackle. The flying tackle became illegal in 1910 during the period's push to make football safer. Numerous experts pointed to stories suggesting that half the deaths occurring on football fields resulted from flying tackles. Newspapers reinforced the idea, but many football experts believed flying tackles seldom caused injuries.