Today's Tidbit... Taking A Position on All-American Teams

One way to look at the history of football is by reviewing the positions named to the game's All-America team, which began when Caspar Whitney identified the nation's top players at each position for the 1889 season. Whitney named eleven players representing three schools: Princeton (5), Yale (3), ), and Harvard (3). The eleven players included two ends, tackles, guards, halfbacks, and one center, quarterback, and fullback. That is how things remained until 1949 or 1950, depending on who you ask.

Football stayed a single-platoon game until 1945, so the All-America team did not need more than eleven players. Until then, some players earned their spots for their offensive prowess, others for their defense, and others because they punted or kicked the ball well. The onset of platooning led the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), one of the top news syndicates, to name separate offensive and defensive All-Americans in 1949.

('NEA Selects Two Squads,' Press and Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, NY), November 28, 1949.)

The offensive players manned the same positions Whitney identified seventy years earlier, but which positions comprised the defensive All-Americans team in 1949? The NEA named a 6-2-3 defense with two ends, tackles, and guards, two "line backers," two halfbacks, and one safety.