Today's Tidbit... The Honest Head Linesmen

If one aspect of football has attracted the brainpower of tinkerers more than any other, it is the down box and chains. Down boxes, especially, are the backdoor light of tinkerers who are unwilling to give an inch.

Eyeballing where to place the down box and the sticks with ten yards of chain passing between them has always been a bit backward. Still, dozens of inventors, many of whom received patents, have found a way to improve football's measurement process, only to be ignored by officiating crews and the public.

An example down box I found recently on the scene in 1938 when L. E. "Bum" Cassell and D. B. "Ben" Massie of Clay Center, Nebraska, earned patent #2,139,300 for a yardage measuring device for football games.

(Patent 2,139,300 Yardage Measuring Device For Football Games, Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, 1938.)

Cassell, who ran a filling station in Clay Center, watched a high school game in 1937 after a group of freshmen mismarked the field. Unable to draw yard lines that remained perpendicular to one another, Cassell was frustrated by the markings and the officials' reliance on them. Convinced he could reinvent the down box and win widespread acclaim, Cassell created an accurate and relatively simple device.