
With the Kelce brothers opposing one another in Super Bowl LVII, we'll look this week at a few brother combinations that played a part in football’s history.
In early football, teams had one captain. Opposing captains met before games to "toss-up," deciding which team would kick off. By the early 1900s, referees took charge of the coin-flipping process, so W. G. Crowell, the referee of the 1920 Princeton-Yale game, met Tim and Mike Callahan at midfield. As Heywood Broun described the process the next day:
Just before the whistle blew, Captain Tim Callahan of Yale and Mike Callahan of Princeton walked out into the middle of the gridiron. The referee said: "I guess I don't have to introduce you boys," and he was quite right, because the Callahans are brothers.
To the best of anyone's recollection, the meeting at midfield was the first time in Eastern football -or perhaps anywhere- that brothers captained opposing major college football teams.
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