Today's Tidbit... Widening the Gridiron

A lot is going on in this image of the 1907 Harvard-Yale game at Harvard Stadium. The teams play before a packed house on a checkerboard field, with the play starting about seven yards from the sideline. Smoke pours from the stack in the distance.

(Davis, 1911)

As the rule makers considered how to make football safer in 1906, Walter Camp argued for widening the field to encourage a more rugby-like horizontal game. However, the proximity of the stands to the sideline shown in this picture is the primary reason that change did not occur. Harvard's relatively new concrete cathedral to American football could not handle a wider field, and no one wanted football without Harvard. So, the forward pass became legalized, leading to a vertically-oriented game.

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