Walter Camp and Football's Road Not Taken

The history of football equipment includes long-forgotten devices that never gained the traction their inventors sought. For example, two Michigan inventors earned a patent for adding beads to the bars of face masks, hoping to prevent face masking.

(US Patent 4594737 John Butash. Fig. 1)

The same situation applies to ideas for potential rule changes, such as the one calling to number the yard lines from 0 to 100 rather than from 0 to 50 on either side of midfield. Whether applied to the game's equipment or rules, we evaluate suggested enhancements as we do ideas in brainstorming sessions where there are no bad ideas. We politely listen to every idea, write each one on the board, and immediately ignore the crazy ones, never thinking about them again.

Similarly, when we look at football history, we emphasize rule changes that clearly altered the game’s direction, such as the system of downs, the forward pass, and the introduction of hash marks. However, we ignore ideas that received consideration but were never adopted, especially those that might have significantly affected the game. Those ideas are the roads not taken, one of which appears in a January 1893 issue of Harper's Weekly, authored by Walter Camp.

Camp was a prolific writer and was not one to toss out crazy ideas. If he had a crazy thought, he would not have published it in Harper's Weekly, one of the most widely read periodicals of the time. The article, A Plea For The Wedge In Football, saw Camp argue not to limit the wedge's use in football. Power and close formation play, like the wedge, developed due to an 1888 rule allowing tackling above the knees rather than the waist. The rule made open-field tackling more effective, lessening the advantages of open play versus power and close-formation football.