Timothy P. Brown's Blog, page 10

Today's Tidbit... Getting A Kick Out Of The 1914 Rules

Although the 1914 football rules included fourteen rule changes, most were of a modest, technical nature that did not significantly alter the game. However, that does not mean the rule changes were uninteresting. Two of the changes affected the kicking game, making it more rational while also prompting one to ask why they created the old rules.

The first rule change related to kicked balls hitting the goal posts, and stemmed from an incident in the 1913 Harvard-Yale game, best remembered for Harv...

Today's Tidbit... Unfair Acts and the 12th Man

A Tidbit of one month ago described several ways in which a football referee can award points - or used to be able to award points. It can happen today is due to an Unfair Act since the rules give the referee the authority to make essentially any call necessary to remedy an unfair act, including a palpably unfair act in NFL parlance.

One set of unfair acts occurs when players come off the bench, or fans leave the stands to interfere with play. Since I promised to do a story focused on those even...

Today's Tidbit... Minnesota's Spinner and Their Ineffective Passing Game

We're taking a spin today, back to the days of the Single Wing and half-and-full spinners. The spinner arrived in football in 1924 when Walter Steffen, Carnegie Tech's coach, employed it with his quarterback Dwight Beede, who 20+ years later invented the penalty flag.

The spinner was a component of the backfield faking and misdirection in series plays in which each play looked like another. Minnesota coach Bernie Bierman shared his preferred half-spinner techniques in his Want To Be A Football Ch...

Pigskin Dispatch Podcast... When Referees Make A Point (or Six)

Pigskin Dispatch’s Darin Hayes and I discuss multiple instances in which football referees can award points to one of the competing teams. Darin also recalls a few instances in which he made rulings based on the power of the striped shirt.

Watch or listen to the podcast here and/or read the original Tidbit.

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Today's Tidbits... Freshmen Beanies at Football Games

Freshman caps or beanies were a long-standing tradition on American college campuses. They had their place on campuses large and small, private and public, and still appear on select campuses today.

The frosh caps or beanies played a role in the campus hazing of freshman and, towards their end, acted as a substitute for the more arduous hazing activities of the past.

It's not entirely clear when beanies arrived on America's quads, but they were featured in Spalding catalogs after the turn of the ...

Today's Tidbit... When The Shoe Isn't On The Other Foot

Kickers have always enjoyed their quirkiness, even before specialist or dedicated kickers exacerbated the problem. There's just something about thumping the ball that brings out unconventionality.

An example of kicking eccentricity is the barefoot kicker, a species many recall emerging in the 1970s and 1980s when the NFL saw Tony Franklin and a few other soccer-style kickers booting the ball without a boot on their kicking foot. Barefoot kickers variously claimed that connecting skin to leather e...

Today's Tidbit... Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On

Shaking hands is a tradition that dates back to ancient times when gents wearing distinctive helmets in the Fertile Crescent shook hands to signal friendship or, at the very least, that they were not bearing arms. Some claim that modern handshaking is a democraticized form of kissing the hands of social superiors. Whatever its origins, the number of 1890s newspaper articles regarding the niceties of handshaking suggests the practice was in transition then or that the lesser classes began rubbing...

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Pigskin Dispatch Podcast... One or Two Feet In?

Pigskin Dispatch’s Darin Hayes and I cover the emergence of rules covering whether players are inbounds and out-of-bounds when catching punts, forward passes, or even, fumbles.

Watch or listen to the podcast here and/or read the original Tidbit. Well they had one in one season.

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Stadium Size, Football Droppers, and Deemphasizers: Fordham

I had planned for this story to be about CCNY, in part because they had one of the coolest old stadiums in the land. However, once I started looking into them, it became apparent that they were never a big-time program, so I turned instead to another New York borough to cover Fordham.

(Personal collection)

Although the Rams have a solid FCS program today, Fordham is supposed to have the distinction of having dropped football five times. After first playing in 1882, I found only four periods of no ...