Timothy P. Brown's Blog, page 62

Today's Tidbit... Fred Sington's Sideline Invention

One can accomplish a great deal in athletics and life yet have your longest-term legacy go unremarked upon, with few being aware you were its inventor. Fred Sington was one of those individuals who succeeded in nearly everything he tried, which is remarkable because he tried so many things.

Sington grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, attending Phillips High School and earning four letters each in football, basketball, track, and baseball. Several baseball franchises wanted to sign him, but he chose t...

Today's Tidbit... 100 Years of Football: The 1880s

This is the second in a series looking back at “100 Years OF Football,” syndicated cartoons published by Jerry Brondfield and Charles Beck in 1969. Today's version covers the 1880s.

Several fundamental changes in football’s evolution away from rugby emerged in the first half of the 1880s, initiating the year after year tweaking of football’s rules. The compounding effect has resulted in a game substantially different from rugby.

Brief notes follow each cartoon, primarily so their contents are dis...

Uni Watch: Football And Vacuum Tubes

This morning, I’m the Uni Watch guest author with an article about football and vacuum tubes. The story covers the bad old days when televisions had vacuum tubes that burned out without warning and how that affected the ability to watch a game. The story illustrations come from a brochure with the 1971-72 NFL schedule and instructions on diagnosing which vacuum tube needed replacement.

I hope you enjoy it.

Football And Vacuum Tubes

I’ll repost the article on Football Archaeology in a few days.

Subsc...

Today's Tidbit... 1876 IFA Rule #48: Touched Down Between Posts

This is #48 in a series covering football's original 61 rules adopted by the Intercollegiate Football Association in 1876. We review one rule each Friday.

Last week, we covered the spotting of a try at goal following a touchdown. Rule 47 told us they walked the ball out perpendicularly from where it crossed the goal line, and the kicking team could walk the ball out the distance they chose. Rule 48 modified Rule 47 when touching the ball down between the goal posts.

Rule 48: If the ball has been t...

Today's Tidbit: The Kicking Women Of 1937

American University in Washington, D.C., has a football history, but not much of one. They fielded teams from 1925 to 1941, dropped the sport due to WWII, and never brought it back. With good reason. They went 24-67-6 during its time with their 1926 record of 4-3-1 marking their only winning season. Two years later, they played and lost four games in four weeks to Gettysburg College 81-0, Catholic University 69-0, St. John's University 63-0, and Gallaudet University 37-7.

Trying to make a go of i...

Today's Tidbit... The Case Of The Missing Goal Posts

Football's origin story is that Princeton and Rutgers played the first game in 1869. That game involved 25 players per side kicking and batting a round ball with the ultimate aim of kicking the ball between two posts at either end of a field at Rutgers. The team met again a week later on a Princeton field with goals at either end.

The proximity of the schools encouraged them to keep playing over the years. Princeton leads the series 53-7-1, though Rutgers went 10-3-1 from 1968 to 1980. During the...

Today's Tidbit... 1935 GoldSmith Sports Equipment Consulting Staff

I've shown illustrations and images from period sporting goods catalogs in the past to illustrate how football equipment evolved over the years. Still, I have not showcased a particular catalog until now. Having recently purchased the 1935-36 GoldSmith Athletic Equipment, Fall & Winter catalog in an auction showing only a few interior pages, I was delighted when I received it and began flipping through it. Preceding each of the equipment sections (e.g., football, shoes) was a one-page cartoon co...

Pigskin Dispatch... The History of Player Numbers

Pigskin Dispatch podcaster Darin Hayes and I discussed a recent Tidbit concerning the history of player numbers. Spurred by an offhand comment in an article on a separate topic, I dug into the origin of player numbers again and found some new information.

Click here to listen to the story, or subscribe to Pigskin Dispatch wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s the original Tidbit:

Subscribe for free and never miss a story. Support this site with a paid subscription, buy me a coffee (or two), or buy...

Today's Tidbit... 1934 Alabama Double Reverses Your Pleasure

When your team has one of the greatest ends in football history, one would expect the first touchdown pass of his senior year to come before the season's seventh game, but that is what happened with Don Hutson and the 1934 Alabama team. Hutson was a fabulous, fluid athlete who played left end for Bama during the days when every end was tight. The counterweight on the right side of Alabama's line was a junior named Paul "Bear" Bryant.

The 1934 Alabama lineup (1935 Alabama yearbook)

The 1934 season ...

Today's Tidbit... Puntin' In The U.S.A.

Let's get boring now,

Everybody's learnin' how, 

Come watch a dull punt play with me.

The punt is among the most boring plays in American football, while it is among the most exciting in Canadian football. The difference is that American football is structured so the return team often does not return punts, while the Canadian game forces them to do so. The difference comes down to four rules.

Two key rule differences are that Canadian punt returners cannot fair catch the ball and are protected by a ...