Timothy P. Brown's Blog, page 74

Today's Tidbit... Four Heisman Trophy Winners In One College Game

A 2016 NFL game between Baltimore and Tennessee had five Heisman Trophy winners suit up for the game. Baltimore had Lamar Jackson (2016), Mark Ingram (2009), and Robert Griffin III (2012), while Tennessee had Derrick Henry (2015) and Marcus Mariota (2016). The previous record of four in a game came in 1998 when the Raiders, which included Tim Brown (no relation), Desmond Howard (also no relation), and Charles Woodson (also...), lost to the Doug Flutie-led Buffalo Bills in Week 15.

While those gam...

Pigskin Dispatch Podcast: When Did American Football Really Start?

Pigskin Dispatch podcaster Darin Hayes and I discussed a recent TidBit about the origins of American football. I argue the game did not start with the Princeton-Rutgers games of 1869 but with the IFA rules meeting of 1876. Darin disagrees with me, arguing for a later date.

Click here to listen, 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), o...

Today's Tidbit... Seeing Beyond His Troubles

Despite being a man of many talents and having success, it is difficult to consider Irving "Brick" Marcus’ athletic career and not think about what might have been.

Marcus was born in Romania in 1904 and emigrated to the United States as a 4-year-old. His family settled in San Francisco, where he became a football track star at Polytechnic. Upon graduating, Marcus entered Berkeley, positioning himself as a future star based on his open-field running on the freshmen team. Unfortunately, despite lo...

Today's Tidbit... Hanging With A Glue Guy

We talk more about glue guys in basketball and hockey than football and baseball. Still, regardless of the sport, glue guys help teams do the little things correctly, contributing to a team's success in ways unaccounted for by the game's statistics.

Bruce Maher was a glue guy in college, but not in the usual sense since he was a star on the University of Detroit's football and baseball teams in the late 1950s. Maher redshirted before taking a starting role as a sophomore halfback on offense and d...

Today's Tidbit... A 1919 Press Pass And Grass Drills

I recently came across the press-photo pass shown below. Since it only cost a few bucks, I decided to buy the item, research the game's story, and find something interesting to share with you. So, a few paragraphs from now, you’ll know whether I succeeded in that task.

Since the photo-press pass did not identify the year it was used, my first task was determining the year they played the game. Thankfully, Army's football website lists the dates and results of each game by opponent. It shows Army ...

Today's Tidbit… 1876 IFA Rule #33: Pushed Into Touch

This is #33 in a series covering football's original 61 rules adopted by the Intercollegiate Football Association in 1876. We review one rule each Friday.

(Frederick Remington, Yale vs. Princeton, Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 27, 1890)

Rule 31 told us the ball remained live when it went out of bounds and became dead only when touched down by a player on either side. Rule 32 describes the procedures for bringing the ball back into play from out of bounds, while Rule 33 takes us back to the issue of the b...

A Look Back On Football's Transitive Property

Oregon State fans celebrating at halftime (RPPC, Personal collection)

Much of the fun of football and sports generally comes from the belief that my team is better than yours, and one way fans have convinced themselves that their team might win is through comparative scores. But, of course, comparative scores have their limit, and some comparisons are better than others. Still, the most straightforward ranking system and most sophisticated computer model both boil down to comparing one team's sco...

Today's Tidbit... Medical and Law School Football Teams

College football barred professional athletes early on but took a bit longer to agree on the other professionals, that is, students in the professional schools of medicine, dentistry, and law. Whether professional students should play collegiately was a contentious issue in the 1890s as colleges increasingly grew into universities with graduate and professional programs.

Penn was the early target of these challenges since it was the largest university in the country and had multiple professional ...

Today's Tidbit... Downfield Punts and Dropkicks

Remnants of football's rugby past remained part of the game for varying amounts of time. For example, Saturday's Tidbit covered the return kick, which involved players immediately punting the ball back to the opponent after taking possession of the ball on a punt, kickoff, field goal attempt, or turnover. The return kick left the college game in 1967 but remains legal in Canadian football.

Another aspect of rugby that remained part of football for longer than most realize involved the ability to ...

Pigskin Dispatch Podcast: Mowing Early Football Fields

Pigskin Dispatch podcaster Darin Hayes and I discussed a recent TidBit about how football and other athletic fields were mown and maintained back in the day.

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

Here’s the original Tidbit:

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