Timothy P. Brown's Blog, page 80

Pigskin Dispatch Podcast: Fielding Yost and the First Fake Field Goal

Pigskin Dispatch podcaster Darin Hayes and I discuss a recent TidBit about Fielding Yost and his role in pioneering the fake field goal - or not.

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

Football ArchaeologyFielding Yost and the First Fake Field GoalThere is nothing new under football's sun. Many plays, techniques, and concepts are borrowed, recycled, adapted, or reinvented by those unaware someone else already rolled out that invention. Still, everyth...

How We Forgot, Then Remembered The 1902 Rose Bowl

All history is revisionist history. We understand our past by continually redefining as new facts emerge, and we reinterpret old ones. As a result, facts that seem indisputable become disputed when given enough time.

Take, for instance, an example from the football world. Today, if you ask the average football fan or a historian of the game when they played the first Rose Bowl game, they will tell you it occurred in 1902. However, if you transported yourself back to the early 1930s to ask the sam...

Today's Tidbit... Taking A Position on All-American Teams

One way to look at the history of football is by reviewing the positions named to the game's All-America team, which began when Caspar Whitney identified the nation's top players at each position for the 1889 season. Whitney named eleven players representing three schools: Princeton (5), Yale (3), ), and Harvard (3). The eleven players included two ends, tackles, guards, halfbacks, and one center, quarterback, and fullback. That is how things remained until 1949 or 1950, depending on who you ask...

Today's Tidbit... WSUI And Football's Early Radio Coverage

Part of the fun of researching football's history comes from trying to understand how football fits within broader social and technological changes, particularly the media. You cannot understand football over the years without recognizing its symbiotic relationship with newspapers, radio, television, the internet, and the monies that came with each advance.

One way to examine those relationships is through documents that show the interplay at some time. Period documents are like insects trapped i...

Blog-Used Items: 1800s to 1919

I collected old football-related items in the past but now buy only for use in stories. In some cases, I buy cheap and sell high because my research identified the object, its story, and its value. If interested, check out the items below and on the other pages.

All sales occur on eBay, but paid subscribers can contact me about these and other items.

CLICK TO ENLARGE IMAGES

1903 RPPC Purdue Football Game Action On Stuart Field, Today's Tidbit... 1903 Purdue Football's Tragic End, eBay ($89.99)

1904 ...

Blog-Used Items For Sale

I acquire old football-related items to use on this site. Once they appear in a story, I’m happy to sell my blog-used items to those who appreciate them or the broader story.

Regular sales occur on eBay. However, paid subscribers can contact me about items that are not listed here.

I’ll add more items from published articles and update the page regularly.

CLICK TO ENLARGE IMAGES

1903 RPPC Purdue Football Game Action On Stuart Field, Today's Tidbit... 1903 Purdue Football's Tragic End, eBay ($89.99)

1...

Today's Tidbit... The Patented Bunny Oakes

Back in July, I wrote about defensive line drills of the 1930s pictured in Bunny Oakes' 1932 book, Football Line Play. The story, found here, covered the Blow and Step drill and left open a question about the nature or use of the middle piece of equipment in the image below. Additional research now provides the answer to that question, but let's first look at Bernard F. "Bunny" Oakes' career.

(Oakes, Football Line Play, 1948)

Oakes grew up in Illinois in time to enlist in the Marines in 1917. He s...

Today's Tidbit… IFA Rule #26 Throwing Back

This is #26 in a series covering football's original 61 rules adopted by the Intercollegiate Football Association in 1876. We review one rule each Friday.

Following the scrimmage, the ball is passed back to the half-back as an opponent chases after him. (Johnson, Alexander. “The American Game of Foot-Ball,” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Vol. XXXIV, No. 6, October 1887)

The last several rules covered onside and offside, with the core issue being that offside players, those closer to the...

Today's Tidbit... When Did Football Really Begin?

One year ago today, I sent the first issue of Today's Tidbits to a subscriber list of one: me. Some stories on Football Archaeology show earlier publishing dates because I imported 100+ articles from my old site, but today is the first anniversary of Football Archaeology!

The Tidbit I sent one year ago covered one of my favorite stories of a multi-sport athlete, Dick Reichle. Reichle started for Great Lakes Naval in the 1919 Rose Bowl before returning to the University of Illinois, where he was i...

Today's Tidbit... Football at the Soldiers' Orphans Industrial School

While combing through an online postcard store (OldPostcards.com) recently, I came across an RPPC showing the 1906 football squad for the S.O.I.S. of Scotland, Pennsylvania. The image shows a few coaches and 35 or so high school-age boys posed for their team picture in front of an imposing three-story school building. Not having heard of the SOIS or Scotland, Pennsylvania, it was not clear whether there might be an interesting football-only story or a broader story in which football is a part, a...