Timothy P. Brown's Blog, page 81

Today's Tidbit... Great Coaching Staffs: 1954 Michigan State

Some teams are excellent due to the talent on the roster, and others due to their coaching staff. Of course, there is an interplay between the quality of coaching staff and the rosters since success and recruiting beget high-quality recruits. Still, you occasionally come across a coaching staff and are startled by its depth of coaching talent. One staff that fit the excessive talent bill was the boys coaching the 1954 Michigan State Spartans.

How many great coaches do you recognize from the pictu...

Pigskin Dispatch Podcast: Gerald Ford and Idealism

Pigskin Dispatch podcaster Darin Hayes and I discuss a recent TidBit about Gerald Ford and his willingness to stand up to a wrong while he was Michigan’s captain.

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Today's Tidbit... A Report On The Official's Gun

I enjoy coming up with punny Tidbit and article titles, and one of my all-time favorites was When Football Officials Tooted On The Field, which covered the evolution of whistles, horns, bells, guns, and other noisemakers used on the field by football officials. Officials began blowing whistles in 1887, and they initially did so to signal the end of a play and that a foul occurred (in the days before penalty flags). However, players became confused since the blown whistle signaled both that play ...

Today's Tidbit... College Football's Only Triangular Game

Andy Kerr was a football outsider whose innovations led to strong teams at several schools, though he is best known for his success at Colgate. Kerr did not play college football but was Pitt's track coach when Pop Warner arrived, with Kerr assisting Warner. Warner signed a contract to coach Stanford in 1922, but Pitt would not release him from his existing contract, so he sent Kerr to Palo Alto to be the head coach for two years until Warner's contract ran out.

Kerr coached Washington & Jefferso...

Today's Tidbit... Facing A One-Year Suspension

Some consider today's penalty for targeting - disqualification for the current and next half - to be excessive, but that penalty is mild compared to one recommended in 1906. The 1906 rules committee emphasized removing foul play from the game as part of the effort to make football safer. That emphasis was reflected by the rule of the time called for tossing players from the game for unnecessary roughness, including:

Striking with the fist or elbows

Kneeing

Kicking

Meeting with the knee

Striking with ...

Today's Tidbit... Before There Was Pass Interference

It isn't easy to get things right on the first go-around, as shown when the forward pass became legal in 1906. The rules heavily restricted the forward pass, and the game lacked proven throwing, catching, and route-running techniques we now consider obvious. Also missing were rules concerning pass interference.

Pass interference went unmentioned in the 1906 rule book for three reasons. First, many anticipated the forward pass to look like what we consider the forward lateral, so perhaps they thou...

Today's Tidbit… Knute Rockne and Hire's Remorse

Over the last fifty years, many top football coaches have jumped jobs, and the same was true in the old days. Heisman, Warner, and others changed positions regularly. Even Stagg had to jump jobs after Chicago forced him to retire following 41 years of service. Then and now, few played at one school and moved up the coaching ladder at their alma mater before becoming highly successful head coaches there.

One who followed that path was Knute Rockne, who played at Notre Dame from 1910 to 1913, assis...

Today's Tidbit… IFA Rule #25 Defensive Offside

This is #25 in a series covering football's original 61 rules adopted by the Intercollegiate Football Association in 1876. We review one rule each Friday.

Culture can be described as the rules people follow in the absence of explicit rules. We learn in families, schools, and work organizations to behave in certain ways without anyone issuing a specific order. Likewise, we learn that almost everyone in some groups ignores certain explicit rules.

Following certain unwritten rules while ignoring othe...

Today's Tidbit... Let's Play Two

Yesterday's Tidbit included images of the cover and internal pages from a 1937 Shell Oil football schedule booklet. Used as a giveaway at Shell stations on the West Coast, most internal pages listed the 1937 schedule and 1936 results for West Coast colleges.

Below is an image of pages 2 and 3, which shows the schedules for six Pacific Coast Conference teams, several of which have interesting elements. Oregon has a late game with the U. S Marines, a football team typically referred to as the San D...

A Look Back on Football Stadiums of the Future

The game of football witnessed tremendous change over the years. Some parts of the game’s evolution were planned, others emerged, and things often did not turn out as everyone expected. Predicting the future is challenging since it requires understanding how coming technological and social changes will intersect. Typically, futurists accurately predict some elements of the future while missing others, so let's look at past predictions regarding future football stadiums.

Predictions of the future ...