Forward Pass: The Play That Saved Football

by Philip L. Brooks

The Most Important Innovation in the History of Football
In 1913, a small, up-and-coming school came to West Point to challenge the great Army football team. The opposing quarterback dropped back, raised the football, and threw a perfect spiral to his wide open teammate. Again and again the quarterback and his receiver completed passes, resulting in a stunning 35-13 defeat of Army. That school was Notre Dame and the receiver was Knute the game of football was transformed. The story of Notre Dame’s passing attack goes back seven years, when the forward pass was first legalized as a means of opening the game up to avoid the fatalities that plagued early football and nearly saw the game banned. A student of the legendary Amos Alonzo Stagg, Jesse Harper, envisioned a mixture of precision passing and running throughout the game, and after arriving at Notre Dame, he schooled his team in his new-fangled approach.
In Forward The Play That Saved Football , Philip L. Brooks introduces the reader to the dirt, spectacle, and emotion of the great teams of the early twentieth century, including Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indians, Stagg’s University of Chicago Maroons, Fielding Yost’s Michigan Wolverines, Johnny Heisman’s Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, and Gil Dobie’s Washington Huskies. While most teams experimented with passing, it was Jesse Harper and Knute Rockne who showed how the forward pass could be used as the ultimate offensive strategy and key to the brilliant future of football.

Genres: Football

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2007

Reviews

[Timothy Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed Brook's look at the beginnings of the forward pass in college football. He covers Amos Alonzo Stage, Eddie Cochems, and a few other key coaches, but focuses on Jesse Harper's role since his Notre Dame team's victory over West Point in 1912 is the game that brought the forward pass into the national game. This is a fun read if you are interested in early football.

[Hertz · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is focused on the development of the forward pass before 1920s, especially the influence of Jesse C. Harper, and the game of his Notre Dame squad against the Army in 1913. There is no question this game has great importance on the nation-wide recognition of the forward pass being integrated into the game of football. But any further development surrounding the forward pass in football is not mentioned at all, which makes this book incomplete in terms of illustrating the complete history of the forward pass.

NFL films' a football life - forward pass, has a better overview, compared to this book.