"History of the Forward Pass

The pastime of kicking around a ball pre-dates recorded history. Ancient savage tribes played a form of primitive football. About 2500 years ago, Corinthians, Spartans, and Athenians enjoyed a ball-kicking game which the Greeks named episkuros. The Romans competed in a similar game termed harpastum, which they transported west when they invaded the British Isles in the First Century, B.C.

The game known in the United States as football derives its existence from the English game of rugby.

Football was played informally on college lawns in the middle decades of the 19th Century and an annual freshman-sophomore series of “scrimmages” began at Yale in 1840. It was not until November, 1869, however, that the first formal intercollegiate football game was played – at New Brunswick, N.J., the Rutgers side defeated Princeton 6 goals to 4. The first professional game was played in 1895 at Latrobe, Pennsylvania. The National Football League was founded in 1921 and merged in 1949 with the All-American Conference and in 1970 with the American Football League.

In the early days of college football, games were played with 25, 20, 15, or 11 men on a side. That varying number of players was standardized to 11 through the efforts of Yales’s Walter Camp at the 1880 football convention. A year earlier, the same Camp was involved in the first recorded forward pass in college football. During the Yale-Princeton game, as he was being tackled, Camp threw a football forward to the Elis’ Oliver Thompson who sprinted to a touchdown. The Tigers of Princeton protested; by tossing a coin, the referee made his decision to allow the touchdown.

It was John Heisman who convinced the Football Rules Committee to legalize the forward pass. For thirty-six years, Heisman coached at a number of schools including Auburn, Clemson, Georgia Tech, Pennsylvania, Washington and Jefferson, and Rice. He, Alonzo Stagg, and Pop Warner, three of the greatest coaches from the turn of the century through the 1920s, constituted the “football Trinity”.

Heisman first witnessed a forward pass in 1895 when he scouted a game between North Carolina and Georgia. In order to avoid a blocked punt by onrushing linemen, the Tar Heel punter passed the ball downfield to a teammate who caught it and ran 70 yards for the only touchdown of the game. In response to the Bulldogs’ howls of protest, the referee admitted, “I didn’t see the ball thrown,” thereby allowing an illegal play.

Heisman envisaged the forward pass as the salvation of a sport which had degenerated into dangerous formations and tactics such as the flying wedge and mass plays. After unsuccessfully attempting for 3 years to convince Rules Chairman Walter Camp to legalize the forward pass, Heisman enlisted the valuable support of committee members John Bell and Paul Dashiell instead. Finally, in 1906, the Rules Committee, college football’s governing body, legalized the forward pass..."

I suggest they try to figure it out

This post was edited on 10/1/22 at 10:02 pm