jrn 362/sps 362 - lecture four

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Rich Hanley, Associate Professor Lecture Four

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Page 1: JRN 362/SPS 362 - Lecture Four

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of FootballRich Hanley, Associate ProfessorLecture Four

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Review• In the 1880s and 1890s, college

football spread to all parts of the U.S. - including to Oklahoma, pictured left, behind two significant forces of change.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Review• Those forces were

1) The rapid grow in the number of colleges.

2) The dissemination of game accounts by mass textual

media: magazines, newspapers & books.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Review• Many new colleges, founded

under the federal land-grant act, sought to imitate older institutions such as Yale and Harvard in the east.

• Part of the process included the formation of football teams, headed by professors who had attended an eastern college, notably Yale

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Review• The rule changes of 1881-1882

and later opened the game, made it more accessible to more people and created the platform for news coverage that featured heroic play.

• That, in turn, prompted the publication of books educating the spectator on football and so forth.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Review• The rules sparked innovative

game play, beginning with the development of signals for calling of plays.

• The complexity led to the hiring of coaches who knew the game.

• The creation of mass formations and mass momentum followed.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Review• And that almost killed the game

of football in the 1890s and 1900s as the size and shape of players changed to match the new tactics and formations.

• Here are two images. The first is the 1884 Yale team, the second from 10 years later in 1894.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival• Note that 1894 team picture and think of the players alongside

the typical college student from that era, shown on the next slide.

• The slide after that is a scan from a report on the size of football players of that era.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival• And what did these large young men do?

• Engage in violent, often injurious and sometimes fatal collisions in running the V offense.

• A contemporary description of what happened to some players illuminates the state of play at the time.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival

• “There are still others who tell of games in which they did not even see anything, so far as they can remember, but that is usually after a blow to the head. There have been frequent instances of men playing subconsciously to the end of the game and not being able afterward to recall a single circumstance of it.”

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival• One of the more innovative plays

other than the V turned out to be the Yale end run, or sweep.

• An outside lineman would sprint around the line after the snap to lead interference and often pull the runner behind him through the defense.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival• That play created the first true star of

the game, a player who later that decade would become the first pro football player: William “Pudge” Heffelfinger, left, who teamed with Leo McClung.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

• Growth & Survival• Camp’s first All-America team in

1889 included Amos Alonzo Stagg (discussed earlier) and Heffelfinger.

• Camp selected Heffelfinger, a guard, in 1889, 1890 and 1891.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

• Growth & Survival• Camp frequently cited

Heffelfinger as the best player he ever knew.

• He named the guard to his first all-time, All-America team, inserting Pudge in the hallowed spot in the middle of the photo illustration.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival

• Outside of the east, football continued to grow in popularity, requiring centralized organization to plan schedules.

• In 1890, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska formed the Western Intercollegiate Football Association but the east still ruled in terms of direct influence.

• A count at the time showed that 45 former Yale players, 35 of Princeton and 24 of Harvard served as football coaches or teaches throughout the U.S.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival

• And the innovations in game play emerged almost always from the east, particularly from Harvard.

• In November 1892, Harvard unleashed a formation so potent, so damaging and so menacing, that calls for banning the game arose from college faculty and even some political figures alarmed over the violence it spawned.

• The Flying Wedge disrupted football.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival• Lorin F. DeLand, a mad scientist of a

football coach, devised the flying wedge even tough he had no experience in football as a player or coach until hired by Harvard.

• He was businessman who saw his first game in 1890 and spent thousands of hours after that studying the game.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival• DeLand’s insight was to connect

football to military tactics, particularly plans developed by Napoleon Bonaparte to concentrate a mass of force against the weakest point.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival

• “Napoleon Bonaparte would have been pleased,” wrote scholars Scott A. McQuilken and Ronald A. Smith of Penn State University in an academic paper on the development of the Flying Wedge. (1993) “His three principles of military art – concentration of force, mobility, and a firm resolve to triumph or perish gloriously – had been made functional for late-nineteenth-century intercollegiate football strategy in America.”

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival

• The Flying Wedge, the two wrote, “was hailed by some as a positive reflection of scientific thinking applied to football.”

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival• The flying wedge featured

players on one side and five on the other moving some 25-30 yards behind the line of scrimmage. One man held the ball at center.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival

• Each of the five-man lines would start running with arms interlocked toward the center.

• As soon as the lines arrived, the back would put the ball in play and disappear in the mass as it gathered momentum and hit the line.

• It was awesome to watch, as Stagg later wrote (see slide after next image).

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival

• Here is one account from the 1892 Harvard game against Yale by a man who recalled its effectiveness years later.

• “Harvard opens the second half with a new and startling formation … The formation, the famous flying wedge, goes crashing into the Yale men with a tremendous impact, taking the ball to the 25-yard line. Sensation runs through the stands at the novel play, which is the most original and beautiful ever seen upon a football field.”

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival• “It not only was the feature of

the game, although the contest was won by Yale, but it was the most discussed topic by the country at large for many days and the central subject of football for several years.“ read one account.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival• The New York Times wrote, “What a

grand play … a half ton of bone and muscle coming into collision with a man weighing 160 or 170 pounds.”

• The Times also reported that after an injury, the game continued with “renewed brutality.”

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival

• A year later in the Yale game, Leland unveiled what we now called unitard uniform, a single piece of garment consisting of smooth leather that made it difficult to tackle the ball carrier, and kept deploying the flying wedge.

• But it’s days were numbered, just in time.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival

• The violent impacts generated by the flying wedge alarmed Walter Camp and his rules committee, and after the 1893 they moved to change the game to neutralize mass momentum plays.

• After considering extending the first-down line of gain to 10 yards, the rules committee decided to keep it simple.

• They banned mass momentum plays by making it illegal to have more than three men moving before the snap.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival

• Yet the flying wedge lived on in a more profound way.

• It introduced military tactics to football, and coaches from 1892 to the present would create a culture dramatically different from that under Camp’s original design of a test of manliness.

• Beginning with 1893, football would become a game of domination and conquest contest under military discourse and designs, McQuilken and Smith concluded in their research.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival

• And that was clearly evident on November 24, 1894, when Yale and Harvard met in what historians have declared as one of the most violent football games ever played, one that threatened the existence of the game and its newfound militaristic impulses.

• The game would leave many players injured and many in the crowd of 19,000 in shock at the violence that had unfolded in front of them.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival

• This is how one European reporter described it: “It turned into awful butchery. Of twenty two participants, seven were so severely injured that they had to be carried from the field in a dying condition. One player had his back broken, another lost an eye, and a third lost a leg. Both teams appeared upon the field with a crowd of ambulances, surgeons and nurses. Many ladies fainted at the awful cries of the injured players. The indignation of the spectators was powerful, but they were so terrorized that they were afraid to leave the field.”

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival

• The Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of War were so shaken by reports of the game that they abolished the Army-Navy series, then just gaining traction.

• Afterward, Camp sent a letter of inquiry to every former football player in the U.S. to ask about injuries and request suggestions to make the game safe.

• The results suggested that former players saw great value in the game.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival

• The previous letter was written by artist Frederick Remington, a Yale alumni who played football and who would later gain fame with his work portraying the frontier.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival• Remington found similarities

between the physical world he knew on the field and the idealized view of the vanishing way of life in the western United States.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival• Remington would often illustrate

magazine covers such as this one for Harper’s showing football’s physicality.

• And his famous image of the west called Dash for the Timber reflects football’s line play.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Growth & Survival• In fact, a connection can be drawn

between Dash for the Timber, the Hollywood film Duel in the Sun and the production aesthetic of NFL Films. More on that later, but it is important to note that NFL Films would provide the visual mythology for the game in the 1960s and beyond.