The Forward Pass

By Jack Bonden
Love of Sports Correspondent

In 1905, college football was just a bit different than it is today. The best football was played in the Ivy League. The best of the hinterlands of the West included one team that no longer plays football, Saint Louis University, and one team that fares pretty well in division-three ball, the University of Chicago.

Back in the day, points scored via the drop kick were worth as much as touchdowns, the ball they kicked resembled a watermelon more than a football and games were most often officiated by the teams’ coaches.

The most striking difference, though, between today’s football and that of the Old School was that the old version was in many ways, much more brutal. Players wore little padding and they protected their heads with those ridiculous pieces of leather that served as helmets.

As a result, the 1905 season almost killed college football because college football kept killing its own players. Eighteen different players died during the season – and it was a wonder that the body count wasn’t higher!

For starters, there was no line of scrimmage; teams mostly took running starts at each other. If that didn’t make most of you squirm in your seat a bit, then take a second and imagine what it would be like to block Ticonderoga-class man-mountain Terrence Cody when he has a few yards of momentum behind him.

Ball carriers were allowed to be picked up by linemen, meaning that linemen were ball carrier carriers. Sometimes players had the kind of handles you would use on luggage attached to their uniforms to make them easier to pick up and ram through the defense.

Put simply, college football had become the World War I of the sports scene – it was trench warfare – where inexcusable prices were paid for relatively miniscule gains in territory.

In an effort to preserve the game, which President Teddy Roosevelt seriously considered banning after the notorious 1905 season, a number of schools gathered to retool the game to open up the field a little more. One of the innovations this group, that later became the NCAA, was the legalization of the forward pass.

The forward pass was a risky proposition in those days. The rules stated that incompletions were fumbles and that the ball had to be thrown five yards on either side of the middle of the field. In addition, nobody knew how to properly throw the ball they were using – should it be thrown end-over-end like a kick, or pushed from the shoulder like a shot put? (Actually, these aren’t particularly silly questions to ask – if you think they are, go try to throw a watermelon and then get back to me.)

As the years progressed, however, teams began to embrace the forward pass. The rules continued to be tweaked, allowing incompletions to be simply incompletions, and for the whole field to be open for the passing business.

Writer George H. Brooke, who created a huge spread on the forward pass for the Washington Post at the beginning of the 1906 season, began his explanation of the forward pass with this ghosts-and-mists invocation:

If one could go up in a balloon and get a bird’s-eye view of what is going on in all the football fields in the country, and then, with a magic carpet, drop into all the secret councils of the coaches, he would probably get some original ideas on football that would rather startle him. He might sail out to Michigan and watch Yost, and then he might fly over to Chicago and study Stagg, and then, coming out East, he might visit the big universities and find out what Walter Camp, “Czar” Reid, “Tiger” Cochran, “Quaker” Carl Williams, and the rest are doing.

He would probably discover that all of them were studying out a way to get the most out of the forward pass, which is now allowed. That forward pass will probably do more to revolutionize the game than any other thing in the new rules.

Right he was.

So in all of its forms – from the jump pass of Harry Gilmer to the jump pass of Tim Tebow; from the evil-scientist mind of Pop Warner to the evil-scientist mind of Mike Leach; from SLU quarterback Bradbury Robinson, launcher of the first legal forward pass on September 5, 1906 to Texas Tech quarterback Graham Harrell, who winged 58 of them on Saturday – a hefty dose of Old School Love is in order for the forward pass.