Change. People who live in zones of temperate deciduous forests see it in multicolored leaves, as anthocyanin, xanthophyll, carotene, and tannic acid replace the green of chlorophyll in a seasonal change that coincides with football games. For more than a century, the game has been associated with the season. While Nature has kept the same rules, however, football has changed, and its changes seem to reflect philosophical changes in American society—and maybe world society—that date to the First World War.
Football players used to wear leather helmets. Ouch! Concussions were inevitable, even among smaller and slower players. Although participants might have been smaller, Earth’s size was the same at the beginning of the twentieth century as it is today, so a collision between a leather-shrouded head and the ground had dire consequences. Football players still experience concussions—thus the big controversy about current rules that make defensive secondary men ruin offensive players’ knees rather than their skulls. But protective technology has changed, training has changed, strategies have changed. Collisions with the ground are inevitable, but rules to lessen the effects of human collisions now center on a very open, often pass-dominated game.
Football rules have over the decades fallen like autumn’s leaves, and numerous summers have seen the growth of new rules, initially centered on the nature of the game, but now centered on the nature of society. Are we in an age when we can make rules to lessen the consequences of human collisions?
What kinds of changes to the game have occurred that derived from the nature of the game itself? Centers were originally “snapper-backs.” A century ago, only five men had to be on the line of scrimmage between the goal and the 25-yard line instead of seven players. Before 1906 there were no forward passes, no up-the-middle runs, and no quarter divisions. Forward passes? The rules of 1906 then allowed any player anywhere behind his line of scrimmage to throw a pass to any player on the end of the line as long as the forward pass crossed scrimmage at least five yards from the center. Skirts on quarterbacks? That was Jack Lambert’s complaint about rule changes during the years of the Steel Curtain in Pittsburgh. Well, in 1914 football instituted the first rule to keep the “forward passer” from being “roughed up.”
And then rule changes in the early days of football came to an abrupt halt. War intervened, taking people’s mind off a game and putting it on the destruction and death raging in Europe. Human collisions had dire consequences, including those from unbridled gas attacks that killed and maimed indiscriminately. In his 1921 book The Forward Pass in Football, YMCA’s Coach Elmer Berry makes this comment:
“Relatively little change occurred during the war period and there has been a feeling since that experimentation has gone far enough; that the game is very good as it is, and that coaches, players and the public generally should have a chance to thoroughly acquaint themselves with the present possibilities. The open game has come to stay, and attempts to further restrict it have met with strong opposition.”*
By 1914 the rule changes signaled a significant alteration in American society. They opened up the game, and the chief mechanism for that opening was the forward pass. No longer were football players locked into a scrum. And as international awareness increased both because of WWI and the movement of millions of displaced people, the society had no choice but to be more “open.” We’ve been rather open ever since; thus, modern communication technologies have meant a change in degree, not in kind.
Of course, football has seen numerous small changes in the intervening decades, and those changes have coincided with the expansion of the football audience through radio and TV coverage aided by satellite communications. The Super Bowl might be the longest forward pass of all—the longest of long bombs we can throw—one that reaches people around the planet. Yes, the game has really opened up. We can even watch on Twitter.
And society is used to such long passes. Society has probably opened more than football. The latter still has end zones and sidelines. There seem to be very few boundaries in American society and communication technologies. Maybe football has undergone far few changes in the past century than the society that supports it. Maybe football is actually a conservative changer like Nature with a predictable cyclic coloring of leaves. As for the rest of us? Was Berry prescient in 1921? Remember what he wrote about the game, “The open game has come to stay, and attempts to further restrict it have met with strong opposition.”
*Berry, Elmer, B.S., M.P.E., The Forward Pass in Football, New York, A. S. Barnes and Company, 1921, p. 5.
Football players used to wear leather helmets. Ouch! Concussions were inevitable, even among smaller and slower players. Although participants might have been smaller, Earth’s size was the same at the beginning of the twentieth century as it is today, so a collision between a leather-shrouded head and the ground had dire consequences. Football players still experience concussions—thus the big controversy about current rules that make defensive secondary men ruin offensive players’ knees rather than their skulls. But protective technology has changed, training has changed, strategies have changed. Collisions with the ground are inevitable, but rules to lessen the effects of human collisions now center on a very open, often pass-dominated game.
Football rules have over the decades fallen like autumn’s leaves, and numerous summers have seen the growth of new rules, initially centered on the nature of the game, but now centered on the nature of society. Are we in an age when we can make rules to lessen the consequences of human collisions?
What kinds of changes to the game have occurred that derived from the nature of the game itself? Centers were originally “snapper-backs.” A century ago, only five men had to be on the line of scrimmage between the goal and the 25-yard line instead of seven players. Before 1906 there were no forward passes, no up-the-middle runs, and no quarter divisions. Forward passes? The rules of 1906 then allowed any player anywhere behind his line of scrimmage to throw a pass to any player on the end of the line as long as the forward pass crossed scrimmage at least five yards from the center. Skirts on quarterbacks? That was Jack Lambert’s complaint about rule changes during the years of the Steel Curtain in Pittsburgh. Well, in 1914 football instituted the first rule to keep the “forward passer” from being “roughed up.”
And then rule changes in the early days of football came to an abrupt halt. War intervened, taking people’s mind off a game and putting it on the destruction and death raging in Europe. Human collisions had dire consequences, including those from unbridled gas attacks that killed and maimed indiscriminately. In his 1921 book The Forward Pass in Football, YMCA’s Coach Elmer Berry makes this comment:
“Relatively little change occurred during the war period and there has been a feeling since that experimentation has gone far enough; that the game is very good as it is, and that coaches, players and the public generally should have a chance to thoroughly acquaint themselves with the present possibilities. The open game has come to stay, and attempts to further restrict it have met with strong opposition.”*
By 1914 the rule changes signaled a significant alteration in American society. They opened up the game, and the chief mechanism for that opening was the forward pass. No longer were football players locked into a scrum. And as international awareness increased both because of WWI and the movement of millions of displaced people, the society had no choice but to be more “open.” We’ve been rather open ever since; thus, modern communication technologies have meant a change in degree, not in kind.
Of course, football has seen numerous small changes in the intervening decades, and those changes have coincided with the expansion of the football audience through radio and TV coverage aided by satellite communications. The Super Bowl might be the longest forward pass of all—the longest of long bombs we can throw—one that reaches people around the planet. Yes, the game has really opened up. We can even watch on Twitter.
And society is used to such long passes. Society has probably opened more than football. The latter still has end zones and sidelines. There seem to be very few boundaries in American society and communication technologies. Maybe football has undergone far few changes in the past century than the society that supports it. Maybe football is actually a conservative changer like Nature with a predictable cyclic coloring of leaves. As for the rest of us? Was Berry prescient in 1921? Remember what he wrote about the game, “The open game has come to stay, and attempts to further restrict it have met with strong opposition.”
*Berry, Elmer, B.S., M.P.E., The Forward Pass in Football, New York, A. S. Barnes and Company, 1921, p. 5.
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