The Opening Kickoff

by Dave Revsine

  The revelation led to a series of athletic meetings in New Haven. Speaking before a gathering of alums in New York just two days after the slush-fund story broke, President Hadley promised that a group was looking into ways of “cutting off unnecessary expense,” though he seemed shockingly oblivious to some of the broader issues the sport was facing. “Football has, among all major sports, the double advantage of being the most democratic and the least dangerous,” Hadley told the group, less than two months after the end of a season that had seen nearly twenty men killed on the gridiron. He continued, “At Yale we have had no deaths from football, and, to my knowledge, no grave permanent injuries. This shows that hard football is not necessarily attended with overwhelming physical danger.”

  Hadley was clearly on Camp’s side, joining with his coach in resisting massive alterations of the playing rules. In a February letter to Camp, he advised his athletic advisor to cooperate with the new committee on some of its broader reforms. “We should take a position about eligibility which the public will approve,” Hadley wrote. “Then we can deal with the matter of rules as we please.” Evidently, Hadley, like Camp, was most concerned with continuing Yale’s winning ways.

  And while it seems fair to commend Harvard’s reform-minded stance, there were certainly those who believed they too were operating out of self-interest. Penn’s athletic trainer, Michael Murphy, a friend of Camp, wrote that “Harvard would not play any more football under Camp’s Rules, they are sick of being licked and want a change of any kind.” He concluded that the Cambridge school was “playing the baby as usual and ought to be spanked this time.”

  Whatever its motivation, Harvard helped push through a sweeping set of reforms. The newly combined rules committee met six times between early January and mid-April of 1906. They emerged with a new rule book that promised to dramatically change the nature of the game. The yardage needed for a first down was increased from five to ten yards. Runners were now considered down when any part of their body other than their hand or their foot hit the ground. A neutral zone, which neither team could cross before the snap of the ball, was established between the linemen. Stricter definitions were adopted regarding personal fouls, unnecessary roughness, and unsportsmanlike conduct. And, finally, the forward pass was now permitted, though with severe limitations: It had to be made at least five yards to the side of the center, passes could not cross the goal line, and an incomplete pass resulted in a turnover.

  Harvard, Yale, and Princeton also worked out a new series of eligibility rules. “The main purpose of these rules,” the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine wrote in June 1906, “is to limit participation in intercollegiate sports to undergraduates in regular academic standing and to shut out the men who come to college solely to engage in athletics.” The new rules barred graduate students and freshmen from participating in intercollegiate sports, thus limiting eligibility to three years total. The changes were deemed satisfactory by Harvard. The university’s Board of Overseers voted in early May to allow football to continue at the school.

  The schools of the Western Conference went through a concurrent crisis. In early January the Wisconsin faculty elected outspoken football critic Frederick Jackson Turner to represent their group at a meeting of Midwestern schools to be held in Chicago. The faculty asked Turner to propose a two-year suspension of intercollegiate games, “to the end that rational, moral, and normal relations between athletics and intellectual activities may develop in each institution.” They had a good spokesman in Turner, who in early January told a group of alums that football had “become a business, carried on far too often by professionals supported by levies on the public, bringing in vast gate receipts, demoralizing student ethics, and confusing the ideals of sport, manliness, and decency.”

  Though Turner’s suggestion of a two-year ban on the game failed to gather support, the schools did push through a series of reforms that fundamentally changed the nature of the competition in the Midwest. In January they adopted a new eligibility code that became the basis for the later agreement between Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. They also limited the number of intercollegiate games to five per season, banned preseason practice, capped the cost of student and faculty tickets at fifty cents, and mandated that the season must end before Thanksgiving. In addition, nonfaculty members were prohibited from coaching their teams, though those already under contract, including Michigan’s Yost, were grandfathered in.

  Though massive in scope, the reforms were not enough for Northwestern, which suspended the sport in March. The fear in Madison was that Wisconsin might do the same, and the school’s students reacted with violence. On the evening of March 27, 1906, a group of protestors, armed with rifles and revolvers, marched through town shouting “death to the faculty!” When they arrived at Turner’s home, the noted historian walked out onto his porch, where he was greeted with hisses.

  “When can we have football?” a student yelled.

  “When you can have a clean game,” Turner replied. “It’s been so rotten for the last ten years that it is impossible to purge it.” Before the night was over, the angry mob burned effigies of Turner and two other Wisconsin professors. After a protracted series of meetings, Turner eventually helped broker a compromise to keep the sport. The agreement came at a price, though. The biggest matches—battles with Chicago, Minnesota, and Michigan—were all canceled.

  The attempts to overhaul the game got mixed reviews. The Yale Daily News, for instance, lampooned the changes. In the new sport, it said, the ground should be as soft as possible and covered by a red carpet, tickets should cost whatever spectators want to pay, fans should stay quiet in the stands, and “the time between halves should be devoted to tests in high class literature.” In this new farcical football world, players would need at least an 85 percent classroom average to be eligible, and, if they were carrying more than two dollars, they would be disqualified as professionals. All tackles, the article concluded, would be preceded by the waving of a flag and the statement, “Tweedledum, tweedledee, I now tackle thee.”

  But most people recognized the changes for what they were—an honest effort to save a troubled sport. “We have endeavored to reform the game in earnest and adopt measures which will prevent the continuance of the old grinding game,” Reid said as the 1906 season loomed. “If the game does not stand the test it will be rooted out completely at Harvard and elsewhere.”

  That test proved to be a lengthy and difficult one.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Football’s New Rules

  Three hundred cadets stood in silence, their gray army uniforms mirroring the mood in the late morning of November 2, 1909. More than a thousand more men, women, and children congregated with them. They couldn’t hear the service going on inside the tiny Catholic chapel on the gorgeous grounds of the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, so they simply stood and waited. An empty artillery caisson drawn by seven horses waited nearby. The West Point band, instruments in hand, lingered alongside.

  For nearly an hour, they waited. Then, just before noon, the church door opened. A single cadet emerged carrying a shield-shaped arrangement of red, white, and blue flowers. He placed it gently on the wagon. That was the cue for the band, which began playing the somber hymn “Nearer My God to Thee.”

  Moments later, seven cadets emerged through the doorway, eyes red with tears, together bearing a coffin as some in the gathering quietly sang the poignant words.

  Though like the wanderer, the sun gone down,

  Darkness be over me, my rest a stone;

  Yet in my dreams I’d be nearer, my God, to Thee

  They lifted the casket onto the caisson and carefully strapped it down. The horses were urged slowly forward, and the wagon rolled down the steep hill toward the academy’s famed cemetery, carrying 21-year-old Cadet Eugene Alexis Byrne to his final resting place.

  Just four days earlier, Byrne had been playi
ng left tackle for Army in a game against Harvard in front of 10,000 fans, the largest crowd ever to witness a game at West Point. The Crimson pounded the ball straight at him throughout the game, building a 9–0 lead, and the merciless smashes began to take their toll in the final ten minutes of play. Byrne was briefly shaken up after making a tackle on a short gain by Harvard, but he stayed in the action. On the next play, Crimson fullback Wayland Minot took a handoff and followed the blocks of tackle Hamilton Fish and guard Robert Fisher, who crushed Byrne between them. The players all ended up in a pile just beyond the line of scrimmage.

  As the men untangled, Minot and Byrne remained down. Trainers from both sides rushed onto the field. Minot eventually sat up, invigorated by a dousing of water on his face. Byrne didn’t move. He was rolled off the field on a cot and died fourteen hours later. Posthumous X-rays revealed two crushed vertebrae.

  Byrne’s death came just two weeks after a similar tragedy had befallen rival Navy. Midshipman Earl Wilson injured his spine in a loss to Villanova. He fought valiantly for six months before passing away in April. Two weeks after Byrne’s injury, Virginia fullback Archer Christian was killed in a game against Georgetown. In all, twenty-six players died from football-related injuries in 1909, ten of them college players. The death total was double the number that had perished just a year earlier.

  The new rules of 1906 had led to a temporary decrease in casualties and a brief sense that football had emerged from its crisis. Caspar Whitney called the 1906 season “the most satisfactory year I have known in football,” while Walter Camp basked in “the reinstatement of Foot Ball in popular favor.” Even one of the game’s harshest critics, Harvard president Charles Eliot, begrudgingly admitted, “the game of football was somewhat improved by the new rules.”

  But in truth, the game hadn’t changed very dramatically. The forward pass proved unpopular as an offensive strategy, due in large part to the fact that an incompletion resulted in a turnover. A few scattered coaches embraced the new tactics. St. Louis University’s Edward Cochems, a former teammate of Pat O’Dea at Wisconsin, was particularly innovative, designing plays he termed the “Parabola Pass” and the catchy “Overhead Projectile Spiral Pass.” When Iowa beat Illinois 25–12 in November of 1907, the Chicago Tribune attributed the win to “a remarkable development of the forward pass.” The Illini showed mastery of the new approach the next season, as quarterback “Pom” Sinnock completed fourteen of seventeen passes in a 64–8 drubbing of Northwestern’s newly reinstated team.

  But most of the Eastern powers continued to play the game much like they had before, pushing and pulling runners through the line, a strategy that remained legal and, particularly against lighter and less talented opponents, largely effective. As evidenced by the 1909 fatalities, it was also quite dangerous.

  As it had when the crisis began in 1905, the press attacked the game vigorously. “After three such accidents to experienced and skillful players in the ‘leading teams’ the public has the right to demand that football be abolished or completely reformed forthwith,” the New York Times proclaimed in an editorial, published just days after Christian’s fatal injury. The paper noted that presidents of the affected universities were quick to cancel the season after one of their players perished, but that the leaders of the other schools were blind “to the greater propriety of canceling all games before the next boy is killed.”

  Two Harvard athletic coaches expressed their dismay at the ongoing carnage. “I believe that the new rules did little or nothing toward making the game clean,” crew coach James Wray told the Times. “I think that Byrne’s death and Wilson’s fatal injury will prove the undoing of the game unless further modified.” Track coach W. E. Quinn echoed that sentiment, saying in the days after Byrne’s death, “The accident is the last straw. Football, to my mind, is henceforth a doomed sport.”

  Even amid the latest crisis, there was resistance among the old guard. Walter Camp’s Yale team was coming off a 10–0 season, which had seen the Elis outscore their opponents 209–0. As proposals to further reform the game circulated in the off-season, Princeton’s athletic advisor, Bill Roper, complained to university (and future US) president Woodrow Wilson that Camp was, once again, far more concerned with his own self-interest than that of the sport as a whole. “Mr. Camp is violently opposed to the new rules,” Roper wrote, “because Yale’s style of play is practically destroyed, there being no further pushing and pulling of the runner.” It got to the point, though, where there was little Camp could do to block further reform. “We have certainly got to do something, Walter,” his old friend and longtime ally Amos Alonzo Stagg wrote, “for the season has been a mighty bad one for a number of individuals as well as for the game.”

  Over the subsequent four months, the rules committee met repeatedly with a goal of again overhauling football. The results of those meetings ushered the game into the modern era. The new rules essentially outlawed mass plays, requiring seven offensive players to be positioned on the line of scrimmage and prohibiting the pushing and pulling of ball carriers. The quarterback was now allowed to carry the ball across the line of scrimmage at any point.

  But the most significant alterations surrounded the forward pass. Balls could now be thrown over the line of scrimmage at any point, rather than the previously mandated five yards to the left or right of the snapper. In addition, the rules eliminated the penal aspects of the incomplete forward pass, which had initially resulted in a turnover and had subsequently been changed to a 15-yard penalty. An incomplete pass now simply counted as a down. The new rules promised to open up the game dramatically. Not everyone was pleased with these developments. Though he was a member of the committee that had drawn them up, Walter Camp refused to sign the new rules.

  The committee made more tweaks over the next few years. The dimensions of the field were changed to their modern configuration with the addition of 10-yard-deep end zones and the reduction of the distance between the goal lines from 110 to 100 yards. Passes over the goal line, which were previously prohibited, were legalized. The size of the ball was reduced as well, as a means of further facilitating the passing game. While the sport would obviously undergo many changes over the next hundred years, the football played in 1913 would be instantly recognizable to today’s fans.

  The possibilities of the new rules were on full display on November 1, 1913. That afternoon’s matchup at West Point between Notre Dame and Army didn’t figure to be a revolutionary one. Notre Dame was in its first season under new coach Jesse Harper, who had played for Stagg at Chicago, serving as the backup to quarterback Walter Eckersall. Though his new school hadn’t lost a game since 1910, its schedule hardly inspired fear—looking largely similar to the one it had played at the turn of the century, when Pat O’Dea had coached in South Bend. Notre Dame’s opponents in 1912 had included mostly tiny regional colleges: Adrian, Morris Harvey, St. Viator, and a Wabash College team coached by Harper.

  Those foes generated little excitement on campus, and as a result, Notre Dame’s attendance and cash flow were underwhelming. Harper immediately set out to upgrade the schedule, sending notes to a number of higher profile schools hoping to secure a game.

  Somewhat surprisingly, he got a positive response from Army. The Cadets continued to occupy a spot in the second tier of the Eastern football hierarchy. They were certainly not a powerhouse. The week before Notre Dame showed up, they had managed only a safety in a narrow shutout win over Tufts. They had dropped three games the year before, including a shocking 27–6 defeat against Carlisle, a game in which the Indians’ remarkable Jim Thorpe, in the words of the New York Times, “simply ran wild.” But Army would be a clear step up in competition for the small Catholic school from northern Indiana. The academy’s student manager, Dan Sultan, who scheduled the game, recalled afterward that he had agreed to the contest because he felt the Cadets “needed a breather” before their game against Navy. They promised Notre Dame $1,000 fo
r its troubles.

  It was hardly an impressive group that rolled into West Point. Due to the severely limited storage space on the train, many of the men wore their uniforms under their coats. Each player was forced to carry his own equipment. They dined on sandwiches packed by the nuns in the university cafeteria. Future Irish coaching legend Knute Rockne, a player on the 1913 team, recalled: “Our only extra equipment was a roll of tape, a jug of liniment and a bottle of iodine.”

  What the Notre Dame team lacked in style, it more than made up for in substance. Rockne, a talented end, and quarterback Gus Dorais had worked that summer at Cedar Point, a resort town in Ohio. They spent their spare time at the beach trying to perfect the passing game. “I’d run along the beach,” Rockne remembered, and “Dorais would throw from all angles. People who didn’t know we were two college seniors making painstaking preparations for our final season probably thought we were crazy.”

  Those skills they honed over the summer were perfected in Harper’s practices. “The pass plays were rehearsed for weeks by the entire squad,” Harper recalled. Careful observers knew this was a better Notre Dame team than they were getting credit for. “There are many who believe the South Bend aggregation will walk off the field a winner,” the Chicago Tribune reported. “The Westerners are expected to flash an open field attack,” the New York Times wrote, “and the Cadets are wondering what it consists of.”

  They found out soon enough. Late in the first quarter, in a scoreless game, Dorais faded back to pass and hit Rockne in stride at the Army two-yard line. He waltzed into the end zone for the first touchdown of the game, a play variously reported at between 25 and 40 yards. “Everyone seemed astonished,” Rockne recalled. “There had been no hurdling, no tackling, no plunging, no crushing of fiber and sinew. Just a long-distance touchdown by rapid transit.”