From "Out of Bounds"

This month's edition of Out of Bounds will feature vignettes about Notre Dame football, 1880's style.

Standardized scoring began in 1883. It allowed two points for a touchdown, four for a point after (that's no misprint), and two for a safety. A year later, the awards for a TD and PAT were reversed. Field goals were worth five.

The early game consisted of two thirty minute "innings." Sixty minutes of action, quartered, did not begin until 1909. Originally, the offense was given three downs to either gain ten yards or lose five...you figure it. By 1912, teams had the familiar four downs for ten yards, and scoring values were identical to today's (except for the two-point conversion, which showed up in 1957). By the way, it was not unusual for teams to mutually agree on a reduction of game time if one squad had to catch an early train home, or if the contest was an obvious mismatch.

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When Mike Daly booted Notre Dame's first field goal on November 6, 1897, more than one of the opposing Chicago Maroons had no idea what was happening. It was the first "Princeton style" place kick west of Pennsylvania.

The game seems so immutable to us now. Back then football changed with the seasons. Rules were dropped or added or switched around. Everyone felt free to tinker; the growing game fed on the energy of innovation.

Let's backtrack a bit. Most historians pin a birthdate of 1869 on the grand old game, but football in those days was little more than rugby gone wild. European rules were ignored; American rules did not exist.

The true dawn of modern football came in 1880 when Yale's Walter Camp introduced a game that featured a scrimmage with undisputed ball possession. This eliminated the scrum, which resembled a can-can line turning against itself, the players bowing in a big circle and kicking at the ball and each other's shins while pushing in the general direction of the opponent's goal line. Camp's new rules freed a team to plan and occasionally even execute an attack, instead of depending on a haphazard mad dash for the goal line when the ball finally popped out of the scrum. Camp also limited the number of players to eleven on a side. Schools had been playing with anywhere from thirty to fifty to one hundred on the field at once, the contests looking like strange and dangerous Easter egg hunts.

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Wedge plays were common in those early days. The offensive team closed in tightly around the ball carrier, arranging themselves like bowling pins. Each man grabbed the waist of the man in front and shoved, and the human battering ram was on its way.

The defense usually stopped the wedge by choosing a human sacrifice who would, willy-nilly, toss himself in front of the lead blocker and pile up the play. At least that was the idea. Even when it worked, a stalled wedge was no problem. The ball carrier was simply hoisted and hurled over the line. Keep in mind, these guys were doing all this to relax and have fun.

Near the turn of the century, chunky tackles and guards started to slip into the backfield, beefing up the wedge and giving the attack more of a knockout punch. This was all going on in the days of mass momentum - players started running before the ball was hiked.
Sound dangerous? It was. There were eighteen deaths and almost one hundred and fifty serious injuries in the 1905 season alone. By 1910, the wedge, flying block and tackle, and other literally bone-crushing plays had been legislated out of existence.

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