The forward pass was a mistake. Not because there is no reasonable justification for having a forward pass in the game of football. Rather, it is a mistake because the arc of history demonstrates that we as a people can never limit the forward pass to its justifications—to the detriment of the essential nature of the sport.
The Justification for the Forward Pass
In the beginning, there was football. Not association football (soccer), not rugby union football, not gridiron (American and Canadian) football. Just the primordial ball game where Team A tries to get the ball to one end of the field at the same time Team B tries to do so in the other direction. See generally, Christopher Rowley, The Shared Origins of Football, Rugby, and Soccer (2015). But this proto-football was nasty, brutish, and short. As you can imagine, when a game has no rules other than the simple objective of get the ball from A to B, eventually every player tackles the ball carrier and play devolves into a pile of humanity pushing and fighting each other with the ball somewhere in the middle.
All football codes—soccer, rugby, and gridiron, to name a few—are rules to try to solve the same problem: what do you do when there is that mass of humanity on top of the ball? In soccer, the solution is to prevent the mass in the first place by not allowing players to carry the ball and severely restricting the manner which players can tackle. In rugby, the solution is the ruck: play continues, but the tackled player must release the ball and there are limits on how players can approach the contested ball. In gridiron (which I will just call “football” for the rest of this), the solution is the down-and-distance system: after the ball carrier is taken “down”, there is no contest of possession and play continues from that line of scrimmage with the same team maintaining possession; however, the offense must go a certain distance in a certain number of downs to earn a new set of downs, otherwise the opposing team gets the ball. It is this down-and-distance system that makes football different from its cousins. And of course, as part of the “foot”ball tradition, kicking the ball forward to gain territory was always permissible.
The problem is that even with the down-and-distance system, early football was still too violent. For one thing, the prohibition on “unnecessary roughness” was treated as a tentative recommendation against killing other players in view of a referee rather than a meaningful penalty to prevent intentional harm to other players. Basically football around the turn of the century was a bunch of Vontaze Burficts coached by Gregg Williamses:
“You put him out [with a collarbone injury on the first snap of the game] because he is a black man.”
“We didn’t put him out because he is a black man,” [Princeton quarter-back] Burke replied with indignation. “We’re coached to pick out the most dangerous man on the opposing team and put him out in the first five minutes of play.”
Henry Beach Needham, The College Athlete: His Amateur Code*: Its Evasion and Administration: Part II—”Summer Ball,” The Gate-Money Evil, and “Unnecessary Roughness” in Football, McClure’s Magazine, Vol. 25:3, pp.260–272 (1905-07)
In addition to the unpenalized assaults on the field, the rules of football did not prohibit dangerous mass plays relying on joint momentum. The most successful football play design, in this or any other era, was the flying wedge: the offense, with a running start before the ball is put in play (the “flying”), forms a mass surrounding the ball carrier so as to prevent anyone from tackling him, with each player holding on to his teammates on either side (the “wedge”). See, e.g., Richard Hershberger, The Flying Wedge: The Greatest Play in Football, Ordinary Times (2015-09-14). Imagine being the brave defensive back tasked with throwing his body into an oncoming ‘V’ of football players running at full steam. These sort of mass plays were so successful at moving the ball downfield that “[t]he problem wasn’t too many injuries. It was too many fatalities.” Id. In the 1905 season, there were about 19 reported deaths, along with 137 injuries from “accidents out of the ordinary.” Football Year’s Death Harvest, The Chicago Tribune (1905-11-26) (publishing telegram from Chicago Tribune to President Theodore Roosevelt).
These fatalities and episodes of unnecessary roughness, along with the familiar-to-a-modern-ear criticisms of professionalization of amateur sports and the overshadowing of college education by college football (see generally, e.g., Henry Beach Needham, The College Athlete: How Commercialism Is Making Him A Professional: Part I—Recruiting and Subsidizing, McClure’s Magazine, Vol. 25:2, pp.115–128 (1905-06)), culminated in what is now known as the Football Crisis of 1905. See, e.g., Ronald A. Smith, Harvard and Columbia and a Reconsideration of the 1905-06 Football Crisis, Journal of Sport History, Vol. 8:3, pp.5-19 (1981-Winter). Influential figures in universities advocated for abolition of the sport, and achieved some successes. Columbia dropped football, and even powerhouse Harvard voted to do the same before eventually reversing its decision. The two Pacific powers Stanford and Cal switched to rugby to continue their rivalry series. See, e.g., Roberta J. Park, From Football to Rugby—and Back, 1906-1919: The University of California-Stanford University Response to the “Football Crisis of 1905”, Journal of Sport History, Vol. 11:3, pp.5–40 (1984-Winter). Clearly, change was needed.
One man who sought to broker that change happened to be the nation’s most prominent champion of football as a noble and masculine pursuit for young men: Teddy Roosevelt. See, e.g., John S. Watterson, Political Football: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and the Gridiron Reform Movement, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 25:3, pp.555–564 (1995-Summer); Christopher Klein, How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football, History (updated 2019-07-21). In October 1905, Roosevelt hosted representatives from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—the three Eastern powers in football—along with six football experts like Walter Camp to discuss reform. Watterson, Political Football, 25 Presidential Studies Quarterly at 560.
While this meeting did not spawn significant reforms, a similar series of meetings that did effect change were called in December 1905 by the chancellor of New York University after a Union College player died in a Union-NYU game. Id. These New York conference meetings, attended by more than sixty schools spawned two significant developments. First, these efforts eventually lead to the formation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association—later renamed the National Collegiate Athletic Association—which would come to be the major self-governing body of college football and police the sport’s amateurism concerns. See, e.g., Rodney K. Smith, A Brief History of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Role in Regulating Intercollegiate Athletics, Marquette Sports Law Review, Vol. 11:1, pp.9–22 at 12 (2000-Fall). Second, the rules committee from these meetings adopted several changes “to create a more open game”, including: the creation of the neutral zone; the banning of flying wedge plays (which is why today we have illegal motion and illegal formation penalties); increasing the distance required to get a new set of downs to 10 yards from 5 yards; and, most controversially, the legalization of the forward pass. See, e.g., Jim Morrison, The Early History of Football’s Forward Pass, Smithsonian Magazine (2010-12-28).
It might be hard today to understand people’s reticence toward the forward pass. Try to bottle your reaction to the idea of implementing a double forward pass in football today. The forward pass was essentially viewed as a gadget play that inferior teams would use but that real football teams wouldn’t because it wasn’t football. Reformers like Roosevelt were incredibly worried that reforms would “emasculate football” and the sport would be played “on too ladylike a basis.” Klein, How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football. As a result, the forward pass was severally penalized in the 1906 season (for example, an incomplete pass that didn’t touch a player on either team resulted in a turnover), with many of the harsher restrictions being lifted a year later. See, e.g., Brian Meehl, Dateline 1906: The Forward Pass Will Ruin Football!, Blowback Trilogy (2016-09-17)
The American collegian, whether player or spectator, does not care for a game in which the element of chance is paramount. He likes to see or play a game where hard work counts, and a game where definite planning secures a well-appreciated result. For this reason he does not care for the unlimited forward pass, which can now be tried without severe penalty on first and second down. Throwing the ball around indiscriminately may be the last resort of a weak or inferior team, and as such is unsatisfactory.
Walter Camp Favors Restriction of Forward Pass, The Harvard Crimson (1907-12-04) (printing letter from Walter Camp after the first couple seasons of the legal forward pass)
Indeed, the forward pass was first adopted and developed by a major underdog: the Carlisle Indians. (The Carlisle “Indians” weren’t like the Stanford “Indians”; they represented the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an off-reservation boarding school for Indians that attempted to Americanize them along the lines of “Kill the Indian: Save the Man.” Worthy of researching further totally unrelated to football. See generally Sally Jenkins, The Real All Americans (2008); Ghosts of Football Past, Radiolab (2015-01-29).) Coached by Pop Warner (yes, that Pop Warner; pictured in cover photo), Carlisle successfully employed the forward pass in 1907 to stun Penn. Carlisle—with All-American and future Olympian Jim Thorpe—also upset Harvard on its way to an 11-1 record in 1911, and beat Army—with future president Dwight D. Eisenhower—in 1912. When rising Middle West power Notre Dame (and then-player Knute Rockne) used the passing attack regularly in its 35-13 upset of Army in 1913, it was clear that the forward pass in football was here to stay.
But at what cost?
Approaching The Leviathan
A quick political analogy. The U.S. Constitution establishes three branches of the federal government: the Legislature, the Executive, and the Judiciary. The conventional wisdom is that the Founders viewed Congress (Article I) as the most powerful branch of government and that the President (Article II) was less powerful—at least in domestic affairs. See, e.g., Glenn Sulmasy, Executive Power: The Last Thirty Years, University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, Vol. 30:4, pp.1355–1366 at 1356 (2009) (discussing power of the President in foreign affairs). Certainly, the framers of the Constitution did not embrace an absolute monarch so soon after the Revolutionary War: one of the debates in the Second Congress was whether it was within the Executive Power of the President to choose which Post Offices and Post Roads to build or whether Congress had to specify the placing of offices and roads itself. See, e.g., “Post Office and Post Roads, [7 December] 1791,” Founders Online, National Archives. Fast forward to today, and the President of the United States can effectively unilaterally legislate on domestic matters of tremendous political salience (including environmental policy and basically any federal funds programs) without input from Congress and can even decide to wage war in any country across the globe until Congress bothers to say otherwise. There are many reasons for this expansion of Presidential power (see, e.g., William P. Marshall, Eleven Reasons Why Presidential Power Inevitably Expands and Why It Matters, Boston University Law Review, Vol. 88, pp.505–522 (2008)), but chief among them in my opinion is the rise of the administrative state. Through the ever-growing machine of agencies and bureaus, I fear that the President approaches the absolute sovereign from Hobbes’ Leviathan—a far cry from the original order. See generally Cass R. Sunstein & Adrian Vermeule, Law and the Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State (2020).
So too with the forward pass. Football’s founding period left a clear but limited justification for the forward pass: player safety. But the forward pass has outgrown its loose restraints. In the NFL particularly, rule changes have been made to encourage passing to make the game more “exciting” and to give offenses the edge over defenses. See generally, How Offense Took Over the N.F.L., The New York Times (2019-01-19). There is no analysis today of whether encouraging passing over running makes the game safer for players. And there are reasons to think that passing play—where wide receivers and defensive backs are running with a full head of steam toward each other in the open field, only with the receiver’s eyes on the ball—are more dangerous than running plays. Just look at these compilations of hospital passes in football. It is telling that both the NCAA’s (Rule 2, § 27, art. 14) and NFL’s (Rule 12, § 2, art. 9) definition of “defenseless player” begin with 1) a passer who just threw as pass and 2) a receiver who just caught a pass.
Without the safety justification tethering the forward pass, there is nothing stopping football from evolving into a glorified game of 500 except for the concerns of purists, like Roosevelt over 100 year ago, who don’t want to “emasculate the game.” Given the evident trend in the sport today and the modern’s audience desire for points and scoring above all else, I fear this concern is not strong enough to prevent that Leviathan. And when the Leviathan finally materializes and football dies, I predict that it will be greeted with thunderous applause.
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