The focal point of this podcast revolves around the intriguing discussion with Timothy Brown of FootballArchaeology.com regarding the role of referees in awarding points within the game of football. During our conversation, we delve into the historical context and specific instances where referees have exercised their judgment to allocate points, often in response to unique situations that have arisen during gameplay. We explore various examples, including the establishment of rules that emerged from notable incidents, thereby illuminating the evolution of officiating in American football. Additionally, we consider the broader implications of referee decisions on the fairness and integrity of the game. Join us as we navigate through these significant insights into the often-overlooked responsibilities of officials and the historical ramifications of their rulings.

This chat is inspired by Tim's recent Tidbit: Referees Awarding Points - https://www.footballarchaeology.com/p/todays-tidbit-referees-awarding-points

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Miss our football by the day of the year podcasts, well don't, because they can still be found at the Pigskin Dispatch website.

We have a big show coming up tonight.

We're going to be talking to Timothy Brown of FootballArchaeology.com about the referees and the point system.

Tim's up in a moment to tell.

Us all about it.

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history.

Your host, Darren Hayes is podcasting from America's North Shore to bring you the.

Memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your poor little positive football history.

And welcome to Tuesday, it's footballarchaeology.com day.

Timothy P.

Brown of that great site is with us.

Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey there.

Good to see you as always and looking forward to making a few points tonight.

Well, you're, you're scoring points already because you're, you're segueing into one of your tidbits that you wrote recently titled Referees Awarding Points.

Now.

Great, great words in that three word title.

You know, Referee.

Great word points.

That's, that's great.

And awarding, you know, it's very, very positive.

I like this upbeat title you have.

Yeah, I like to, you know, uplift people.

That's kind of who I am.

That's what I'm about.

So, so let's spread the news, huh?

There's something uplifting, but I have to get boots on to.

Yeah, so.

So it's, it's one of those things, you know, people don't think about, but, you know, it's one of those weird things that I do, you know, from time to time.

But you don't think about the fact that football has some situations where the officials and the referee specifically can award points to, to one team or another that's on the field.

I mean, it's not quite like a Bach in baseball, but, you know, it's something along those.

Well, you know, so if bases were loaded and you call a block, you've just awarded a point, Right?

So, you know, there's something akin.

But in football, the first one that I'm aware of where that was the case.

Germanville, Germantown Academy and somebody else.

And so like Haverford or something.

Anyways, they, they had an instance where somebody threw a, it was actually an illegal forward pass, if I'm remembering correctly.

But one way or another, the player on the one team was behind the goal line and committed a penalty.

And so the referee ruled it a safety.

And that actually wasn't in the rules at the time, but he said, okay, basically this is what happened.

I'm going to award a safety.

And so, boom, two points.

Now, it just so happened that, you know, some of the people who lived in the area were or.

And whose kids I think maybe even attended the schools were.

It wasn't the NCAA yet, but they were rules committee members.

And so they put in the rules that if you commit a penalty while your team is behind your own goal line, that's a safety.

And so, you know, and that's been the case in one, you know, I mean, it's changed a little bit, I think, here and there, but basically that rule's been in effect ever since.

And.

But it.

That's one of those where a specific incident.

Incident led, demonstrated there was a hole in the rule.

So they plugged the hole, right?

And they said, here's what, you know, here's what it is.

Moving on.

So then, then a.

A reader raised the point.

You know, he asked me a question about.

Is going for the extra point and a penalty is committed, and they either award the point or the team, they award the point if the penalty is on the defense or if the offense committed the penalty, then they lose the opportunity for the extra point.

So rather than forcing the yardage penalty as normal, it was like, yeah, well, that was the rule.

When they first added the opportunity to run or pass for the extra point, not just kick it, they added that as a rule.

And, and so whether you kick, kick past.

Past a rin.

If there was penalty, that decided it one way or the other.

So.

So it's just one of those things that it only lasted for a little bit, but because he asked that question, then I was like, okay, well, what, what were the other instances of that?

So, so another one was that, you know, the safety behind the goal line, which, you know, continues to this day.

And then there are.

There are two others.

So one is if.

Let's just say it's towards the end of the game.

And you're close to scoring and the clock's running.

If the other, the other team can't just deliberately commit penalties to, to keep the clock.

You know, this is kind of a goofy situation, but it, you know, it can happen.

And if you deliberate.

So basically the officials have the opportunity to award points if a team delays, deliberately delays the game in by, you know, committing one penalty after another.

So that was, you know, that's kind of an interesting one, but it's a judgment call, right?

You know, at what point do you say, oh, that's enough.

And then.

But the other one, which is an interesting one, is what's called unfair acts.

And that's one where the, the NFL, NFL and NCAA both have them.

They have slightly different terminology, but the principle is that the rules don't cover everything.

So there may be things that pop up during a game that, that happen.

And the referee has the power to make any judgment, any ruling that he deems necessary in the interest of fairness.

And they can call games, you know, they can call forfeits, you know, things like that, but they can also award points.

And so the classic example, and it's happened multiple times is, and I'll do a tidbit, separate tidbit on this in the not too distant future, but there are instances where some guy breaks free, he's running along the sideline, going to go for the score to win the game, or, you know, at least put his team up, you know, in a dominating position and some substitute on the bench, and in other cases, even fans have run out onto the field and tackled the player.

And so what do you do in that case?

Right?

You know, and in that case, football didn't have a rule to handle that.

But the referee was, he was leaning towards saying, I'm giving the points to Great Lakes after being, you know, the guy from Navy tackled him.

But he, that decision got a lot easier when the commandant of the Naval Academy came onto the field and said, I don't care what the rule is, you're giving them the points.

Right?

So he was making sure his team didn't commit, you know, this get away with this unfair act.

So.

Which was pretty cool, actually.

So anyways, that's, you know, that's again, it's happened multiple times but it's, that's an instance where the referee can say, had this not happened, this unfair act, you know, team A would have scored on team B.

And so that becomes the third way that I'm aware of anyways where, you know, the, the officials can award points.

I've got another one for you too.

Really?

Yeah.

And I, I'm pretty sure I'm correct on this.

I know it's a high school rule and I think it's a college rule too.

If you have a team that doesn't have enough players, if somebody gets disqualified or injured in the middle of the game, doesn't matter what the score is and they have to end the game in a forfeiture, the score will go down as two nothing to the team that still had things.

So you're technically, if it's a 00 game or they could be taking away points, if it's, you know, 21 to 7 or something, it could be a two nothing game to end it.

So.

But yeah, I, I have never, in 27 years of officiating, I, I've, I've read quite a bit in a case books that you're saying, you know, the, the application of, you know, the referee in his judgment can have anything that's not covered by the rules.

I've never seen it for scoring points.

I've never been on a game where that's happened.

I've had other instances where you had to make some rulings.

I did some myself.

And it's, it's never a pleasant thing because somebody's mad because it's not in the rule book.

And you, yeah, you got a lot, a lot of explaining to do, you know, later.

Do you remember any, any specific instances?

Well, I had a team come out, this is probably about 15 years ago, and it's right when teams, the college teams were starting to wear off colors.

You remember it was always like your darks were dark and your whites were white.

Yeah.

Well, I had a home team warm up and navy blue shirts.

The other team was in white.

All in white.

And they went in right before the game started.

They go, you know, they always go back in the locker room for a few minutes, they come out and all light gray.

So you have the home team in light gray and a dark helmet, the way team and a dark helmet, all white.

And you had to.

And it's like the biggest high school game in this area every year.

It's the two biggest schools by far in our area.

And it's, you know, you know, 7,500 people in a stadium and you have to make a decision.

And so, so I had to rule on that.

And I had another time where I had a team that was getting in a first.

So you told them, go, go back in and put on your blue shirts.

We ended up, we ended up playing.

I probably should have did that.

But we, but once you get in that now you have a 15 yard penalty for delay a game because there's no way they would have been out in time for.

Yeah, clock would have had zeros before they came back out.

So I probably did.

So I, I probably should have did what you said.

And just through the 15 yards, it would have been easier, but it was a big game and I didn't want to influence the game with 15 yards to start it because this is a rivalry game, you know, and it's one of those ones that they sort of forced me to do.

I went to, I went to one of the schools, that's where I graduated from.

And my kids all graduated from the other school.

So it was a bad situation for me no matter what I did anyway.

But I had another case where a team, because there's what it's commonly called the mercy rule.

And in high school, 35 points or greater difference in the second half, you go to a running clock, get the game over to do it.

It's like 35 point rules, what it's technically called.

Well, I had at the end of the first quarter a 47 to nothing or something game.

It was last game of the season.

You had the best team in the league against the worst team, the, the team.

Both teams came out at the quarter and said, hey, can you.

I mean, for the losing teams, because my kids don't want to be here.

It's rain.

It's like 36 degrees raining.

It's, it's just miserable.

Nobody's in the stands, nobody wants to be there.

The, the team on the losing team doesn't want his kids to get hurt because they're just giving up.

And the other team getting ready to go to the playoffs, they don't want anybody to get hurt.

And so they're both asking me, can you just, you know, whoever you can do to get this going.

You know, I said, well, if you, if two coaches are in agreement, we'll, we'll start running the clock now.

And you know, technically you're not supposed to do it till after halftime.

So I, we ran the clock, but it was the best thing for that game.

And both, everybody, everybody wanted that to happen.

You're doing except the, the administration of that I have to answer to.

I had to go through a bunch of meetings on that and everything, but if the coaches came to my defense and said no, we, yeah, we, we wanted that and we're glad he did it.

So that's, that's two instances I can come off where I, I had to make a decision like that.

I've been on other games where I wasn't the referee and the referee had to make a decision and you know, we, we went with it because that's, he was the ref, you know, he's in charge of the game.

But, you know, but the cool thing is that the, you know, I mean, I, I'm sure there's some places where some referee has abused the power, but you know, that's not the way they're built generally.

Right.

And so it's, it's a good power to have.

Right.

Because you never know what's going to, what's going to pop up, you know, even like acts of God kind of stuff.

You, you never, you don't know, you know, what can happen.

So.

And you see things, I mean, I read about it every couple years or some lunatic will drive their car through the middle of a football field when a game's going on and you know, maybe there's a play on, you know, thank God nobody gets hurt or nothing, but still it affects the play and you know, you have to reset clocks and everything like that.

They're really not a rule to do that.

But common sense will tell you to, to get this thing so that.

Get the game to be fair.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I have another instance.

We, we had a, we had, we were on a muddy field, rainy weekend rain for like a week or so.

Went into the field, was underwater basically, which we probably should have not played the game.

It was, I'm underwater, but it was, it was just miserable.

You didn't want to be short yardage inside the five yard line because it was just a mud hole.

So we would, when teams would go over the 50, we were flipping the field, say, okay, change size.

It's just like you do it a quarter and put them on, you know, the 48 going the other way to play at the good end of the field all the time.

And nobody was unhappy with that.

Both coaches were happy.

The quarterbacks and centers were ecstatic that we did that in running back.

So they're not laying in a mud.

But yeah, we did that to keep a game going, but it was like a JV game.

So yeah, you get Fun stuff out there, that's for sure.

It's a never a dull moment in stripes.

No, not at all.

But it's also never a dull moment on football archaeology because you quite often have some great items of football history just like the one you talked about today and you call them your tidbits.

And Tim, why don't you tell us where people can enjoy these great tidbits?

Yep, just go to the site footballarchaeology.com it's a substack site, so you can subscribe, get an email every time that I publish a new article.

You can also just follow me on substack and it'll pop up.

You'll be able to access it whenever you want.

And you can also follow me on Blue sky because I publish every time.

Every time it, you know, publish a new article, I link it on Blue Sky.

All right.

Well, Tim, we really appreciate you coming on tonight and sharing this great piece of history and, you know, celebrating the referee and stripes around America.

Yeah, that's history.

So this is.

The good guys are finally, you know, awarded some time here.

So I really appreciate that.

Yeah, you guys see.

See the world through black and white.

And so that's good if we see it all.

So, Tim, thank you very much and we would love to talk to you again next week.

Very good.

Thank you.

That's all the football history we have today, folks.

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