The discourse presented in this episode centers on the origins of American football, with our esteemed guest, Bert Gambini, positing that the pivotal moment in football's history occurred on October 16, 1880. Gambini articulates that this date marks the first instance of gridiron football being played under the critical rule of scrimmage, a significant departure from previous iterations of the game. Throughout the discussion, we meticulously analyze various claims regarding the inception of football, including widely accepted dates such as 1869 and 1876, yet we ultimately find them lacking in defining the essence of what constitutes football. Gambini's research highlights the importance of understanding the transformation of the game from its rudimentary forms to the establishment of structured play, notably through the introduction of possession rules. This episode serves not only as an exploration of football's historical timeline but also as an invitation to reconsider the narratives that have long shaped our understanding of the sport's evolution.

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A profound examination of the origins of American football unfolds in this enlightening discussion, wherein the speakers engage with the esteemed historian Bert Gambini. The discourse traverses various proposed starting points of football, including the commonly cited years of 1869, 1874, and 1876, culminating in Gambini's compelling assertion that the true inception occurred in 1880. Gambini articulates a critical distinction between earlier forms of the game and the establishment of scrimmage rules, which he argues fundamentally transformed football into the sport we recognize today. The conversation delves into the socio-historical context surrounding these developments, highlighting the necessity for a more nuanced understanding of football's evolution. Gambini's meticulous research, which includes references to contemporaneous newspaper reports, illuminates the obscured narratives and misconceptions that have persisted over time, challenging the audience to reconsider widely held beliefs about the game’s origins. This episode serves not only as a chronicle of football history but also as an invitation to engage critically with the sources that shape our understanding of the past. The speakers emphasize the importance of recognizing scrimmage as a pivotal moment in football’s development, underscoring that this rule change marked a departure from its rugby roots. Gambini’s insightful analysis prompts a re-evaluation of the historical timeline, advocating for a recognition of the 1880 game between Rutgers and the Stevens Institute as the first true gridiron football match. This perspective not only enriches our comprehension of football's lineage but also invites further scholarly inquiry into the myriad influences that have shaped the sport over the decades.

None of them tell us specifically why we're calling that football. The very first gridiron football game was.

Buckle up your chin straps. Because our guest today, Bert Gambini, has an answer that might just surprise you. When football started.

Touchdown.

The Pigskin Dispatch. Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

We have a great guest today that's wrote a tremendous article in the coffin corner of the PFRA recently. His name is Bert Gambini. Bert, welcome to the Pig Pen.

Thank you, Darin.

Bert, before we get into our main piece of our discussion here, when football started, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself. I'm familiar with you from being a fellow brethren in the pfra and you know, I've enjoyed some of your speeches.

One just recently, a couple months ago in Western New York chapter. But why don't you tell us where your passion comes from and what you really like to get into?

That was the second to last year that the Bills played played in War Memorial. I was at the last game the Bills played at Ward Memorial against the Detroit Lions as well. It was a 21, 21 tie.

And very early on I started to get interested in history through books that were given to me by family and access that I had to the public library.

And it's access to libraries and books that made me a football history Fan.

Yeah, I, I think that is a. A story that a lot of us can resonate with. I mean, I'm very similar, just a different NFL team, but they all sort.

All 32 will take you back, or any college team. They sort of want to drag you back. Once you're looking into it long enough, back to the beginning and trying to figure out, you know, who were the.

The people that put this thing together. Almost like American history, you know, you want to know about the George Washingtons and Thomas Jefferson's.

Well, you want to know about the Walter Camps and the Amos Alonzo Stags and Newt Rock, the game of football, too. So that's a very shared passion. So that's. That's a very.

And the Bills were only, you know, looking back, too. The bills were only 11 years old when, When I really started watching them.

The second season after the merger process had been completed. So, you know, the NFL was really beginning to blossom at this point.

Yeah. And I guess you're only like a half of a decade away from them winning AFL championships, being the top dogs.

Yeah, just a few years. Just a few years. Yeah.

Yeah. Very interesting. Very interesting. All right. So, you know, you responded recently. You know, even though we.

We know each other from sort of a distance, even though we've been at the same meetings, and we'll correct that here as we have the upcoming meetings here. But we. You. You said you.

And Tim says, okay, that's where he's planting a flag in the ground. That's where he believes American football, even though they were rugby rules. And I've debated with him a little bit about that.

So when do you believe that American football started?

That was the beginning. I kind of approach this a different way.

When I wrote the original piece that appeared in the Coffin corner magazine, the official magazine of the pro football Researchers Association, I wanted to include an appendix. Appendix that listed all of the sources who defined football as scrimmage. The problem was the space consideration. There were just too many sources.

So what I do or what I did with this piece is just reverse engineered it. If football is defined by scrimmage, then what was the first game that featured that rule?

That, to me, is the first example of gridiron football, because it is the first time in a sanctioned game that two intercollegiate teams played under those rules.

Okay, so you mentioned the October 16th game that you're seeing. It's earlier than that then.

Scrimmage was amendment number one to the. Or, excuse me, the reduction of players was amendment number one that took the teams from 15 to 11 aside.

There were rule changes involving kicking, involving punting, and the application of penalties as well. But the structural change that initiated what I see as gridiron football was the idea of scrimmage, where one side would have possession.

I want to say the Springfield convention was Oct. 12, which days later Rutgers and Stevens played under the new rules. And it was the. The. The first gridiron football game sanctioned, intercollegiately, involving teams from two different schools.

You know, I think the larger question here, though, is why don't we know this? And keep in mind that I have.

The New York Times reported on the game, the New York Herald reported on the game, the New York sun reported on the game as well. And all of them made a point of saying this is the first game played under the new rules.

In fact, scrimmage could refer to any kind of commotion or uproar or ruckus. You, you actually encounter it in a lot of political writing of the day.

They'll talk about, you know, scrimmages in legislative chambers, for instance. So you can't just look for the word scrimmage in these, in these newspaper stories. But again, like, you know, why, why don't we know this?

If, if it was so easy to track down?

You know, we have the, the Springfield convention that established the rule, and days later, we have several newspapers, including the newspaper of record, saying it was the first time that this game was played. You know, why don't we know that? And there are a number of reasons, I, I think for this.

People just weren't familiar with the rules of the game. And I think any reporter who went to write or cover this game might not have known those rules.

You know, they can look and say, all right, the, the teams are smaller. I see that, but the, the scrimmage rule could have been lost on them. And even years later, I find somebody like Walter Camp, who is the.

Considered the father of American football. Years later, he's talking about people still aren't familiar with the rules of football.

So if you think about this early scrimmage didn't look much different from the rugby scrum. You know, what was missing was the chaos and the confluence of players in the scrum.

You had teams lining up and I suppose that reporters just could have missed that. They, they, they didn't get that. And we also have the fact that there could have been some unfamiliarity with the game.

But I think that's, that's a good point right there. Because sit here, think about this. Even rugby had not been in the United States for very long. You know, they're.

Well, not only, not only that, you know, you mentioned it's a, it's a soccer game.

There are several historians of sport who also point to Princeton, Rutgers as the first intercollegiate soccer game, not the first intercollegiate football game. And I think calling it a soccer game is a much easier case to make.

Yeah, I agree with you.

But the familiarity of the American public, who were just less than two decades out of civil war, basically, you really want to put it in perspective, they were more thinking about farming, the industrial revolutions coming on.

They're not thinking about having pastimes like we do today where you can kick back and watch TV or go to your local gymnasium, watch a basketball game or go to a baseball or football game like we can today. They didn't have the free time that we have today, so they were probably very unfamiliar with the game.

So something as, you know, substantial as a big rule change, you know, diversifying a game played in your states from rugby, you know, probably was missed completely by journalists and the public are like, so, yeah, it's very understandable why they would, would miss that. You know, I guess you could almost take it the game of highlight, which, you know, is not very popular here. I don't know the rules of it.

I, I barely understand what's going on with it. If they change the rules of highlight and made it more like pickleball or something, I probably wouldn't notice.

You know, neither would most America, you.

Know, and I, I think it's important too and again, this is one of the stories, or one of the points rather, that I brought up in the. In the coffin corner piece. There is a. There is a belief that football evolved on a continuum.

And it's an argument that I find difficult to embrace, and I'm going to tell you why. By definition, a continuum implies minute changes, and that's not the case when we look at the development of football.

And I distinguish between evolution and revolution in this piece. And part of that wisdom is borrowed from a writer that I admire, Melvin I. Smith, who just compiled these.

But once the kicking game becomes the carrying game, that's a revolution. That continuum has stopped. Those players decided that they were going to play a different game. Now they gave up on one and they adopted another.

The same is true with the revolution of possession. A decision was made that we were no longer going to play the rugby game and we were going to start playing the possession game.

And consider this as well. We've already talked about Princeton, Rutgers being fraught as more of a soccer game than a football game.

It doesn't seem to fit historically, because I don't think that those games were football. We don't have football until we have scrimmage.

And again, this isn't an opinion that I agree with, but it's an opinion that you encounter time and time again when you read histories of the game. Some histories of football even begin with mentioning football is scrimmage. Football begins with the introduction of scrimmage.

And I had just encountered that so many times. I said, all right, it's. It's just time to. To just do the reverse engineering here and find out when that first game was. And that's when it was.

And yeah, I can address each of those points and, you know, we have to go back. You know, as innovative as scrimmage was, it nearly killed football because it was a flawed invention.

You know, the rules committee had decided to create this new game, but what they failed to do is come up with a mechanism to surrender possession. So theoretically, a team could hold the ball for an entire half if they wanted.

The only reason we have a down and distance rule is because of scrimmage. So the down and distance rule, as I reason in the piece, is an evolution of the possession game. The forward pass.

You could make a case for the forward pass. However, although it's unlikely a football game can be played without any passing.

I mean, it has happened historically on I believe, five or six occasions. It's unlikely that it'll ever happen again. But as a thought experiment, you don't have to pass on either side to have a football game.

So it's very problematic then to say that the forward pass marked the beginning of football if you don't have to pass to play the game.

Yeah, that, that's true. Nowadays you really don't have to run to play the game. You could throw a pass every time.

The short passing game has come along with the west coast and other similar offensives. Yeah, very interesting. No, I, I tend to agree with you.

I, I lean more towards when the rule change was made at the, the committee meeting, when the IFA or ifc, I don't remember which one they were at that time, but when, when they made that rule, the Walter camp suggestion to, you know, put that in with the scrimmage versus the scrummage, I think that was it. You know, I can't disagree with you saying the first gameplay because that was under the new rule and that really started it.

That was when it actually happened. So I don't have an argument against that either. But.

There were even early.

I want to say that There were even 19th century commentators who distinguished football as different from any of its predecessors because of scrimmage. This is, it's not a relatively new observation. This has been made throughout the history of the game.

And even late 19th century commentators were pointing to scrimmage. But there's another point here, Darren. You know, at some point, and let's keep in mind that, you know, these early games were diversions.

Nobody knew what this was going to become. Nobody knew if this was even going to last. You see a pretty strong trajectory as the crowds get bigger and bigger.

And even by the early 20th century, we understood that college football wasn't going anywhere. It was only going to get bigger. But at what point did we start talking about an origin? There are very few references to Princeton, Rutgers.

There were some passing references to Princeton, Rutgers and the significance of the game in some early newspaper reports. But we really don't see the game enshrined in history until the publication of a book by Park Davis, Football the Intercollegiate Game.

He dedicated an entire chapter of his book to the game. He had testimony from some of the surviving.

He had a photograph of the game too, which is.

I didn't know that. I didn't know that.

Yeah, there's a photograph of that, that game from quite a distance. But he's claiming that it's that game.

It always seems to come with this qualifying language. You know, here is the first football game, but not really.

And I think it's important as researchers that, you know, we don't create these misleading perceptions.

With different rules, but we can see that that's not the game that they wanted to play.

And they gave up on it and they adopted a rugby style of play, but they gave up on that as well and came up with scrimmage and created an entirely new game.

Yeah, I have. I'm not sure if you familiar with Dr. Tony Collins.

I had a great honor, Tim Brown, actually, we did a show where we had Tim and I interview Dr. Collins. Dr. Collins is probably the foremost expert on football worldwide. And he, his really adopts football of all genres.

He calls, you know, association football, soccer to U.S. rugby, American football, Gaelic football, the Australian rules and the other, you know, all the disciplines of rugby as cousins to each other. And he sort of put a new perspective in my mind and said, okay, yeah, this was the.

But you're giving the facts of when American football, the gridiron game started. And that's, that's what I think is interesting.

Yeah. And, and I think that that anniversary game of, of. Of.

Maybe this would have been easier if in addition to making these rule changes, the, The Intercollegiate Football association would. Or the Intercollegiate Football association would have changed the name of the game.

There you go.

You know, it's okay. We're, we're done with association football and now we're just going to play rugby.

I do want to mention one other thing because we were talking earlier about the newspaper stories concentrating on the downsizing of the teams from 15 to 11 players.

And this is some research that I've done since the publication of the piece and since I made the presentation at the Western New York chapter meeting of pfra.

I suppose if you, if you, if you wanted to criticize the, the research of the original story, you can say, well, I didn't come up with a specific mention of scrimmage, which is accurate. However, I still believe that I haven't had enough supporting evidence to make my case.

The unfamiliarity of the game, you know, being, being one of them. The similarities that early scrimmage had to the, the rugby scrum.

But recently I've discovered another source, and this is, I want to say the New York Sun. I'm getting these, these New York papers confused.

There was a lot of them.

There's a lot, there's a lot of them, especially then. But, and this goes back to the block games that we were talking about earlier.

There was an early possession that was detailed in this game that took 20 minutes. So we had one side with the ball, as reported in this story, in possession for 20 minutes.

Now, for an attacking team in rugby, in a rugby style game, to have the ball for 20 minutes is implausible.

It would require nearly flawless execution on the attacking team and a complete inability on the defense of the defensive team to get the ball back from that attacking team.

I went back and said, you know, there's, there must be some record or, you know, what's the longest time that a rugby team, you know, had the ball themselves? And I came across seven minutes and change. And that was an extraordinary length of time.

And it was also a thrilling length of time because if you think about this, you're watching this game, you have one side in possession, you know, you're watching, you know, think of like a hockey game where, you know, one side just has the puck for this, what seems like an eternity. Well, that just can't happen in a rugby game.

However, in an early football game that is just introducing scrimmage, a 20 minute possession is quite possible. In fact, it's almost likely because again, there is no mechanism to surrender possession.

And I think that Fourth source is, is the closest that I have come to a mention of the scrimmage rule being in place in this game. I would also say the writer made a point of talking about how dull the game was during this stretch.

So remember, for an attacking team to maintain possession for that long is thrilling in rugby, but it's quite dull in, you know, in a scrimmage type game with no mechanism to surrender possession. So I see that as an important piece of evidence that further supports the use of scrimmage in that game.

And we also have to consider, you know, the rules. The rule conventions were to establish a book of rules.

They weren't to establish suggestions that gave teams, you know, the ability to cherry pick what they wanted. And again, I found Harvard, incidentally was against the, the reduction of players from 15 to 11.

They traveled to Montreal shortly after the, the rules convention and they had a Canadian team play with scrimmage. Like they were so committed to this rule that even a non late game, they said, you know what, we, we don't play that game your way anymore.

We use scrimmage. And this newspaper story specifically mentioned scrimmage.

In fact, Harvard actually had an inner squad scrimmage on the same day as the Princeton Rutgers game. They had an inner squad scrimmage where they kind of field tested scrimmage.

So again, we see these examples of teams didn't adopt these rules piecemeal. They took them in their entirety and took them to heart.

Yeah, because you could also look on the other side too. If you have 20 minutes of possession, that means the defense is doing something too, that keeping them out of, from scoring. Yeah, that's a.

So really, that might be a really good game. You know, if you look at it for flawless perfection of execution on both sides to get something like that.

I've referenced it many times and some of my books and things.

But you know, he also had biblical reference, said the Bible was referring to football and twisted some of the biblical things and Greek, you know, literature. He was taking that and twisting it into football too.

I almost look at Park H. Davis as sort of like Dr. Harry March, who wrote a lot, you know, one of the early historians of pro football of the NFL. They tell a lot of factual truth in there.

But there are some things that are, that we know today after doing some research might be a Little bit far fetched and maybe overly dramatized by both those gentlemen, but their contributions are much appreciated.

I, I think that the Harry March book, which is pro football's ups and downs, you know, there are some, there are some historical errors in there. You know, the first gridiron game is going to come down to a matter of opinion.

I think the consensus opinion is that football begins with scrimmage, and it's one that I certainly embrace. But, you know, there are other researchers and historians who think otherwise.

This is when we first start to see the rankings. And soon the wire services picked up and the national beat reporters, and we eventually had what we now think of as the college rankings.

Park Davis got involved in this as well. He jumped on the bandwagon.

But Park Davis, rather than have a formula, he just kind of went back, looked at the standings and said, okay, whoever had the best record was the national champion. Never looking at anything like strength of schedule or any other factors that could have influenced his decision.

But again, I would stress that conclusion is based on what I see as the historical consensus. The majority of historians that I encountered, even though they don't identify the game, they say generally football began with scrimmage.

Yeah, you know, if we all agreed on everything, life wouldn't be as much fun.

You know, that's, that's the fun of it to have the debates, to help make people dig into the research, prove their points, state their cases, and we all get to sit back and enjoy it and, and listen to the discussions and take part in the discussions. And that's what makes it fun.

And that's why we appreciate what you're doing and what Tim Brown does and Dr. Collins and everybody else that's, uh, having points of opinion that they're publicizing on this. And we really thank you for joining us.

Now, do you have any projects coming up that, you know, either in the past or are coming up that we can look forward to, to see some of your work?

Update on that, Update us on that. But I'm thinking that's going to be out sometime next year.

We have a convention coming up that year, so that's usually when he usually tries to pull the trigger on those and make sure they, they come out then. So.

But we really appreciate you coming on here and would love to have you on again sometime to, to, you know, if you come up with any more research on that or anything else that you want to discuss. You know, we have an ongoing series here where we're going year by year, you know, because we were.

We have our timeline on pigskindispatch.com, which might be the most comprehensive that I found anywhere that we built on American football history. And we're just trying to celebrate football year by year here coming up.

So we'd love to have you be a guest on one of those episodes, should you so desire.

I love that and I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this research and talk about this game.

I think it's an important addition to the early history of football, and it just creates this richer texture for what we know about the game that got us to the point where we are now.