This podcast episode delves into the historical implications of incomplete passes within the realm of American football, particularly during the formative years of the forward pass. We engage with Timothy Brown of FootballArchaeology.com, who elucidates the punitive measures that accompanied early forward passing, revealing how such restrictions shaped the evolution of the game. As we traverse through the timeline of rule modifications from 1906 to 1934, we observe the gradual easing of penalties associated with incomplete passes, which transitioned from severe consequences to more lenient measures that fostered the development of offensive strategies. We discuss how these changes not only reflect the changing attitudes towards the forward pass but also illustrate the intricate relationship between running and passing plays in the sport. Through this exploration, we aim to provide listeners with a comprehensive understanding of how historical regulations have influenced modern football dynamics.

Tim's original Tidbit on the subject is: A Look at Early Incomplete Pass Penalties -

Join us at the Pigskin Dispatch website to see even more Positive football news!

Don't forget to check out and subscribe to the Pigskin Dispatch YouTube channel for additional content and the regular Football History Minute Shorts.

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

Imagine a world where a drop pass isn't just a frustrating turnover on downs, it's an automatic penalty, a turnover, or even a touchback.

Timothy Brown of FootballArchaeology.com joins us to tell us about the punitive years of early forward passing in football and what is the consequences and how did they overcome it?

Tim's up in just 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, Darrin Hayes is podcast broadcasting 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 portal to positive football history.

And welcome to another exciting Tuesday where we get to go back in time and talk about some old time football and what made the game it is today.

Timothy p. Brown of FootballArchaeology.com joins us.

Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey Darren.

Looking forward to chatting and making my life complete or incomplete or both?

Whichever.

Yeah, I think you'll be making a little bit more incomplete being on this podcast and with the topic of your recent tidbit which you have called a look at early incomplete pass penalties.

Incomplete past penalties.

That's a lot of a mouthful to say.

I'm sure it's got quite a story to tell, so why don't you please share.

Yeah, I mean it, it is one of those things where you just almost, you can't imagine, you know, the, the early rules that were, that so heavily restricted the forward pass.

I mean just the, the sheer technique of throwing the ball.

They had no sense of play design.

How do you, how do you, how do you run a pass play?

What do you do with the offensive lineman?

What, you know, I mean, just things we just like.

They didn't have pass routes per se, right?

They didn't have named pass routes.

They didn't have, they didn't cut.

You know, there's just things we consider so basic today that they hadn't figured out.

It took a while, it took decades, you know, for many of those things to come.

But one of the things that really held the forward pass back were the, was the Restrictions or were the restrictions the rule restrictions?

So, so just wanted to kind of COVID those.

And I'm going to, as I talk to you offline a little bit before we start a recording, I'm just going to kind of walk through a couple of different categories of rules that restricted the forward pass and related to incompletions and just kind of walk through them and kind of how, how they changed over time.

So one of them was there was like, just like a basic, if you threw an incomplete pass that landed in the field of play, right?

So not out of bounds, you know, not past the goal line.

You know, it was pretty much the same thing as like before they legalized it.

If you threw a forward pass, it was a turnover.

That was the penalty for an illegal forward pass.

So that makes sense, right?

I mean, is more or less the same thing as before, but, but that they realized right away that that was too restrictive.

An incomplete forward pass is a 15 yard penalty.

However, if it hits a player, offense or defense while it's in the air, it's treated and then it hits the ground, it's treated as a fumble.

So it just means it was either tipped by the defender or the offensive player touched it but didn't catch it.

So it was a live ball and so mad scrambles to catch, you know, get the ball.

Okay?

You had to throw a pass from at least five yards behind the line of scrimmage.

So if you threw a pass that hit the ground, that meant that the ball was then positioned at least five yards back of the previous spot.

Right?

And they real, okay, we screwed up.

That's a bad rule.

Right?

So again, this is, you know, I make an argument in my latest book, When Football or When the When Football Came to Pass that basically, I mean, they tried but they really had no idea what they were doing when they legalized for pass.

I mean, it was just kind of a mess.

They made a lot of dumb rules.

They didn't foresee lots of things.

They didn't foresee the need for pass interference, penalties and that kind of stuff.

So that these are just examples of the progression to make it less restrictive.

So another.

It's kind of fascinating, though.

You sit there and you think about, if you watch your favorite team today and they step back the past, there's almost a little bit of anticipation and angst and they catch it.

You know, you're delighted if they drop it or it's incomplete or even if they dump it out of bounds to save their skin.

It's kind of disappointing.

You're just kind of a letdown.

You're like, oh, yeah, that's kind of a bummer.

They're not penalized.

Yeah, but you're not penalized.

That's much worse earlier for football.

Yeah, but, you know, I mean, there were a lot of people who didn't want the forward pass to be there at all.

So this was, you know, their, Their way of.

Of minimizing the impact of the forward pass on their beautiful, you know, run it up the gut game.

You know, that was kind of, you know, one of the things they did.

So, like, another category of incomplete penalties was the forward pass crossing the goal line.

On a fly or bounced or hit the goal post or a spectator behind the goal line and was not caught, then it became a touchback.

Right?

So.

So if you, if you're.

If either the defender or the.

Well, if, if the offensive team didn't catch the ball behind the goal line, it was a touchback.

Maybe just, Just some clarity for folks that don't listen regularly.

There's no end zones at this.

There is no.

There is no end zone.

In fact, I, I even messed that up.

So any ball crossing the goal line was a touchback because you couldn't catch it behind the goal line.

The offense player could.

So it didn't matter what, you know, you hit the.

You hit somebody, you hit the goal post touchback.

But all the other things still applied.

If it bounced, you know, if it fell incomplete in the goal line, hit goal post, hit a spec.

So presumably spectators were at Least passed past the end line, but all the other conditions, if it felt incomplete beyond the goal line, it was still a touchback.

And how long did that last for?

When did they eliminate that rule?

Two years?

1934.

Really?

Wow.

Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, it's crazy to think about that, you know, how long rule lasted, and now they're.

Trying to bring it back in the NFL with a dynamic kick ruler.

Having all the crazy stuff of the vlogs.

I don't even pay attention.

Yeah, I mean, it really.

I mean, in last week's podcast or the week before, we're talking about the, the, the change in size of the ball.

And they, they reduced the size of the ball in 34 to make it easier to pass.

Well, they also eased some, some of the restrictive pass incomplete passing rules in 34.

So one of them was all these silly things about, you know, the, the ball crossing the goal line and being incomplete, becoming a turnover.

Those got eliminated.

Well, now they had the smaller ball, they could fire it down there and get it to the goal line maybe.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't know.

They just, they were crazy along the same lines.

They had a rule like, you know, the past became more popular and despite all the, you know, still having a lot of restrictions.

And in 19.

And so they said the second, third and fourth incompletions in a series.

So, you know, in one set of four downs, second, third and fourth incomplettions were a five yard penalty.

So again, one of those rules that got freed up in 34 and then the last set of these incompletion passing completion rules was it's, it's a bizarre, you know, kind of a bizarre one to current thinking.

If it, if it had bounced in bounds, then that whole falling in the field of play rule applied.

But if it flew out of bounds, then the defensive team, it was a turnover.

And the defensive team got the ball at the spot where it crossed the sideline, you know, much like a punt today.

Yeah.

And so what did teams do?

Well, if they had a kid who could throw the ball deep instead of punting, and especially if they were in a kind of a coffin corner kind of situation, where somebody could throw it more accurately than they could punt.

You know, you're on the 40, you just say, okay, let's let.

Let's let Billy throw that ball, and Billy at rear back, throw the ball downfield out of bounds, you know, inside the 5 or inside the 10.

And that's where the team, you know, that's where the defense got the ball because it went out of bounds on the fly.

Right.

You know, those kind, you know, 14 or 15, that they did that.

So anyways, it's just things that we just take for granted today in terms of the treatment of a forward pass.

And we know it's risky, the whole thing.

Well, there's three things that can happen, you know, three bad.

Three things can happen, and two of them are bad.

Well, back then it was more like five things can happen and four of them are bad.

Like 10 things are bad.

And now we have four options.

So.

Yeah.

So, I mean, it's just, you know, if you ever wonder why the game remains so running oriented and just teams didn't pass as often.

It was rules like this.

It just, you know, the powers that be wanted the game to be more of a running game.

That's the flavor they preferred.

And so they set up rules to.

To maintain that.

And eventually they figured, you know, the fact of the matter is people found the forward pass to be a really exciting, fun play, and it gave lesser teams a chance to compete, and they loved it.

And so, you know, that's why they.

That's why the rules changed.

Yeah, I think it's such a beautiful marriage of the two disciplines between the running and the passing game.

And, you know, even to this day, you know, the standard is, you know, the perfection of your offense is to have.

Be a 50, 50 split between your running and your passing.

So the running play, the very beginning of football, is still the.

The fundamental part of it.

And you.

You run to set up to pass.

You know, it's a common terminology.

It's just beautiful how.

Or pass.

Right, right.

And, you know, play.

You know, play action and RPOs and everything are based off that of sharing those two and keeping the defense off balance.

And it's just.

It's a beautiful thing.

That's why it's such a fun game.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, you know, it's.

But that.

That came about, you know, it took a century.

Right.

And, you know, just attitudes had to change, and the ball had to change.

Just so many things had to change.

And, but, you know, I mean, I, I mean, as much as, like, I still really love watching, you know, I grew up, I'm a Wisconsin fan, and so the old Wisconsin.

So not so much the recent years, but the old pound it and we're gonna just run at you and beat you.

I still love that style of football, but I love watching the Canadian game and the way they fling that ball all over on the wider field.

I think that's, I think that's really fun.

You know, I mean, I, I, if you're, if you're good at it, I don't care what style you run, right?

Just be good at it, execute it well and, and win, Right?

Enjoy this last month and a half or so of the Canadian game because it's.

Changes are coming, it sounds like so.

All right.

Well, Tim, this is some fascinating stuff.

It's always great to hear, you know, about the roots of football and how things fundamentally started and how they evolved over the years.

And you do this a lot in your tidbits, and it's really exciting as a football fan to look at these things and you do your research on it very diligently and give, you know, excerpts from experts, you know, hundreds some years ago and, you know, and everything else, newspaper articles, whatever, what have you, and you share them in your tidbits.

Maybe you could tell folks how they can find your tidbits.

Yep.

Just go to footballarchaeology.com it's a substack site.

And sign up.

You'll get an email every time that I send a send out a new story or just go to the site anytime you want.

Follow me on Blue Sky.

You know, kind of whatever floats your boat.

All right.

Well, it definitely, definitely floats our boat or we wouldn't be coming to this, this channel and watching you and me talk about football every week.

And so definitely have some interest in football history.

And we have so much interest.

We would love to invite you back next week to talk about some more.

I'll be happy to.

Happy to show up whenever you name a time and a place.

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

Join us back tomorrow for more of your football history.

We invite you to check out our website, pigskindispatch.com not only to see the daily football history, but to experience positive football.

Football.

With our many articles on the good people of the game, as well as our own football comic strip, cleatmark's comics.

Pigskindispatch.Com is also on social media outlets.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and don't forget the BigSkin Dispatch YouTube channel to get all of your positive football news and history.

Special thanks to the talents of Mike and Gene Monroe, as well as Jason Neff for letting us use their music during our podcast.

This podcast is part of the Sports History Network, your headquarters for the yesteryear of your favorite sport.

You can learn more@sportshistorynetwork.com.