Timothy Brown joins Darin Hayes to spotlight the significant yet often overlooked contributions of Henry Mitchell McCracken to the safety and evolution of American football. McCracken, who became NYU's chancellor in the late 19th century, played a pivotal role in advocating for safer rules in the sport during a time when football was facing scrutiny for its dangers. Following the tragic death of a player during a game, he galvanized university leaders to convene and develop new regulations, ultimately leading to the formation of what is now the NCAA. The discussion delves into McCracken's legacy, including his influence on the establishment of halls of fame in the United States and his efforts to reform the game. Join us as we explore these fascinating historical insights and uncover the impact of McCracken's work on modern college football.

Of course, this discussion all stems from Tim`s original article titled: Stadium Size, Football Droppers, and Deemphasizers: NYU

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We have a great episode in store for you today. Glad you joined us because Timothy Brown joins us to talk about a man that helped make football safe in the game it is today.

May have saved football and you may have never heard of him. Tim's coming 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, Darren Hays 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 pigskin dispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

And welcome to another Tuesday edition where we get to visit with our friend Timothy p. Brown of footballarchaeology.com and we've got a great topic tonight to talk about with one of his tidbits. Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey, how you doing, Darren? Looking forward to chatting and maybe cracking you up a little bit.

Sounds like a bad McDonald's breakfast or something. I don't know, but it's just a bad dad joke which were famous.

I think it's the latter.

But yeah, you segue us right in here sort of into your topic. You had a tidbit a little while ago, stadium size football droppers and de emphasizers with the series you're running on the NYU Talk.

And it's a very interesting figure in American football history that doesn't maybe doesn't get as much credit as he should for some things that he did.

Yeah, that's actually what I was going to start with was just the point that, you know, he's one of these guys who, you know, played a kind of a brief role but an important role. And you know, but I, you know, unless you're kind of a dork, you know, football historian, you're probably not familiar with them.

So but you know, the guy's, his name was Henry Mitchell McCracken. I'm not sure why everybody back then had to use their middle name all the time. But, but he did.

So, you know, long, you know, long history of playing the game. But they pretty much always played it at kind of a second or third tier level. That changed, like in the 20s and 30s.

They had some really, you know, very, very strong teams, you know, nationally prominent teams. But. And then they, you know, they shut it down later on.

But the thing about McCracken that's really interesting is that, you know, he's kind of known for two things.

You know, he's known for one thing people probably aren't generally aware of the first thing, which is that he, you know, I don't know if he visited Germany or whatever, but there. There was a place in Munich that he became aware of that was basically a hall of fame in Germany.

And that building behind me is that hall. It still exists. It's now on what.

Well, what used to be one of NYU's campuses up in the Bronx, you know, they left their, I want to say, in the 60s or early 70s, something like that. And so that building still exists, but it's on a community college campus now.

And then this is the field that was called Ohio Field, but that was a field that NYU played on, you know, for their home games.

So just the fact, you know, basically every hall of Fame that, you know, exists probably owes some level of credit to McCracken importing it, you know, from. From Germany. Maybe somebody else would have. But, you know, he was the first one to.

Now, what kind of people were in the hall of Fame? Was it just athletes or was it.

Yeah, no, this is. This is like political figures and philosoph philosophers and scientists and things like that.

Okay.

So, yeah, it's not a.

More of an academic academia type of hall of Fame.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, it's kind of an open air sort of deal and you, you know, little rotunda and whatnot.

So, you know, he. I think he was alive when he left the field, but he died, you know, shortly thereafter.

You know, and it was just one of those things where, you know, McCracken just said, this has to stop.

And so he, you know, wrote to, you know, kind of university presidents, chancellors, you know, kind of all over the place, published some things in newspapers and basically demanded that the rule that, you know, that there was an existing rules organization. And he basically said, these people have not fixed this problem. They've had their chances.

We're going to gather kind of a separate Congress or, you know, group of people come together in New York City and we're going to find, you know, we're going to develop new rules, new systems, whatever it takes to clean up the game.

And so they ended up, you know, there were 60, 70 representatives from universities, you know, primarily in the east, some in the Midwest, but Harvard was one of them. So that, you know, was an important, you know, contributing university to that whole thing.

And out of that came the, you know, what they called the Intercollegiate Athletic association of the. Of the United States. And so they met and they identified a subcommittee that was going to work on developing new rules.

And but shortly after the turn of the year, so January of 06, they essentially took that subcommittee and merged it with the existing rules making body.

And so, you know, basically they were, you know, they were ready to go their separate way, but, you know, they were convinced to kind of come together.

And so that combined committee met, you know, four or five times over the next, you know, handful of months and eventually issued a new set of rules that, you know, people had agreed to. McCracken and others, you know, looked at that set of rules and said, yeah, this is, this is going to work. This should clean up the game.

And so we will continue playing football. Now, you know, some schools chose not to do that. You know, Columbia dropped football, Northwestern dropped football.

Cal and Stanford dropped football. And, you know, and there were others.

So, you know, kind of a big deal in terms of college football and college sports, you know, more broadly.

Yeah, real big deal.

Now is it fair to say, Tim, that because you don't hear of too many presidents of colleges and chancellors getting involved in sports, but at that time he did because there was no NCA or governing body. So he sort of had to. Is that, is that fair to say?

Well, yeah.

So the president or the chancellor president of Harvard at the time, a guy named Elliot, he was very involved, you know, and he, there were multiple times like he shut Harvard's football down for at least one season. So, you know, part of it, you know, schools were just a heck of a lot smaller, right?

I mean, even in, you know, at the start of World War I, Penn was the biggest school in the country and it had 7,000 students. So you know, these organizations were, they were just much smaller. And faculty, you know, the faculties had a whole lot more control.

And so like the, even like the Big Ten, its official name is like the, you know, Conference of Intercollegiate Faculties or something.

So you know, when it formed it was, you know, faculty representatives, faculty deans, you know, whatever from each school that got together and established. In that case it was more eligibility and you know, eligibility rules as opposed to playing rules. So they did get into that a little bit later too. So.

Yeah, I mean, just generally they were, you know, the, the presidents and faculties just had, I mean, the level of control they had over students was just something we don't even conceive of today. You know, they, if they said you can't go to, you know, you can't travel to a game, then you didn't travel to a game.

And I mean like the non playing students, the, you know, just people who are there as fans, you know, if you did something stupid, they'd boot you off campus.

You know, I mean, so they just, they had a lot of, a lot more discretion and you know, definitely a whole lot more control over just the behavior of students.

Yeah, it's interesting how much things have changed in 120 some years, you know, even on the college campuses to everything just the basics like that.

He was the coach the next year. So it was, it was still much more of a student run organizations.

And then you had alumni who did some, you know, kind of fundraising, money management kind of things for the team. But you know, even then, like a student managers.

The student manager back then was the guy who ran the show from a scheduling standpoint, money standpoint, arranging travel, all that kind of stuff. So, you know, the, the burden on the kids was a lot more subs, lot heavier than it is today.

Yeah. Wow. Amazing stuff. Great, great.

I mean, there's some of it like, you know, there's guys who, you know, you just think about, you know, they're basically writing or telegraphing to set up a schedule with somebody else.

You know, they arrange for trains and special trains so that fans can go from, you know, whatever, Champagne, Champagne, Urbana to, you know, Lafayette, Indiana, you know, whatever it is. You know, so they were just college kids. Right.

And many times these schedules weren't laid out in advance like we are know, today. Like we know probably know a 20, 25 schedule right now for, for everybody. These are like week to week sometimes or day to day even.

Yeah.

So in a time that you have not the communication levels that we have today.

You know, I don't know if somebody got on horseback and telegraphed or whatever to get a game schedule and get, and then get, you know, 22 players at least on a field at the same time. That's amazing.

Yeah, yeah.

And well, you know, back then, a lot of times, you know, teams would travel with like 15 guys, you know, and then they, they take, if there was a coach, they'd take a trainer and probably a dog as their mascot. You know, that's kind of the deal.

But I just equated to. You're trying to get the family to go on a weekend getaway. That's all of a sudden, you know, you can't get everybody's schedules together.

But having people that aren't your family that are all over campus and God only knows where they are and get them to go play a football game, that just astounds me that they were able to do that.

Well.

And you know, they came up to New York City, they played at, you know, polo Grounds or you know, one of those Manhattan Field, one of the two.

And you know, but they just kind of picked up and jumped on a train and headed up there and you know, they stayed in a fancy hotel and everything but you know, it was just, you know, very much a different time.

Some of those are, you know, I'm not even talking like those are like Sawani, you know, taking their seven days. That was sort of pre planned and.

Okay, you gotta, I'm, I'm talking about, hey, I just got in contact with so and so we're going to play Wednesday, you know, today's Saturday, we're going to play Wednesday. We're going to travel two hours by train to get there. So yeah, let's get, get all your stuff together.

We're going down there and we're coming back the same day too.

Yeah.

And a lot of times, you know, well, like you said, you know, they might have played on Saturday and then all of a sudden they're, they've got a Tuesday game.

So you know, and I think that was maybe a little bit more the case with some of the, some of the smaller schools just you know, kind of scheduling things on a fly because they, they just, they weren't going to attract much of a crowd anyways. But yeah, times were different.

Yeah, much different. Well, Tim, you know, this is brilliant that you get to talk about people like Mr.

McCracken and some of his great things that he did for football and his importance to the game that it would be long forgotten. And you do this quite a bit.

And even some of the items in football in your tidbits each day, maybe you could just share with the audience how they can partake in your tidbits.

Sure. Easiest thing, just go to my, just, you know, google footballarcheology.com and you can subscribe.

There's just all you gotta do is submit your email address and there's free versions, there's paid versions and then you will get an email. Every time I publish an article, you'll get an email with the contents of that article in there.

It's some great stuff and it's a great research tool too. If you want to learn something more about NYU or any college or any player. That's a great thing to do too.

On footballarcheology.com site so, Tim, we thank you a lot and we'd love to talk to you again about some more football history next Tuesday.

Very good. We'll have to figure out what to talk about.

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