The episode delves into the fascinating historical narrative of Park H. Davis, a pivotal figure in American football history, who, despite his status as a backup player at Princeton, ascended to the esteemed position of head coach at the University of Wisconsin in 1893. We explore the unique circumstances that led to this extraordinary appointment during an era when coaching was often entrusted to graduates from the Eastern football schools. Davis's tenure, although brief and marked by a blend of coaching and on-field participation, provides insight into the evolving nature of football during its formative years. The discussion also highlights the contributions of Davis as a meticulous researcher and historian, whose work has significantly enriched our understanding of the sport's early years. We invite our listeners to engage with this captivating account, which not only celebrates Davis's achievements but also reflects on the broader context of football's development in America.

Timothy Brown joins us to tell of Davis from a recent Tidbit he wrote titled: Parke H. Davis Coaches the 1893 Wisconsin Badgers

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You're just in time for a great adventure going back in time in football history.

As we talk about one of the greatest historians of all time, Timothy Brown of football archaeology takes us on one of his famous tidbits.

And you're going to love this story.

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 portal to positive football history.

And welcome to Tuesday and footballarchaeology.com's Timothy P. Brown visits us to tell us about one of his recent tidbits.

Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey there.

Good to see you.

You know, normally I try to come up with a stupid dad joke at a, at this point, but I'm not going to do that.

Instead, I'm going to ask you to imagine, can you imagine Wisconsin hiring a backup tackle from Princeton to become their head coach to become the Badgers head coach this coming year?

Can you imagine that?

Can I imagine that?

Well, I, I, I guess I probably could because I don't, I'm not, I don't follow Wisconsin as close as you do.

Now if you said Penn State or Notre Dame, then maybe, you know, Ohio State, maybe I'd recognize that, you know, very mythological.

Who's Penn State?

Penn State is what?

So there's this guy, Park H. Davis who, you know, I mean, pretty much anybody who's into like really old time American football history is going to know who Park H. Davis is.

But for those who don't, you know, who aren't familiar with him, he's probably really the first true football historian.

I disagree with him on a couple of things, but the fact of the matter is he really estate.

He was the guy who kind of established football history.

The intercollegiate Game is one of the storied books of, it's like the Magna Carta football history.

Yeah, yeah, good.

Yeah, good, good.

Magna Carta.

I like Magna Carta.

So, so anyways, he, you know, he played it at, at Princeton.

But as best as I can tell, you know, I Went back and tried to look at game reports and everything, you know, because they used to always have the lineups.

And as far as I can tell, he's pretty much of a backup player now.

He started, started a game here or there, but he's playing for one of the top three teams, four teams in the country, which is understandable, you know, but nevertheless, he's a backup.

But either he didn't like it or just decided to go into the football world.

And he takes off and he takes a job as the head coach at Wisconsin.

And, you know, so that was the time when the Eastern football schools for the most part, followed the graduate coaching model, which meant that mostly the guy who was the coach, I'm sorry, the captain the previous year, stuck around for the fall and acted as like a coach, the advisory coach of the team.

The guy who ran the team was the captain.

You know, the captain made that, made the, you know, roster decisions, made the on the field, on field decisions.

But the, the coach was more of an advisor and of course, subject to personalities and, you know, whatever.

So.

But if you weren't from out east, that you're someplace like Wisconsin or Kansas or wherever, you had to hire some guy from out east to teach you how to play football and teach your kids how to play football because they didn't know, you know, it was still a new game and it was dominated by the folks in the East.

So Wisconsin hires this guy, Park Davis.

And so the interesting thing is, like, even if you look at the newspaper coverage of the time, it kind of sounds like there were some things where Davis was running the show.

In other times, the captain was running the show.

So it was more of a trade off between the two.

But it sounds more like the captain ran the show than Davis did, even though he's the head coach.

Plus, Davis started at right tackle in every game of the year.

So here he is.

He's, you know, played four years at Princeton, he's the coach at Wisconsin, but he's also starting at right tackle now, sometimes when injuries occurred, then he played left half back, you know, so, you know, it's just a different game at different time.

And it's not like he's not the only guy who did that, you know, Amos Lonzo Stagg played at Yale, then he coached it, Springfield YMCA.

And guess what he did the first couple of years he played for Chicago Right.

You know, so it wasn't that it wasn't an unusual thing for the coach to play, the hired professional coach to play.

So I mean, it's just one of those things.

It's just, it's kind of a crazy deal that, that's, that, that's what happened.

But you know, so he ends up, you know, they ended up four and two that year.

They, they lost to Chicago Athletic Club, which is a, you know, pretty powerful club I think, I'm pretty sure.

What's his name?

The big dude, the big guard from Puff Heffelfinger.

I think.

Yeah, I think he played for them at times.

Maybe I don't think he played in that game but you know, that, that was a very strong, you know, mostly, you know, former college player team.

And so they, they, they beat Wisconsin pretty handily.

Wisconsin did real well most of the season but then they, they met Minnesota and Minnesota massacred him.

So you know, it's just one of those, one of things where, you know, Davis was successful and yet like most of the graduate coaches of the time, he was there for the season and boom, he's gone, right?

And he ends up coaching Amherst the next year.

Then he coaches Lafayette for three years after that, one of which he is credited as being the national champion because they beat Penn in part by having Fielding Yos, the future Michigan coach and AD play as a ringer for them for one game.

And guess who named them as national champ?

Bark H. Yoast.

The same guy who is the head coach.

So you know, now they may well have been one of the best teams but I'm going to kind of say that it didn't hurt that the guy who named them was the coach.

So anyway, it just, it's again one of those things, just crazy standards compared to today.

And I mean I, on the one hand I respect the hell out of Davis in terms of his research and all kinds of things.

But he's a Princeton alum so yeah, know, yada yada, but still top notch, you know, top notch guy, you know, cannot, cannot argue with that.

He obviously coached a very fine team at Lafayette despite the ringer.

I mean, you know, they had to be really good to play Princeton or to play Pen and beat them.

So you know, can't argue with his coaching skill, etc.

But anyways, just, it's just one of those things where the, the standards of the Day are rather different from now and you know, and he fit into them and he did, you know, he did well and he, you know, he's a big, you know, accomplished author and, and he was a lawyer.

You know, I mean, he, this was not his day job.

You know, he was a lawyer and, and successful and.

But he, you know, he stuck around and in Easton, you know, after poaching it at Lafayette, and was a big supporter of both Lafayette and Princeton, his alma mater for years, for decades, you know, so.

Gotta, gotta love a guy like that.

Yeah, most definitely.

Now he, I mean, people complain about, you know, Eastern bias in college football today's standards.

You had, you know, probably the two biggest names of announcing, you know, camp and his all American teams of, you know, often accused of Eastern bias.

And Davis.

No, not, not accused Eastern bias for sure.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

And, and H. Davis with his retroactive national champion things.

You look at some of these compared to, you know, there's.

You got a whole bunch of, you know, whole gate and you probably got five or six different major groups or people that have gone down Billingsley and Park H. Davis going back and naming who the national champions are because they didn't have it, you know, for the first, what, 30 years or so.

And you'll see everybody sort of in line with whose is.

And all of a sudden, you know, a team that has like 2, 2 loss Harvard becomes a national champion.

You have all these undefeated teams by today's standards, we would be like, what, what the heck are you talking about here?

But who knows?

He.

He was there.

Closer to it than than I was or you were.

And yeah, maybe he had some insight that we don't know, but it sure looks kind of suspicious on some of them.

Well, so I, I will say this about like a lot of the, A lot of the folks who name national championships, even the ones that the.

From the old days, the ones that the NCAA identifies or accepts, a lot of them were based on some kind of mathematical formula.

So the formulas aren't really that good.

The Dickinson.

Yeah.

But I will say this, you know, for sure about Davis.

You know, he, he was a meticulous researcher.

You know, he went out there and you could argue that he was wrong about this year or that year, including his own team, but he went back and he, you know, he researched and talked to people who were there.

Right, because he was.

He's old enough to be there.

Right.

So he, he talked to people who were there who understood the game at the time and compared notes and said, you know, Harvard was better than Princeton this year, or Harvard was better than Yale, or Harvard was better than Syracuse or whatever it was.

And, you know, so, you know, as much as I kind of make fun of him for the, for the Lafayette decision, I think I probably trust his view on championship teams as much as anybody else's.

You know, mathematical formulas, while generally like nowadays, I really do trust them.

Right.

Because of inter intersectional play and things like that.

But back then, I mean, I, I think he probably had it as right as anybody could possibly have gotten it.

Right.

The details he has of each of those early seasons is impeccable.

You couldn't find it in a newspaper.

You mean, whether he's right or wrong, he has a written history of all these seasons that nobody else could, has ever put together that I've seen from that era, the way he did it, naming, calling out players.

But I think maybe the biggest thing is some of the images he has in that book that he identified probably would have been lost to history.

Wouldn't know you.

He has, I believe he has like, Harvard McGill images from that meeting of that 14th and May 15th.

He does.

He does.

Photography was barely, you know, it was a juvenile at best at that time.

And, you know, here's.

There's just images of this that he's identified and saved for, you know, so we can look at, you know, 130, 140 years later, and it's identified that way.

So that's one thing.

And it's out of copyright.

So I can steal those images and put them into my own.

Right.

My stuff, you know.

Yeah, me too.

No, I mean, I mean, I.

Again, I mean, I, I make fun of him in certain respects, but hey, you know, it's like, you know, I bow to the man.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's definitely true.

So.

And he has, I mean, it's a great story.

The Pen and Lafayette story is.

And, you know, and Fielding ghost, of all people, you know, what he went on to do afterwards is just such a great legend of the game.

It's fun to tell and fun to listen to multiple times.

But, Tim, you have a lot of different aspects of the history of football that are fun, that are interesting, that maybe people don't know because it's, you know, 140, 150 years earlier in our past.

And you do this in your tidbits on football archaeology.

Maybe you could share with the listeners how they can take in some of these, sure.

Just, I mean, easiest way is just go to footballarchaeology.com it's a substack site.

Subscribe.

Every time I publish something, you'll get an email that covers that information.

You know, otherwise, follow me on Blue sky or just bookmark football archaeology and go there and search around whenever you want.

There is, there's a search function.

So if you're, I mean, I, I don't, I don't know how much people actually appreciate it, but, you know, if you want to search some old stupid football thing, you know, just put it into the search function there and there's a chance that I've covered it at some point.

All right.

Well, Tim, we really appreciate you.

You're sharing the history, doing the research and coming on sharing it with us each and every Tuesday.

We'd love to talk to you again next week.

Very good, sir.

Thank you.

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

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