There’s a big football game this weekend I hear!
Some love the sport, some love the spectacle, some love those magnificent passing plays where a quarterback finds a receiver way down the field for a big gain.
Amazingly, those passes that are such a huge part of modern football were actually against the rules in the early days of the game.
Back then, football was a ground game; offenses and defenses would run toward each other, sometimes in ways that benefited their teams but sometimes in ways that left players badly injured or worse.
There were calls then, just as there are today, to either make football safer for players or just shut it down altogether.
The powers that be (prodded by none other than President Theodore Roosevelt) made some rules changes ahead of the 1906 season.
Those changes put an end to some of the most dangerous on-field formations.
They also allowed teams to throw passes for the first time, though initially only short passes were legal.
And there were some serious incentives to not throw passes at all.
A dropped pass meant a 15 yard penalty, and a pass that hit the ground without being touched was a turnover!
At first teams didn’t want to risk giving up the ball for the new kind of play.
Also, in some circles, passing just wasn’t considered manly enough to use.
Others thought passes would water down the game so much, they would finish football off.
But as on-field injuries and tragedies continued, football authorities loosened the rules on passing and teams started to find some clever ways to use them, at least once they started penalizing defensive players who would just clobber receivers before there was even a pass for them to catch.
Pro football has continued to tweak the rules over time to make passing a bigger part of the game; the design of the football itself has also changed so that it’s easier to throw a pass.
Because as we know now, there are a lot of people who watch football in the hopes of seeing that high drama that is a long pass thrown and caught against the odds to turn the tide of a game.
Or maybe they just want to see how Taylor Swift reacts to a big pass. Either way.
Tomorrow in Morristown, New Jersey, it’s Mac & Cheese Mayhem.
Restaurants and chefs will show off their greatest takes on this classic comfort food in the hopes of winning the Mac Daddy Award.
The Frequently Asked Questions on their website includes “Will food be available for purchase?”
Um, yes.
How the Forward Pass Saved Football (History.com)
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Image: Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Ray Austrian Collection, Gift of Beatrice L. Austrian, Caryl A. Austrian and James A. Austrian