Timothy P. Brown's Blog

Until recently, college athletic conferences were regional, mainly due to the limits of transportation technologies. Despite being regional, many early conferences, including the Big Ten and the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association, were formed based on athletic philosophy and eligibility standards rather than as scheduling platforms. Despite being in a conference, teams generally played schools in their home and nearby states, aside from occasional intersectional trips that always invo...

Roy Riegels picked up a fumble in the 1929 Rose Bowl, got turned around, and ran toward his own goal before his teammates tackled him on the one-yard line. “Wrong Way” Riegels was not the first or the last to make that mistake, only the most famous directionally challenged runner.

Surely someone ran south when they shoulda run north before W. G. Mack did so for Colgate in 1894, but he’s the first one I know of (thanks to reader, Christopher Haack). Mack, Colgate’s left tackle, evaded all pursuers...

Pigskin Dispatch’s Darin Hayes and I discuss the 1932 Colgate-Brown Thanksgiving Day game that many touted as the contest to determine the Eastern Rose Bowl invitee. Both teams were undefeated coming into the game and Colgate had not been scored on, while Brown had beaten seven undefeated teams over the course of the season.

Watch or listen to the podcast here, or read the original Tidbit below.

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Thanksgiving Day commemorates a 1621 feast between the Wampanoag tribe and the Pilgrims following a bountiful harvest. Eating well has long been a part of the day’s traditions, as has football. That tradition was set in stone when the Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA) chose to hold its annual championship game in New York City on Thanksgiving Day. Those IFA games involved two teams comprised of Caucasians, and football games involving N...

There was a time when coaches told football players with minor aches and pains to rub some dirt on it, but the rise of artificial turf and the disappearance of multi-purpose stadiums now leave players hard-pressed to find healing dirt.

One source of dirt came from games played at baseball stadiums. Gridirons intersected by baseball infields were once a common sight, though the last NFL game played on such a field came when the Kansas City Chiefs played the Raiders at Oakland-Alameda County Colise...

Yesterday, I received messages from several long-term subscribers asking whether I had ever written about particular topics or pointing out an interesting event in football history. The messages point to two issues. One is that Substack has a search function, accessible via the magnifying glass icon in the top banner, to check on whether I’ve covered a topic in the past.

Click on the magnifying glass, enter a term, and you’ll see whether the term has appeared in the site’s 1,350+ posts. I’m happy...

When researching football’s past, I sometimes come across information that doesn’t catch my attention until I stumble upon something else that connects the dots. That’s the case with a 1955 MacGregor catalog I acquired a few years ago. Since I’ve written several times since then about the evolution of football face masks, I’ve looked at the catalog multiple times. Yet, I didn’t pay attention to the catalog’s distinction between the Marietta, Sowle, and Plastic Bar styles of face masks.

Pigskin Dispatch’s Darin Hayes and I discuss the days when defenses could not advance fumbles that hit the ground, and the reason that rule came about. We also veer off into a discussion of why the flea flicker, which originally was the same as the hook-and-lateral, came to be the name for a different play.

Watch or listen to the podcast here, or read the original Tidbit below.

Football Archaeology is reader-supported. Click here to donate a couple of bucks, buy one of my books, or otherwise suppo...

Harvard and Yale will play for the 141st time this Saturday when they meet at Fenway Park, but this story concerns their 70th meeting, played in New Haven in 1953. Not everyone around the country could make it there for the game, so they made do wherever they lived.

The Yale and Harvard grads living in Chicagoland in 1953 traveled and read out-of-town newspapers, national magazines, and the alumni magazines of the day. Still, they would have hoped for some coverage of the upcoming Harvard-Yale ga...

The Football Archaeology Hall of Fame, which honors those whose significant contributions to football go unrecognized by traditional halls of fame. Episode #2 recognizes the Teter brothers who played for Otterbein and developed the center snap to the holder process for field goal attempts. Until their innovation, all field goal attempts occurred by drop kick.

The video is available to paid subscribers on Substack one week before it is shared on the Football Archaeology YouTube channel. Episode #1...