Note that I have created a new channel dedicated to college football history. Join me there! youtube.com/@hardcorecollegefootballhistory

Now I can't wait for the release of Madden 1894!

This series is fantastic! I am a former member of the Pro Football Historians Association and I am learning things I did not know! You presentation is excellent, sir!

Tackling below the waist was legalized in Rugby Union only slightly later than it was in American rules. It was Canadian football that this change came to the last. (It's hard to generalize about Canadian football in the early decades because of the proliferation of rules sets in various local and provincial unions.)

I LIKE what you're doing ! Yes, more visuals and animation would be great. I am a Huge Fan of Canadian Football. I think it is a very dynamic , action-packed game. Very interesting that Harvard played McGill University from Montreal in 1975 that featured 3 Downs. The Canadian Game went its own way staying with 3 Downs, 12 players and a bigger field. Over the decades the two types of North American Football have had an interesting relationship, with many subtle modifications of the Rules. I look forward to more of your videos.

Awesome series! Can't wait to see how much crazier it gets!

Love these - ive wished ken burns do a detailed history of football - your videos provide the history ive been looking for

Exactly what I was looking for! Love the in depth analysis into the history for the sport. I love the headers for the dates and names since I often loose track and can easily look down and know when we are talking about it. Also love the old play diagrams

This is truly some of the best content on youtube. Unbelievable. Thank you sir, for the excellent series.

I've been telling people the tush push is football in its rawest form. It a has a similar description of some of these old time plays

I love this series.

I’m loving these college football history videos please keep it up

When I was at school in the sixties we were taught to tackle around the legs playing rugby, few could do it to perfection.

Simply fascinating! I've always been interested in this extremely obscure history of the formation and early rules of american football.

LOL Bovine Scatology.....I love these informative and interesting videos about early American football. Keep up the good work, Jon! I look forward to the next episode and thank you for your time-consuming research! One note: I think early it was 3 downs to get 5 yards, before becoming 4 downs to get 10.

As a historian who loves football this was made for me!

Show more photos, even if they're not directly related to what you're saying! LOL Putting a pic up on one half of the screen works. Your level of detailed research is excellent! You are presenting the results of your research, not trying to offer mindless entertainment. Keep it up.

i love this time in football history. you make great entertaining informative videos on this. awesome. thanks.

Thank you for this fascinating detailed account of football

Good Stuff Jon really enjoyed. Looking forward to the next video.

I'm really enjoying this series of videos your doing Jon, keep up the good work.

You are very good at describing things. I enjoy history and I love football. Thank you for giving me insight on how it all began and all the difficulties and successes of football when it all began. I look forward to other videos you have...as I have recently subscribed to your channel...but sorry...I am a Badgers fan 😂

Love the history stuff! Keep it up!

Excellent. Looking forward to when the Bugeaters become the Cornhuskers!

Thank you for these videos. Very helpful information for some writing that I'm doing. You being a Husker is a bonus. Former Lincoln/Friend, NE resident and lifelong Sooner fan. That rivalry is one of the things that I'm trying to talk about.

Amazing series. Simply fascinating. Perhaps some quiet music in the background would make these videos legendary! Cheers🎉

This is great stuff John!! I had no idea how tough these guys were.

Now we know why there is no football equivalent to old fashioned base ball exhibition games! 😉

I LOVE Football So fascinating

love the photos

Here's a tip. Talk to some high school or college players or wannabes and coach them how to run these plays. Of course, go with modern safety equipment whenever contact occurs. Set up some cameras where the defensive players would have been so that we could see the wedge arriving in full strength. You duplicate all the plays from each stage of the game, and I am sure retro football would catch on again for a while, like early baseball did.

It’s crazy that in my lifetime kickoffs were very reminiscent of some of these plays.

Great videos! One recommendation: Number the series in the title of the videos so people can easily watch them in the correct order. Keep up the great work!

THANKS BRUH GOOD STUFF

Oh, yeah. I can't wait to see what develops next in the history of collegiate football.

So Heffelfinger is the 19th century version of Troy Polamalu jumping the line of scrimmage 🤣

This is great stuff!

I wonder how the families of the severely injured or killed players reacted. These are, after all, the most elite universities in the country, so all of the students who go there are from wealthy well-connected families. I can't imagine that they'd be happy about having their sons coming home from the fancy Ivy League institution in a pine box. So you'd think that some of them would have tried to do something about it.

You have done a great job! I am subscribing.

I like it! It's good!

We ran the wedge on kickoff return in high school. Very effective!

A couple of your videos popped up this weekend. I no longer follow football, but found them interesting. To me, the most interesting is today's press talking about today's controversy like it's so new or unique. Football's always had controversy, it's just the details that change. Sounds like even the basic themes haven't really changed that much in 150 or so years either.

Interesting topic of discussion

A dude getting KO'd for 5hrs is INSANE

flying wedge sounds like a kickoff

5:04 You may not be aware of this, but the wedge is still legal in NCAA and Federation rules, provided the blockers don't use their arms to wrap their teammates. Such a wedge (without the use of the arms) is still a fairly common tactic in children's football, and indeed the best way to stop it is to crab across the apex player, bringing the formation down as described. I coach it.

NFL should play a few games with 1890 rules, with helmets of course

Flying wedge with no helmets or pads and forward motion before the snap. What possibly could go wrong?

We want the flying wedge animation!

25:30 when you say "The biggest thing about this" my brain immediately goes to "wait, there was a 12-4 score in a football game?"

Remember cities like Buffalo and Cleveland won championships back then.

Imagine: Ivy League powerhouses of extremely violent football. Mass momentum football, so dangerous Service academies don't play, and Ivy League powerhouses. Multiple broken noses, broken legs, broken collar bones, from an Ivy League game. Incredible.

So football started out using Newtonian Physics (F = mA, Football = mass times Aggression). Now football uses Quantum Mechanics where the defense doesn't know whether it's going to be a run or pass until the ball goes over the line of scrimmage.

The geometry of football has always been as much a bug as a feature. Still is today.

Spectator revulsion against mass plays was far from universal. There were plenty of approving fans who enjoyed the concentrated application of force, bodies on bodies, as long as it didn't have to include themselves. Others objected only to a steady diet of mass plays and just wanted to see more variety.

When you say rule changes have come about to make sure that the American game was different from rugby, that can be taken two ways. One is simply that the rule changes made the game distinct. The other way is saying that the rule changes were deliberately undertaken to differentiate the game. I assure you that the latter was not the case. The only example I can think of where there was an effort to distinguish a national type of football on purpose was the slightly later one by the GAA to make Gaelic football deliberately stand out as non-British. And it was *three* downs to advance 5 yards or to take it backwards 10 -- or by the time in question, take it back 20 yards.

I prefer the NFL from the 1970s and 80s. Roger Staubach, Kenny Anderson, Walter Payton, Danny Marino, John Riggins, Jim Plunkett, Marcus Allen.......

Hey look up thomas Edison. He recorded the 1903 Princeton vs Yale

There was (probably still is) a Popeye cartoon made in the thirties wherein Bluto's team forms a "flying wedge." Since this was illustrated close to the time when the flying wedge was legal, the cartoon may have historical relevance.

All of these plays seem less outlandish if you are familiar with rugby scrums.

I honestly believe football befor the invention of the forward pass was one of the worst team sports ever played.

NOTE: World rugby tackle rules reference nothing higher than the shoulders (although Aussie rugby is trialing sternum height this year 2024). proper tackleing techniques as trained here in Aus' is to aim at the waist hips on the run in. Stiff arms have been ruled improper but the deciding line in refereeing is ambiguous ( a push off with a 'not-totally-straight-arm' is not a 'straight arm' thought that could technique be called a breech of play). You cant "ankle-tap" in Rugby i.e. interfere with the lower legs or swipe the feet. The tackle target is therefore from the shoulders/chest to the lower legs providing its with two hands/arms. One of the main differences in tackling style between Rugby and US-Football is Rugby places less emphasis on inches of forward progress so head on tackles are far less prominent in Rugby and can constitute a breech of play. This leads to tackles coming more often, from an oblique angle much more so then fully head on. BTW - Love your content on the birth of the game keep it coming.

Flying wedgy!!!

Rugby is tackling below the waist only, not above. You got it backwards

Is the Tush-Push not a mass play?

Vinatieri, not 'o' and where did you get the pronunciation for Esiason?

Good stuff here. Well done sir. However, you lost me when you started discussing how much better and more fun the NFL is today over 15 years ago. This is just a terrible opinion.

1:09 And now here we are in 2024 where they have basically made tackling below the waist illegal again. What are we doing? Trying to go back to rugby?

Better than what we have now.

Colleges in the 1890s using players that aren't actually college students. What goes around comes around lol.

I see alot of broken bones and beat up people.

You don't know what you are talking about. The scoring at this time is less than ,10 years ago. Montana, Brady, Marino. The MVP this year threw 25 TDs. Are you kidding. You are a fan... Not a coach keep looking into history. Today's game is not even close to 10-15 years ago.

God bless Tom Osbourne

College players were dying right and left

you sound bored. v

Offside. No s

love your content sir! However, the NFL and college is controled by money. Best real football is high school football. True grit and sportsmanship. Kind of like the 1800s. God bless and like your historical analysis, but please encourage true amatuer football.

With all due respect sir, I disagree that the NFL is better now than 15 years ago. Today's game is legislating defense out and because of that the games are less entertaining due to being less competitive. If every offense scores touchdowns and the winner will be the last team with the ball, how is this more fun than watching 11 guys on defense give their heart and soul to stopping the offense and being successful at times. Yes, there will be more injuries but your coming across as being dishonest by saying everyone played the same a decade or more ago. You sound like a college professor telling his students how woke culture is superior without allowing any counter arguments that let them decide for themselves. Shameful tactics.

Tackling below the waste is not allowed i Rugby? Umm what? Always been legal in rugby and in fact is the preferred style of tackling! Lmfao.

Moving formation is conceptually developed in Naval warfare and the tactics on a maneuvering board. As an OC we learned the syllabus of the Naval War College, our neighboring stitution in Newport, RI. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_board#:~:text=A%20maneuvering%20board%20is%20an,time%2Fspeed%2Fdistance%20nomogram.