Quote:
Originally Posted by BigDipper 80
|
It's cool to consider some the locations of the original teams... Dayton, Canton, Columbus, Akron, Hammond, Decatur, Muncie, Rock Island, Rochester... definitely a Great Lakes/Midwestern league.
As a highly-amateur football historian, I feel that I must dispel a couple of half-truths here:
The Dayton game in 1920 was really the first matchup between two American Professional Football Association (APFA) teams... it wasn't the NFL until a couple years later, with many different teams. And the first game for an APFA team was actually played in Rock Island IL.
The claim of the first NFL game in Dayton is a bit tenuous because it wasn't the NFL then, and went through multiple iterations with consolidation of other leagues and exits/entrances and changes of teams, before it became the NFL in 1922.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BigDipper 80
|
This is football mythology... there's tons of it, just like in any sport. Rockne did NOT "invent" the forward pass in 1913. The forward pass became popularized at that time, and Rockne was one of the stars of the era who utilized it.
Rockne wasn't even the QB! It was a guy named Gus Dorais.
The forward pass was used in college football back in the 1870s and 80s, before Rockne was even born. Walter Camp is known to have performed the first forward pass in 1879, which resulted in a game-winning touchdown (that's why it was even recorded for history... it was notable in determining the outcome of the game between Princeton and Yale).
John Heisman convinced the college football rules committee to fully legalize the forward pass in 1906. He was a proponent of it in order to develop the complexity of the sport and for player safety reasons.