JRN 362 - Lecture Six

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
Lecture Six

Football Ascending
• In 1905, the deaths of at least 19
players that year led U.S. president
Theodore Roosevelt to convene a
meeting among football authorities
headed by Walter Camp to make the
game safer. California at Berkeley
and Stanford would ban football after
the 1905 season anyway.

Football Ascending
• The meeting in October 1905 and in
others without Roosevelt in
December and January 1906, led to
new rule and a new organization to
oversee the game.
• “Most of the old football was
abolished,” said one observer.

Football Ascending
• The football rules for 1906 included
the establishment of the neutral zone
at the line of scrimmage and
shortened the game to two 30-minute
halves. The rules also called for a 10-
minute halftime and increased the
number of on-field officials to four.

Football Ascending
• The rules also banned striking with
fists and elbows and kicking players
and defined unnecessary roughness
and unsportsmanlike conduct.
Penalties for such violations were
either game disqualification or 15
yards depending on the referee’s
judgment.

Football Ascending
• Most importantly, the new rules
permitted the forward pass but many
restrictions.
• For example, the ball could only
travel five yards to either side of the
center. And pass interference was
legal.

Football Ascending
• If the ball fell untouched, it would be a
turnover.
• The risks of passing thus outweighed
any immediate, visible benefits.

Football Ascending
• That meant the “old football” would
not go quickly despite fears that it
would.
• Critics of the news rules said the
changes eliminated the reason for
football: Camp’s display of physical
courage, or manliness.

Football Ascending
• The humor magazine Puck
interpreted the new rules in a
different perspective.
• The new rules would lead to a bright
future, securing the Dream Life for
generations to come – perhaps, as
the skeptical woman in the
background suggests.

Football Ascending
• Changes outside the rules swept
through college football in this period,
too.
• Conferences formed in the 1890s to
rationalize schedules, ease travel and
make the season more coherent.

Football Ascending
• The antecedents of the Southeastern
Conference and Atlantic Coast
Conference formed in 1894, followed
a year later by a conference of
Midwestern schools that would
evolve into the Big Ten. A
conference of schools in California
also emerged in the 1890s.

Football Ascending
• In 1902, the first “bowl” game (not
called that) took place, as the
Pasadena, California, officials invited
Stanford and Michigan to play on
New Year’s Day as part of its annual
Tournament of Roses parade. But
another game would not be played
until 1916.

Football Ascending
• In terms of geography, a combination
of eastern tradition and western ease
with change meant that the
innovative element in football would
shift away from where the game
emerged to the west toward central
Pennsylvania and beyond.

Football Ascending
• Over time, colleges adapted to the
new rules with creative flair, in part
because the game lacked the
tradition of the east – and alumni who
would criticize change. After all, many
were new schools.
• High schools, too, were not as tied to
any traditions.

Football Ascending
• Spectators and many commentators
applauded.
• “For spectators, the open game
meant that the ‘ball is always in sight,’
presenting opportunities to track the
action more closely and in clear
view,” one columnist wrote.

Football Ascending
• “The game is the thing, and the new
game so far as we have seen it is
vastly more open and interesting,” he
added.
• Still, passing restrictions – no
throwing the ball more than five yards
to either side of the center or turnover
on an incompletion - limited adoption.

Football Ascending
• Scholars continue to debate when the
first forward pass was thrown.
• But St. Louis University’s Brad
Robinson is generally credited as the
first to throw in 1906, although Yale
claimed it was the first in a game
among top teams.

Football Ascending
• In 1906, St. Louis coach Eddie
Cochems embedded the passing
game into his offense.
• The team completed four touchdown
passes in a game against Iowa that
year en route to an 11-0 record.

Football Ascending
• One coach above others gave the
pass a certain legitimacy because his
team used it to great effect.
• The coach was Glenn “Pop’ Warner,
one of the most innovative coaches in
the history of the game and among
the first star coaches.

Football Ascending
• Michigan’s Fielding Yost was
another, starting in 1901. He
designed a fast-paced offense or his
“point a minute” squad, earning the
nickname of “Hurry Up Yost.” From
1901-1905, Michigan went unbeaten
in 56 games.

Football Ascending
• Warner attended Cornell (he is fourth
from the right, second row, in the
team photo from 1890s, left.)
• Teammates called him “Pop”
because he was the oldest player on
the team.

Football Ascending
• Warner was a restless football lifer
whose innovative approaches to the
game often stretched the rules.
• But his teams won, and that meant
he always had job offers dangled in
front of him.

Football Ascending
• Warner coached Georgia in 1895 and
1896, winning 12 games and losing
8, before returning to Cornell in 1897
and 1898.
• In 1899, Warner accepted the job at
the Carlisle Indian Industrial School,
and he stayed there until 1903. He
left but returned in 1907.

Football Ascending
• Carlisle, a boarding school for Native
Americans funded by the U.S.
government, was located in central
Pennsylvania.
• And by the early 20th century, it
fielded one of the top football teams
in the nation under Warner.

Football Ascending
• In fact, during Warner’s first tour of
duty with Carlisle, he deployed the
hidden ball trick in a game against
Harvard in 1903.
• The great writer Sally Jenkins
described a play in a book she wrote
about how Carlisle changed the
game of football:

Football Ascending
• “Johnson gathered the ball in, and the Indians formed a wall in front of the
quarterback. Ducking behind the cluster of teammates, Exendine pulled out
the back of Dillon's jersey. Johnson slipped the ball beneath it.
• Johnson yelled, "Go!" The Indians scattered. Each player hugged his
stomach, as if he held the ball. The Harvard players bore down on them.

Football Ascending
• “As the Crimson slowed, looking for the ball, Dillon ran straight through them
and up the field, his arms swinging freely. After thirty yards, Dillon was alone
and in the clear.

Football Ascending
• “Johnson, meanwhile, ran for the sidelines with his arms doubled over his
midsection, as if he had the ball. A Harvard man launched himself at
Johnson, who tripped. As Johnson went down, another Crimson player fell
on top of him, and then another, and then another. "I guess the whole
Harvard team hit me," Johnson said later. The crowd roared. But Johnson
was empty-handed.
• Suddenly, a roar swept the stadium. Dillon continued to lope in a straight line
toward the opposite goal. The hump beneath his sweater had become
obvious. The roar deepened: Dillon was the ball carrier.]

Football Ascending
• Four years later, on November 23,
1907, Warner would unleash the
forward pass against the University of
Chicago, coached by Yale alumni
Amos Alonzo Stagg.
• Some 27,000 people gathered at
Marshall Field in Chicago to watch.

Football Ascending
• Carlisle shocked Chicago when
fullback Peter Hauser, left, threw a
40-yard spiral for a touchdown to
Albert Exendine, leading the team to
victory.
• A newspaper game chart locates the
moment when the forward pass
emerged in a big game.

Football Ascending
• Warner worked continuously on
perfecting the passing game.
• In 1912, he wrote a technical manual
including photos to show players and
coaches the proper technique how to
throw the football.

Football Ascending
• Warner configured a variety of plays
featuring the forward pass, often
diagramming movement that led to a
deep attack against the secondary.
• Meanwhile, he offered precise advice
on the passing game.

Football Ascending
• Warner published his book amid a
series of rule changes between 1906-
1912 that loosened restrictions on the
pass.
• That meant coaches could integrate
passing more fully in the offense on
teams that had players who could
throw.

Football Ascending
• Warner’s innovations ranged far
beyond developing techniques for
passing the football when few teams
tried the play.
• Among other things, Warner created
the three-point stance, screen pass,
and the single- and double-wing
formation.

Football Ascending
• He helped to develop lightweight
padding that protected the thighs and
other areas of players’ bodies,
particularly when recovering from
injuries.

Football Ascending
• In 1908, Warner offered the first
correspondence course (course by
mail) for football coaches and
players, which helped to improve
technique and tactics in places too
remote or too poor to afford paid
coaches.

Football Ascending
• The innovative Warner, though, was
not immune to the martial spirit that
swept through the sport in the 1890s
and intensified as the new century
unfolded.
• He also preached cleaned living but
not for moral purposes. It made
players better, he wrote.

Football Ascending
• In 1914, Warner was hired by the
University of Pittsburgh where he
reeled off 33 straight major wins and
three national championships in
1915, 1916 and 1918.
• He later coached at Stanford and
Temple before retiring in 1938.

Football Ascending
• As noted earlier, not all schools copied Warner’s success with the pass.
• Risk-averse coaches in the east maintained a running attack that left little
room for the open game the 1906 rules were designed to create.
• Even four years after the rules permitted the forward pass and new offenses
emerged to include it, only one ball was thrown in the 1910 Yale-Harvard
game.

Football Ascending
• Still, the game’s popularity continued to soar.
• The rules committee, meanwhile, kept introducing new rules each year,
including the requirement to use seven players on the line of scrimmage.
• By 1912, rules allocating points to how teams scored created the modern
system of scoring, and the game started to resemble the one that is
presently played more than ever.

Football Ascending
• 6 points for a touchdown
• 3 points for a field goal
• 1 point for a kick after touchdown
• 2 points for a safety

Football Ascending
• Yet tension over the motivation for persistent rule changes remained: were
these for player safety or spectator appeal?
• One commentator wrote:

Football Ascending
• “It’s important that this committee, or you, its sponsors (colleges), decide
with sharp distinctness whether its efforts are to be directed chiefly to
making the game safe for boys who play it or spectacular for the benefit of
the spectators … If the number of spectators who attend our games and
their enjoyment is of first importance, then our rules making must be such as
to produce a spectacle to please them.”

Football Ascending
• The fact remained that for whatever
reason, more and more people
wanted to play and watch football as
the 20th century deepened.
• Some 432 of 555 American cities had
community or club football teams.

Football Ascending
• A study in 1910 revealed that there
were:
- 20,000 college players
- 48,000 prep school players
- 5,000 players competing for towns
and clubs
- 2,000 players competing for military

Football Ascending
• Four years later, the numbers
continued to astonish:
- 450 college teams
- 6,000 high school teams
- 1500 club teams
- 159,000 players (up from an
estimated 75,000 four years earlier)
- 31,300 games played

Football Ascending
• Another study figured it cost $15 to
outfit each player, meaning a national
expenditure of $1,125,000 in all per
year for equipment.
• The official Spalding football – the J5
- cost $5.

Football Ascending
• The largest expense, though, turned
out to be construction costs to build
edifices to hold the tens of thousands
of fans demanding to see football,
college football.

Football Ascending
• As noted, Harvard opened the first
large stadium built specifically for
football in 1903.
• Instead of wooden seats, Harvard
poured concrete and erected massive
columns referencing classic Athens,
with seating for more than 30,000
fans.

Football Ascending
• Yale made plans for a stadium of its
own. And it would be massive.
• In June 1913, the college broke
ground west of downtown New
Haven.
• The college would call it a “bowl”
because of its shape.

Football Ascending
• It was initially designed to hold
60,000 spectators but had the
footings to expand to 125,000.
• Unlike Harvard, which built a raised
structure, Yale carved its stadium out
of the very earth, making it, in effect,
part of the earth’s crust.

Football Ascending
• It doesn’t get more permanent than
that in expressing the belief that the
game was one to be played eternally
in front of thousands of people.

Football Ascending
• The field is set so that at 3:00 p.m. in
mid-November (when Yale would
play either Harvard or Princeton), the
sun aligns with the five-yard lines,
creating a dramatic natural lighting
scene.
• The clearance between rows meant
that fans had a clear view.

Football Ascending
• The site also included two large
parking lots, anticipating the rise and
ultimate triumph of car culture – and
starting a tradition of pre-game
tailgating that persists to the present.
• The image on the left is from 1954,
40 years after the Yale Bowl opened.

Football Ascending
• The Yale Bowl opened on November
21, 1914, with Yale playing host to
Harvard.
• More stadiums would be built over
the next 20 years, many copies of the
bowl as colleges sought to mimic
Yale – even if Yale’s days as a
collegiate power were numbered.

Football Ascending
• Even with new stadiums popping up on or near college campuses
throughout the U.S. (more on that later) not all who wanted to attend games
could.
• For one, travel during this period was sketchy. Trains took spectators to
games in the northeast but in the west, spectators were often out of luck.
Roads as we know them from coast-to-coast did not exist.
• But new devices emerged to let spectators gather and “watch.”

Football Ascending
• Trains or trolleys took spectators to
games in urban centers but in rural
areas, where many land=-grant
colleges stood, fans had to rely on
new devices that would let them
gather and “watch” away games.

Football Ascending
• Prior to the rise of film and radio in
the early 1920s, people who could
not attend games gathered to watch
a device called a Play-o-Graph or
Grid Graph.
• It track the movement of the ball for
spectators.

Football Ascending
• The graph listed lineups, down and
distance, total yards, and the score.
• A football field mockup served as its
core, and that included a movable
football to show possession and
scrimmage line.

Football Ascending
• The graph required three people to
operate:
- One at the game to relay the
action to an announcer.
- The announcer to perform a
primitive version of play-by-play
to the crowd.
- A third person to move the
pieces to update the board.

Football Ascending
• Spectators would gather on college
quads or gyms to watch their team.
• They would react to board
movements as if they were in
attendance at the game.

Football Ascending
• Students at the University of
Wyoming watched their team play,
reacting to the movement of the ball
on the graph.
• The graph would soon be replaced by
radio, but it underscored football’s
appeal and capacity to serve as the
core of social life and community.

Football Ascending
• And the game’s appeal continued to
create new generations of fans in a
country brimming with youth.
• Some 19,000,000 boys enrolled in
grammar school in 1910, and many
wanted to play football.

Football Ascending
• Artist William Glackens captured the
frenzy of football among youth in his
1911 work titled “For the
Championship of the Back-Lot
League”.
• Appearing in Collier’s Magazine, it
realistically depicted football in New
York City, revealing it as an anarchic,

Football Ascending
• Grammar schools, particularly in the
upper Midwest in states adjacent to
the Great Lakes, began to field
teams.
• It was thought that one in five boys
played football (note the football in
the store window), setting up football
for its future.

Football Ascending
• Yet it would be war in Europe, which
broke out in 1914, the same year the
Yale Bowl opened, that would have
more of a profound impact on the
game than rule changes, new
stadiums or millions of youths playing
the game on sandlots or on rural
fields.

Football Ascending
• To be sure, the grim reality of combat
taunted American football’s standing
as a proxy for its violence, language,
training and tactics.
• That was brought home even before
the U.S entered the war when one of
its early football heroes was killed in
Europe.

Football Ascending
• Before the U.S. joined the allied war
effort in 1917, individual Americans
had enlisted in volunteer international
divisions in much the way they joined
the Rough Riders in the Spanish-
American War. Among the group:
former Princeton star Johnny Poe,
class of 1895.

Football Ascending
• Poe fought in the Spanish-American
War, and despite his age, he decided
to join an artillery unit for the British
Army at the outbreak of hostilities in
1914.
• But such units were too far from the
front lines for Poe, so he moved to a
Scottish Regiment, then engaged in

Football Ascending
• Poe was killed during the Battle of
Loos on September 25, 1915, when
shot in the stomach carrying
ammunition to the front lines.
• His death shocked former teammates
and the tight world of eastern college
football.

Football Ascending
• One former teammate, William
Hanford Edwards, dedicated his book
about his football days to Poe.

Football Ascending
• Walter Camp himself wrote the
book’s Prologue, memorializing Poe
as a true representative of the game.

Football Ascending
• Camp himself became a key part of
the American effort in 1917 when
President Woodrow Wilson appointed
him to advise the U.S. Navy Training
Camps’ Physical Development
Program.
• That’s Camp, left, in New Haven in
1917.

Football Ascending
• Camp’s plans for Navy fitness
programs provided the wartime job
for George Halas - who would play a
key role in establishing the NFL.
• And that cosmic event was triggered
by sex and violence.

Football Ascending
• In 1916, U.S. National Guard troops
in Texas went to Fort Sam Houston,
Texas, to guard the border with
Mexico during a brief war with that
country.
• Bored and with little to do when off-
duty, troops visited towns that grew
near bases to party and seek

Football Ascending
• Alarmed by the activity, senior War
Department officials hired a lawyer
named Raymond Fosdick to
recommend solutions.
• Fosdick found that when a local
YMCA donated recreational
equipment for soldiers to use, camp
town incidents of drinking and sex

Football Ascending
• Ironically, the YMCA, as noted
previously, was founded on the
principles of muscular Christianity
that inspired Camp to standardize
and promote football at Yale.

Football Ascending
• That provided a lesson for senior
military officer as they began to
assemble millions of young men for
the war in Europe.
• Fosdick was named to a commission
to develop leisure time activities for
troops.

Football Ascending
• Fosdick appointed Walter Camp as
the Athletic Director for the Navy.
Camp, in turn, hired athletic directors
for each military installation.
• The initial focus turned out to be
boxing, not football, but former
coaches and draftees formed teams
anyway.

Football Ascending
• Once it became clear that many
draftees wanted to play football,
Camp encouraged the formation of
teams.
• And he did so more than his
counterpart in the U.S. Army.

Football Ascending
• Camp also encouraged teams such
as the Cleveland Naval Reserves to
schedule opponents outside of the
military services.
•
Halas, a star player at Illinois, would
eventually join the Great Lakes Naval
Station team formed under Camp’s
directive – and serve as a player and

Football Ascending
• “... we needed play and recreation.
With this must come the interest and
excitement of competition. We
needed regimental teams to foster
this. We needed [naval] station teams
to increase it, because then outside
competition at weekends and
holidays would be possible,” Camp
wrote after the war.

Football Ascending
• Camp wanted naval station teams to
play teams representing Army bases
and worked out the details to make
that happen.
• In November 1917, Camp arranged a
game between the Newport Naval
Station and the Maine Heavy Field
Artillery post – at the Yale Bowl.

Football Ascending
• Sportswriters took notice, and service
football became extraordinarily
popular.
• Some 20,000 watched the Harvard
Informals, so named because the
school did not field a varsity team that
year, meet the Portland Naval
Reserve.

Football Ascending
• "By the time the season ends football
won thousands of devotees who
never knew its thrills before,“ wrote a
Philadelphia sportswriter who knew
that service football provided the
opportunity for hundreds of
thousands of young men who hadn’t
played.

Football Ascending
• Another sportswriter wrote: “After the
war ends sports should have such a
firm grip on the youth of the land that
it should enjoy the greatest patronage
it ever saw.“
• The war brought the game to the
masses and popularized it more so
than ever before.

Football Ascending
• When American troops fully joined
the allied war effort in 1917, some
colleges including Yale, Princeton
and Harvard canceled play, but most
schools continued with their
schedules.

Football Ascending
• The season started in October, and
teams found it difficult to fill a full
schedule, but college football and
service football co-existed even as
the draft depleted rosters. The
season ended, fittingly, with two
service teams playing in the annual
post-season game in Pasadena,
California.

Football Ascending
• On Jan. 1, 1918, the service football
team representing the Mare Island
Marines of California beat the Camp
Lewis Army from American Lake,
Washington, in the Tournament East-
West Football Game, later known as
the Rose Bowl.

Football Ascending
• “At any rate, neither side is ready to
say the other was right and they were
wrong. But it has shown us that, with
the influx of all the cantonment and
station players, we need never fear
that sport is on the wane,” wrote
Camp in a San Francisco Examiner
article published in early 1918.

Football Ascending
• Despite Camp’s words, the U.S. War
Department sought to cancel college
games in September 1918 because,
top officers said, it distracted men
from combat training.
• Senior military officers eventually
relented, and the season opened.

Football Ascending
• But a pandemic, the Spanish flu of
1918-19, swept through the U.S.,
upending the 1918 college football
season and eventually playing a role
in who would win the mythical
national championship.

Football Ascending
• Defending national champion
Georgia Tech, coached by John
Heisman, went ahead with games,
with fans at Grant Field to wearing
masks while watching the team play
in Atlanta.
• (Note the soldiers in attendance.)

Football Ascending
• Cheerleaders, however, didn’t take
part as it “is too much like sneezing:
if it is to be done in these days of
influenza, it should be done through a
handkerchief, and a cheer through a
handkerchief would not be worth
doing,” writer J.H. McKee reported.
“So there will be no cheerleading.”

Football Ascending
• Even though Georgia Tech played
that day and competed on other
Saturdays in the fall of 1918, many
games in the U.S. were canceled or
rescheduled that season.
• Service teams played, too.

Football Ascending
• The flu, meanwhile, forced the
University of Pittsburgh coached by
Pop Warner to alter its schedule.
• A big game with the Great Lakes
Naval Station service football team,
where George Halas coached and
played, had to be canceled.

Football Ascending
• That forced Pitt to replace the Great
Lakes game with another.
• Princeton coach Bill Roper spotted an
opportunity for a game to benefit
charity, and he asked Pitt who it
wanted to play: Tech, Pitt responded.

Football Ascending
• The game between Pitt and Georgia
Tech took place at Forbes Field in
Pittsburgh on Nov. 24, 1918.
• It would be a national championship
of sorts in all but name only.

Football Ascending
• Pitt won handily, defeating the
Golden Tornado as Georgia Tech
was known at the time, 32-0.
• The Panthers beat Penn State in the
next game but fell to the Cleveland
Naval Reserve, marking Warner’s
first loss as coach of the team.

Football Ascending
• As the war dragged on until 1918, the
names of former football players were
not uncommon in the casualty lists.
• One name, however, stood out. It
was Hobey Baker, of Princeton.

Football Ascending
• Baker had been captain of
Princeton’s football and hockey
teams, and after graduating joined
the war effort as a pilot.
• He was killed shortly after the war
ended when his plane crashed in
France.

Football Ascending
• College hockey honors his name with
a trophy given to the NCAA men’s
game’s top player.

Football Ascending
• Also, during the war, a former
Nebraska football player, Clinton
Ross, who played from 1911-1913,
organized a volunteer company of
African Americans to fight. He noted
that the first troops to die in the 1916-
17 border fight between the U.S. and
Mexico were Black.

Football Ascending
• After the war in 1919, Camp wrote An
American Citizens’ Creed as the
preface to his “Keeping Fit All The
Way” book about the need for an
exercise routine throughout life. He
based it on his moral code first
formulated for football.

Football Ascending
• “… a nation should be made up of
people who individually possess
clean, strong bodies and pure minds;
who have respect for their own rights
and the rights of others and possess
the courage and strength to redress
wrongs; and, finally, in whom self-
consciousness is sufficiently powerful
…

Football Ascending
• “I believe in education, patriotism,
justice, and loyalty. I believe in civil
and religious liberty and in freedom of
thought and speech. I believe in
chivalry that protects the weak and
preserves veneration and love for
parents, and in the physical strength
that makes that chivalry effective.

Football Ascending
• “I believe in that clear thinking and
straight speaking which conquers
envy, slander, and fear. I believe in
the trilogy of faith, hope, and charity,
and in the dignity of labor; finally, I
believe that through these and
education true democracy may come
to the world.”

Football Ascending
• Prior to the war in 1913, an observer
from England had criticized American
football because of its close
relationship to warfare in strategy,
tactics and language.
• “The art of football,” he wrote,
“constantly aspires to the condition of
warfare.”

Football Ascending
• He continued, “Both, in the beginning,
were rooted in individualism; both
went through that stage and emerged
into the stage known to military men
as ‘shock action;’ and both are today
largely given over to what is known
as ‘fire action;’

Football Ascending
• “In war, the long-range use of rifle
and field gun, in football the long-
range use of the kicking game and
the extreme development of the
forward pass and individual
interference.

Football Ascending
• “In both the deadliest arm of the
present day was the slowest of
development: in war the artillery, in
football scientific kicking, handling
and covering of kicks.
• “In both the final destructive element
has remained the same for a long
period: in war the infantry, in football
the line as it blazes the way for the
backs.”

Football Ascending
• Others saw great utility in the
connection within the cycle of football
and military tactics and training.
• One who recognized the mutually
supportive cultural role of the game
and the military happened to be the
U.S. president.

Football Ascending
• American president Woodrow Wilson
had coached Princeton’s first football
team in the 1870s.
• In the 1880s, he coached at
Wesleyan while teaching history.
• At Wesleyan, Wilson formulated a
new system of offense.

Football Ascending
• At the end of World War I, the
American president who pushed the
country into the war and sought to
forge an everlasting peace –
unsuccessfully – afterward wrote a
letter praising the lessons of football
in preparing soldiers for combat.

Football Ascending
• Wilson wrote, that the U.S. Army
“derived excellent results from the
use of elementary football and other
personal contact games as an aid in
developing the aggressiveness,
initiative and determination of
recruits, and the ability to carry on in
spite of bodily hurts or physical
discomforts.”

Football Ascending
• He closed with this: “These qualities,
as you well know, were the
outstanding characteristics of the
American soldier,” a point earlier
raised visually in the program for the
Ohio State – Michigan game in 1918.

Football Ascending
• The Navy, prompted by Camp, and
the Army had encouraged service
football in 1917, recruiting former
football players to help teach soldiers
how to play to boost unit cohesion.
• As noted, Halas enlisted to serve in
the Navy in 1918.

Football Ascending
• The Navy – with Camp as Athletic
Director - sent Halas to the Great
Lakes Naval Reserve Station in
Chicago to help organize a football
team, and he established the station
as a key training ground for football
players and coaches.

Football Ascending
• On Jan. 1, 1919, Great Lakes Naval
Station from Chicago defeated Mare
Island, 17-0, in Tournament East-
West Game in Pasadena.
• Halas, far right, intercepted a pass
and raced a record 77 yards for a
touchdown. He was named game
MVP.

Football Ascending
• After the war, Halas would help form
the National Football League and
coach the Chicago Bears for decades
(his initials GSH still grace the
uniforms of the Chicago Bears).
• The Great Lakes Naval Station,
meanwhile, stood ready for the next
war …

Football Ascending
• … and would play a critical role in
seeding both the college and pro
games with players and coaches who
would influence the game well
beyond the 20th century.

JRN 362 - Lecture Six

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JRN 362 - Lecture Six