JRN 362 - Lecture Twenty-Three (Epilogue)

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
Lecture Twenty-Three (Epilogue)

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• If you were 10 years old in the
1840s, this is what football looked
like.

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• If you were 30 in the 1860s, this is
what football looked like.

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• This is what football looked like to
a 10-year-old in the 1930s.

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an 80-year-old in the 2000s.

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• If that 90-year-old continued to
live at least to the end of 2021,
that person would have seen Tom
Brady win Sports Illustrated’s
Sportsperson of the Year twice - in
2005 and 2021. Only Tiger Woods
and Lebron James have won it
three times.

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• This is what football looks like to a
10-year-old in the 2020s.
• Black QBs in college such as the
great Eldridge Dickey were for
decades told they couldn’t play.
Now, several such as Patrick
Mahomes, Jalen Hurts, Jayden
Daniels and Kyler Murray are

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• Even the persistent issue with the
failure of the NFL to hire Black
coaches in the NFL is changing,
but not so much in college.
• Despite the NFL’s Rooney Rule
designed to encourage the hiring
of Black, few were chosen.

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• In 2022, only three Black head
coaches were on the sidelines:
Mike Tomlin in Pittsburgh, Lovie
Smith in Houston and Todd Bowles
in Tampa Bay.
• The NFL in 2023 consisted of 68
percent minority players, including
54 percent Black.

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• At the start of 2024 season, nine
head coaches identified as
minority, including six Black men:
Bowles, Raheem Morris (Falcons),
Jerod Mayo (Patriots), Antonio
Pierce (Raiders) , Tomlin, and
Houston’s DeMeco Ryans.

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• Other minority coaches included
David Canales, who is Mexican
(Panthers), Mike McDaniel, biracial
(Dolphins), and Robert Saleh, who
is of Lebanese descent (Jets). He
was fired in October 2024.

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• Many Black coaches can be traced
on the coaching tree to one Black
coach: Tony Dungy, now with NBC.
• That points to a need to hire more
Black coaches to create more
coaching trees with Black
coordinators and assistants.

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• In November 2022, a 1957 photo
of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry
Jones surfaced that showed him at
his Little Rock, Arkansas, high
school in a group blocking Black
students from entering the
building after the Supreme Court
three years earlier ordered schools
to desegregate.

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• Jones acknowledged his actions
and vowed to work to make sure
the NFL would break the old-boys
network to hire Black coaches.
• He said the issue comes down to
forming relationships between
owners and more Black coaches.

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• Only two of the majority owners of
the NFL’s 32 teams are minorities:
one Asian American, the other
Pakistani American.

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• Progress is possible.
• Football also looks like this to a 10-
year-old in the 2020s, who
witnessed the first all-Black
officiating crew in 2020.

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• The 10-year-old’s great
grandfather probably did not
witness a Black game official at all
unless he or she attended a game
featuring two all-Black teams.

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• And it looks like this to a 10-year-
old, watching games officiated by
women, including the first, Sarah
Thomas, who joined the NFL in
2015.

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• And the 10-year-old witnessed
Sarah Fuller of Vanderbilt become
the first woman to play in a Power
Five college football game – and
the first to score when on Dec. 12,
2020, she kicked an extra point.
Some 2,500 women have played
high school and college football.

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• But what took so long for the
American game to become open
for Black and women players.
• 1939, LIFE magazine reported on
women’s football played fiercely in
Los Angeles. But girls played tackle
football throughout the U.S., too.

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• In the 1930s, a 14-year-old girl
played center for her Connecticut
high school team. A girl in Texas
kicked for her high school.

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• But the male establishment then
in control of school athletic
departments and town parks and
recreation institutions sought to
prevent women from playing after
LIFE published the photos.
• Girls and women would be banned
from the game for decades – until

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• Today, girls are fueling the growth
of one of the fastest-growing
sports in America with 2.4 million
youth participants: flag football.
• Eight states have certified girls’
flag football as a varsity sport,
while the NFL sponsors girls’ flag
football leagues.

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• “That’s the beauty of flag football,”
Andrea Castillo, quarterback of
Panama’s Bronze Medal team at
the World Games in 2022, told the
Los Angeles Times. “Everyone can
play. It accessible and inclusive.”

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• The NFL is also supporting the
international growth of girls’ flag
football.
• International women’s flag football
championships have been held
since 2002.

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• Flag football will be included for
both men and women in the 2028
Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

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• With equality of opportunity in the
air, the 10-year-old also witnessed
the first woman to serve as an
assistant coach during a game
when Cleveland Browns chief of
staff Callie Brownson roamed the
sidelines directing the team’s tight
ends in their Nov. 29, 2020, game
against Jacksonville.

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• A 10-year-old would see Carl
Nassib become the first active NFL
player to announce that he is gay
when he shared an Instagram
video in June 2021.
• Michael Sam had become the first
openly gay athlete to be drafted by
the NFL in 2014.

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• The 10-year-old is also watching
coaches make decisions such as
whether to go for a first down or
attempt a two-point conversion
based on analytics, developed in
the 1960s in large measure by an
accidental NFL quarterback named
Virgil Carter.

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• Carter ties together many parts of
the modern NFL.
• Summoned to play quarterback by
coach Paul Brown and offensive
coordinator Bill Walsh of the
Bengals after Greg Cook was hurt,
Carter in his spare time authored a
study that created a metric called

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• Called the expected points metric,
its a computation that rests at the
foundation of contemporary NFL
analytics.
• The metric is the typical number of
net points a team can expect
based on ﬁeld position, down and
distance.

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• Carter played college football at
BYU under coach Lavell Edwards,
who refined a spread offense later
copied by college coaches and now
pro coaches.
• He is thus the single link between
spread offenses and the analytics,
components of the 21st
century

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• And there is another piece of
football magic to disclose.
• Red Grange, the college star who
gave the NFL credibility when he
signed with Chicago in 1925,
announced one of the first
televised league games, the 1949
Thanksgiving Day game in Detroit.

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• And running the football – the
elemental part of the game
Grange pursued- may be back
• In the first half of the 2022 NFL
season, points scored fell to a five-
year low, two years after teams set
an NFL record for most points in a
season with 12,692.

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• That trend has continued into the
2024 season.
• Through week three, fewer points
were scored, fewer passing yards
accumulated and more rushing
yards gained than at the same
point in 2023.

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• Could the spread be dead?
• Tom Brady thinks the NFL is mired
in mediocrity.

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• Brady said on ESPN’s Stephen A.
Smith Show broadcast on
November 20, 2023, that he
“doesn’t see the excellence I saw in
the past.”
• He blamed lousy coaches and poor
player development.

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• Still, football goes in cycles. What’s
old is new again.

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• Yale, where Walter Camp
formalized the game in the 19th
century with rule changes that
both popularized and saved the
game, just finished its 151th
year of
football.

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• And the old Blues retain an
influence over the modern game
and, in fact, may be making it even
more popular in the process.

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• Yale alum McDaniel had revitalized
the Miami Dolphins as its head
coach and reconceptualized the
game’s tactics on offense.

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• Come to think of it, the old rugby
game of yore that Yale’s Camp
refashioned mashed with the
modern appeared in 1982 when
California beat Stanford on a
kickoff return featuring laterals
and backwards passes that led to
the winning TD as the Stanford
band took the field.

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• “Working on a book about the
inexplicable (game) … I
interviewed coaches and players,
fans, journalists and officials. I
learned a lot about football, but
more about brotherhood, regret
and hope,” wrote James Rainey of
the Los Angeles Times in a Nov. 19,
2021, story on the game.

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• And that hope is evident in
Southern Methodist University, the
only school to be given the death
penalty by the NCAA in the mid
1980s.
• In 2023, the Mustangs won a
conference title for the first time
since 1984 and are now in the ACC.

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• SMU was nationally ranked
throughout the 2024 season and
looked to be contender for
inclusion in the expanded 12-team
national championship playoffs.

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• Michigan, meanwhile, the school
with the greatest fight song ever
composed, won its 1,000 game in
2023 and the national
championship.
• Hail, indeed, to the Victors.

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• So, in this period of acute medical
trauma, anxiety and political anger,
it may be no accident that
Americans are looking to football
for redemption, for togetherness
and hope amid the grieving of
incomprehensible loss.

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• As such, football will continue to
reflect that “ ... subterranean river
of untapped, ferocious, lonely and
romantic desires, that
concentration of ecstasy and
violence which is the dream life of
the nation” as writer Norman
Mailer wrote of American life.

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• It is, after all, the same game as
ever: a player carrying an air-filled
bladder covered by animal hide
must be brought to the ground
before crossing a line, all in an
exercise of ecstasy and violence
experienced directly and
vicariously each fall and winter by
millions of Americans.

JRN 362 - Lecture Twenty-Three (Epilogue)

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JRN 362 - Lecture Twenty-Three (Epilogue)