Like football, flying was a spectator sport, and newspapers relegated both pastimes to the sports pages. Knute Rockne of the Fighting Irish astonished crowds with long, running catches, and the forward pass soon became “the most popular feature” of the game, as Percy Haughton had it. The key to both the forward pass and the Wright Flyer was control, and both innovations took place in the American Midwest-the airplane in Dayton, Ohio, and football’s passing game at places like Wisconsin and Chicago, Purdue and Notre Dame. This was just two years before the Wright brothers went public with their invention, as Wilbur flew at the Le Mans racetrack before astonished French crowds, and Orville flew over Fort Myer, Virginia, in a bid to sell his plane to the U.S. One of the first forward passes happened on November 24, 1906, when the Yale quarterback launched a 30-yard pass to set up a touchdown run, for a “spectacular victory” against Harvard. ![]() Football was becoming more like science and engineering. As injuries and deaths on the field mounted, patrons found ways to make the game safer, including a new aerial component: the “forward pass,” meant to discourage mass play and advance the “revolution of the ball on its axis,” as Fielding Yost put it. Games included wing formations and wingmen, along with the “flying wedge,” a triangular formation of linemen protecting the ball carrier with a punishing phalanx, which made its debut at the Harvard-Yale game on November 19, 1892.įamed coach Glenn “Pop” Warner spoke about teams as armies, coaching as generalship, seasons as campaigns, games as battles, plays as attacks. But even at its inception in the 1870s, it toyed with aerial terminology. True, football has always been a hard-hitting ground game. ![]() ![]() “Air-mindedness” at the turn of the 20th century meant reaching further and climbing higher, and in their shared focus on aerial heroics and militarism, America’s favorite game and greatest invention grew up together. Americans learned to play football at about the same time they learned to fly airplanes, and it was no simple coincidence.
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