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Football Officiating => General Discussion => Topic started by: TXMike on November 01, 2012, 06:37:42 AM
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;D
1st major use of the forward pass
Inventing the Forward Pass
By HARRY CROSS
November 1, 1913 WEST POINT, N.Y.-The Notre Dame eleven swept the Army off its feet on the Plains this afternoon and buried the soldiers under a 35-to-13 score. The Westerners flashed the most sensational football that has been seen in the East this year, baffling the Cadets with a style of open play and a perfectly developed forward pass which carried the victors down the field 30 yards at a clip. Football men marveled at this startling display of open football. Bill Roper, former head coach at Princeton, who was one of the officials of the game, said that he had always believed that such playing was possible under the new rules but that he had never seen the forward pass developed to such a state of perfection.
The Eastern gridiron has not seen such a master of the forward pass as Charley Dorais, the Notre Dame quarterback. A frail youth of 145 pounds, as agile as a cat and as restless as a jumping-jack, Dorais shot forward passes with accuracy into the outstretched arms of his ends, Captain Knute Rockne, and Gus Hurst, as they stood poised for the ball, often as far as 35 yards away.
The yellow leather egg was in the air half the time, with the Notre Dame team spread out in all directions over the field waiting for it. The Army players were hopelessly confused and chagrined before Notre Dame's great playing, and their style of old-fashioned, close line-smashing play was no match for the spectacular and highly perfected attack of the Indiana collegians. All five of Notre Dame's touchdowns were the result of forward passes. They sprang the play on the Army seventeen times, and missed only four. In all they gained 243 yards with the forward pass alone.
This was the first time Notre Dame has ever been on the Army schedule, and 5,000 came to the reservation to witness the game. Report had the Indiana team strong, but no one imagined that it knew so much football. Dorais ran the team at top speed all the time. The Westerners were on the jump from the start and handled the ball with few muffs. The little quarterback displayed great judgment at all times and was never at a loss to take the Cadets by surprise. He got around as if on springs and was as cool as a cucumber on ice when shooting the forward pass. Half a dozen Army tacklers bearing down on him in full charge didn't disconcert the quarterback one bit. He got his passes away accurately, every one before the Cadets could reach him. He tossed the football on a straight line for 30 yards time and again.
Eddie Cochem, the St. Louis University coach, was the first to use the forward pass in 1906. Jesse Harper, who coached at Notre Dame in 1913, showed how it could be used by a smaller team to beat a bigger one. Once it was used against a major school on a national stage in this game, the forward pass rapidly gained popularity.
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...as agile as a cat and as restless as a jumping-jack...
Love that description!
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Outlined against a blue-gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.
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Hmmm......maybe not the first to use forward pass: Extracted from Wikipedia:
One very important contribution to the game of football by North Carolina is the modern use of the forward pass; they were the first college team to use the play in 1895. Bob Quincy notes in his 1973 book They Made the Bell Tower Chime: "John Heisman, a noted historian, wrote 30 years later that, indeed, the Tar Heels had given birth to the forward pass against the Bulldogs (UGA).