Modern football born at Carlisle Barracks a century ago
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These are the members of the 1906 Carlisle Indian School football squad that ran the single wing to perfection to defeat much bigger teams. (Courtesy of Cumberland County Historical Society)
It was football like few had ever seen before.
Ten yards for a first down ... a neutral zone along the scrimmage line ... the birth of the passing play and single wing offense.
The game caused a sensation 60 years before the first Super Bowl or the reign of Joe Paterno at Penn State.
Newspaper reports say more than 2,000 spectators gathered at Carlisle Barracks’ Indian Field to witness the first significant game in the birth of modern football.
Tuesday marks the 100th anniversary of that 6-0 victory by Carlisle Indian School over Villanova.
Tom Benjey sees this 1906 game as an important milestone — one of many points in history easily overlooked and underappreciated for its lasting impact.
That game introduced rules that were controversial at the time but widely accepted today.
Benjey, a local historian, was doing research for a biography of Lone Star Dietz when he came across newspaper articles about this game. Dietz was a player, then an assistant coach and art teacher at the Indian School, where he illustrated many of its publications.
Benjey felt something had to be done to commemorate this forgotten game so he organized a project back in April to produce the documentary.
Teddy insists on change
Old school coaches opposed the new rules designed to make the sport safer after a brutal year on the college gridiron. Eighteen athletes died and 149 were seriously injured during the 1905 season, when the only protection players had was light padding and leather helmets, Benjey says.
Legend has it President Theodore Roosevelt was angered by a photo of Robert “Tiny” Maxwell in a newspaper, Benjey says.
“Maxwell was a great big guy ... a Swarthmore College player,” Benjey explains. “His face looked like a piece of meat that had been tenderized.
“Incensed, the president called the coaches of Harvard, Princeton and Yale into his office and threatened to ban the game if they did not clean it up.”
This led to the formation of a rules committee to make the game safer.
Prior to 1906, teams only needed to rush 5 yards to make a first down, Benjey says. This encouraged coaches to put the larger, heavier players behind the line of scrimmage to bully their way through the defense.
“The result was a lot of punching, kicking, biting and gouging,” Benjey says. “It was pretty brutal. The change to 10 yards (for a first down) required a lot more strategy.”
To keep players apart, he adds, the committee introduced rules requiring a neutral zone and six men on the scrimmage line.
With roots in rugby and soccer, the focus of early 20th century football was to move the ball into the best position for a field goal, Benjey says. “It was all rushing with some touchdowns.”
The revised rules made the forward pass legal, but many coaches did not like this approach, including Glenn “Pop” Warner — head coach of the Carlisle Indian School team from 1899 to 1903 and again from 1907 to 1913.
Warner called the forward pass the “illegitimate child” of the sport, while Fielding Yost, coach of the University of Michigan, vowed his team would never throw a forward pass, Benjey says.
While most coaches rehashed old plays for the new rules, Warner invented a whole new scheme that shifted the strength of the formation to the right flank and made the quarterback an extra blocker in the running game.
The result was the single wing offense, which made its debut during the Carlisle-Villanova game.
Although Warner was not the Carlisle coach in 1906, he did spend a week prior to the game advising former star players- turned-coaches Bemus Pierce and Frank Hudson on the new tactics, Benjey says.
He says the single wing offense suited the Indian School team, which tended to be smaller and undersized in a sport where bulk ruled. “They were fighting an uphill battle, but they were faster, more agile and better at surprise.”
Newspaper accounts of the game reported the Carlisle Indian School scored in the first half with a touchdown by fullback Little Boy. Left halfback Frank Mt. Pleasant then kicked the extra point, ending the first half with Carlisle holding a 6-0 lead. (Touchdowns counted as just five points in those days.)
Neither side scored in the second half. The Sentinel said Carlisle came close but was stopped by a strong Villanova defense. The game ended with the ball on the Indians’ 35-yard line.
Benjey says the Carlisle-Villanova game drew football officials from all over who were interested in seeing how the new rules played out.
“There was a great deal of penalizing, due probably to the new rules,” The Sentinel reported.
The Arrow, the Carlisle Indian School weekly newspaper, reported the general opinion among authorities present was that the new rules were turning football into a sport closer to basketball.
“... (T)he only good feature is that it permits a closer observation of details for the spectators,” The Arrow reported.
A Sentinel article published the day before the game mentioned that a 10-minute trolley service was available for spectators from the Square in Carlisle. “Ladies will have seats reserved for them on the grandstand,” the article reads.
The Sentinel reported a large number of cars present at the game — two years before Henry Ford introduced the Model T, the first affordable automobile for average Americans, Benjey says.
He adds that while the number of deaths and injuries did not immediately drop with the new rules, the revisions were enough to calm Teddy Roosevelt.
The single wing offense would go on to dominate football for much of the first half of the 20th century before going out of vogue, Benjey says. Now it is viewed as old-fashioned and is used by only about 50 high schools in the country, Benjey says.
The documentary includes interviews with players and coaches on the Windber High School football team near Johnstown. Windber is one of those teams still using Warner’s method, Benjey says.
As the story goes, Windber coach Philip DeMarco wanted to try something new, so he consulted old coaching journals, which mentioned the single wing offense.
“The community embraced the idea,” Benjey says. “It energized the old guys who found an old playbook. Windber is a small school which tends to be undersized. This gives them some advantages.”
Windber won the PIAA District V Class A title last year with the single wing and is 4-0 so far this year.
