Early Football Photos

With their stylish caps, this looks like a photo of a 19th century baseball team. But look more closely at the oblong object the man in the front row is holding. That's a football, and this is a picture of the 11-man squad from Trinity College taken in 1889.

The game of football was born in the 1870s on the campus of northeastern colleges. By the late 1880s it was spreading like wildfire, and the boys from Trinity formed a league with other North Carolina schools like Duke, Wake Forest, and UNC.

The folks at Duke University have been sharing their archives online, with a massive collection of photographs that span the institution's history. There are photos showing campus scenes, student life, early postcards... even a 70 picture set that covers campus dining halls. But my favorite is the collection of Duke football pictures. I'm particularly fond af the artwork on the football programs, like this one from 1937.

Red Grange's Notebook

One of the great things about doing football research is the treasure trove of source materials available from coaches and players. The image above shows a couple of pages from the notebook of Red Grange, which describes some of the basic concepts of the T-Formation offense. they're available from the archives of The University of Illinois, Grange's alma mater.


Great coaches from Knute Rockne and Clark Shaughnessy to Bill Walsh and George Allen have left us a rich legacy, documenting their strategies and innovations in great detail for future generations. I've got several dozens of these in my collection, and I'm always on the lookout for more.

One of my favorites comes from the college ranks. Notre Dame coach Frank Leahy wrote this book on the T-Formation in 1949, having won the National Championship three times in his first six years as head coach. It includes chapters on special teams play, run and pass defense, and even his approach to pre-game warmups. These sorts of books were intended to serve as a guide to other coaches, but they also provide an invaluable insight into football history, and into the minds of the game's great innovators.

Imus is Retarded

Radio host Don Imus is coming under increasing fire for comments he made last week about members of the Rutgers University women's basketball team. The day after the team lost in the NCAA championship game, Imus commented on their tattoos and called them "rough girls," and later called them "nappy headed ho's."

For the record, I watched that game and none of the Rutgers girls sported any visible tattoos. That may seem like the most trivial point, but it is important. Imus was not responding to something he saw on a video highlight, he was spouting his preconceived conclusions about female athletes. Women can't play sports and be feminine, and those who try should be ridiculed.

It's been a recurring theme on the Imus show. His sidekick Sid Rosenberg called the U.S. women's soccer team "juiced-up dykes." He also said that he can't watch tennis players Venus and Serena Williams because they are too masculine. Rosenberg called Venus Williams an "animal" and said the sisters are more likely to be featured in National Geographic than Playboy.

This kind of misogyny isn't unique to the Imus show. Popular sports talk host Jim Rome constantly refers to players in the WNBA as "horses," and makes derogatory comments about women golfers and other female athletes. While Rome seems to be more progressive than his peers on the issue of gay male athletes, he has been much less tolerant of lesbians in sports.

Imus responded this week with a half-hearted apology as he fought for his job. He insisted that he wasn't a racist and pointed to his philanthropic efforts as a reason why he should keep his job. He's a shock jock after all -- he invented the genre -- so the fact that he said something offensive shouldn't surprise anybody. It's what he gets paid to do.

But for more than a decade, he's tried to mix the obnoxious humor with serious political commentary. All of the top journalists, from Thomas Friedman to Tom Brokaw, appear on his show, and any politician who wants a national stage makes a visit. But Imus can't have it both ways. He can't ask to be taken seriously when discussing the war in Iraq or autism research while he and his merry band do sophomoric comedy bits.

And while Imus claims that his latest gaffe was simply a failed attempt at humor, it was an accurate reflection of the views he has expressed time and time again: that women have no place in the world of sports. That's a view that should have been discarded twenty years ago. It's out of place in our society, and since that is how he feels, Imus has no place in the mainstream media. His views are retarded, in every sense of the word.

That's the problem in my mind. Not that Imus made comments that were racist and sexist, but that he thought it was funny -- that it was his job -- to belittle and demean 18 and 19-year old women at their moment of glory.

I love the fact that women have an opportunity to play sports in this generation. Girls sports weren't taken seriously when I was growing up, and I've come to learn what a remarkable loss that was for them. Young people can learn important lessons from sports, about teamwork and dealing with adversity and accepting defeat. I'm thrilled that my daughters get to grow up in a time when they can compete in athletics, and I look forward to a day we no longer have to listen to old men questioning their sexuality because they want to play.

Gerald Ford, Football Star

The news came over the wire late yesterday that former President Gerald Ford has passed away at the age of 93. Many others will write about his career as a public servant, but I wanted to take an opportunity to briefly recount that in his youth, Ford was a great football player.

In the mid 1930s, Ford was one of the stars on a powerhouse team at the University of Michigan. He played center and defensive lineman in an era when every man played both offense and defense. His Wolverines were national champions in 1932 and 1933, and Ford was voted as the team's most valuable player in 1934. Ford played in the annual East-West College All-Star game in San Francisco in January of 1935 and the College All-Star football game at Soldier Field against the Chicago Bears in August of that year. Two different NFL teams offered him a contract -- the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers -- but he spurned them to continue his education. Ford went to Yale University, where he worked as the boxing coach and assistant football coach while pursuing his law degree.

In later years, as people reminded the President of his athletic prowess, he was always humble. While making an appearance at his alma mater in 1976 he said:

In those stories that I was a great all-time center, I found this--the longer you get away from the reality, the bigger those stories get. ... And I can only say that they get better, because the longer you are away from school, the fewer there are of people to tell the truth about what happened.