Football History

The Four Horsemen and Knute Rockne in His Own Words (Collier’s Magazine, 1930)

An article written by one of the grand old men of football and one of the game’s most legendary coaches: Knute Rockne (1888 – 1931). Before there was the NFL, there was only college football and it was football pioneers like Rockne who brought out the excitement of the game, generating such enthusiasm for the sport and creating a fan-base that grew steadily throughout the century. Just as Redskin Coach Joe Gibbs had The Hogs in the Eighties, Knute Rockne was famous for a group of players in the Twenties called the Four Horsemen (Harry Stuhldreher, Don Miller, Elmer Layden, and Jim Crowley), and that is who the coach wrote about on the attached pages:

Individually, at first, they were just four compact youths, no better than football’s average…Within a season they became famous – the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame…They amazed even their own coach

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The Invention of Football’s Lateral Pass (Literary Digest, 1927)

A football article in which various wonks from 1927 muse wistfully about the earliest use of the lateral pass (1902) and how the game of football was forever changed as a result. Football coach and sportswriter, Sol Metzger (1880 – 1932) is quoted numerous times throughout as he is credited as the first offensive end in the history of football to catch a lateral pass (during the Thanksgiving Day game of 1902 between Cornell and Pennsylvania). The lateral pass is identified in this article as being the brainchild of Dr. Carl S. Williams, who was at that time the football coach of the University of Pennsylvania.
A diagram of the 1902 play is provided.

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