"The Bastard Offspring of Real Football"

Late into the September night in 2019, Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Gardner Minshew sat in the Martin Stadium crowd as Anthony Gordon passed for a new Washington State record nine touchdowns. Minshew set the program’s previous single-game passing touchdown record of eight, set all of 10 months earlier.

Remarkably, Washington State lost to UCLA on Gordon’s record-setting night, 67-63. Bruins quarterback Dorian Thompson-Robinson passed for 507 yards to lead a comeback from down 25 points in the third quarter.

Passing output around college football has grown exponentially throughout the 21st Century and shows little signs of slowing down. At the Football Championship Subdivision level, for example, four teams passed for more than 4,000 yards in 2019; in 2015, just one reached that milestone.

At the Bowl Subdivision level in 2019, 16 programs averaged more than 300 passing yards per game — two more than a half-decade previously (2014) and seven more than a decade earlier (2009).

The pace at which college football coaches adopt more aggressive and potent passing strategies is unprecedented. From the moment Saint Louis University’s Bradbury Robinson attempted college football’s first forward pass in 1906, however, the game’s leading innovators have sought to leverage the throw for a strategic edge.

David M. Nelson wrote then-Saint Louis coach Eddie Cochems was “to forward passing what the Wright brothers are to aviation and Thomas Edison is to the electric light.”

In the same way the Wright Bros. could not have conceived of jets that break the sound barrier, nor Edison envisioned city lights visible from outer space, it’s as unlikely Cochems could foresee the evolution of the passing play 120 years later.

Ditto Pop Warner, one of the most renowned sideline generals in the game’s history and the man widely credited as football’s first celebrity coach. Ironic as it may be coming from someone who called the forward “bastard offspring of real football,” Warner’s innovations laid the groundwork for the modern game.  

The forward pass was illegal until 1905 when, amid a rash of grievous injuries and deaths in the sport, Theodore Roosevelt wielded his proverbial Big Stick to bring university presidents together to enact change.

Six years prior to that revolutionary moment in the sport, early indicators of the principles behind today’s offense surfaced.

Lars Anderson’s book Carlisle vs. Army explains how in 1899 ahead of a marquee game with early-era powerhouse Penn, Warner devised a strategy intended to utilize his smaller Carlisle team’s exceptional speed.

Working off the logical assumption a defender will slide to the right if his assignment moves to the right on offense, Warner instructed his ball-carrier to step to that direction before the snap, “then sprint to the left around the left end.”

Hal Mumme is often cited as one of the leading minds behind the revolutionary air-raid offense, the quintessential modern example of the forward pass’s potency, but it’s a label the former Valdosta State head coach and Kentucky offensive coordinator dismisses. Mumme instead credits innovations like that of Warner for making the air raid possible.

“One of my absolute heroes in coaching is Pop Warner, who pretty much invented everything,” Mumme said. “He was doing things before the forward pass that would make [Auburn head coach] Gus Malzhan blush.”

Warner may have abhorred the forward pass — regardless of the influence he had on its implementation — but Notre Dame legend Knute Rockne embraced its potential. Rockne is credited for helping popularize passing offense as the Fighting Irish’s coach in the 1920s, but his own time as a Fighting Irish player set the foundation.

Bob Carter’s Sportscentury biography of Rockne explains:

“In the summer of 1913, Rockne and quarterback Gus Dorais practiced the forward pass on an Ohio beach. "Dorais would throw from all angles," Rockne recalled. "People who didn't know we were two college seniors making painstaking preparations for our final season probably thought we were crazy."

The team unveiled a different offensive look that fall under new coach Jess Harper and upset Army 35-13 as Dorais completed 14-of-17 passes for 243 yards, including a touchdown to Rockne, a third-team All-American.

Rockne’s success in the passing game as a player translated to his coaching tenure at Notre Dame. Introducing the Notre Dame Box — an unorthodox, four-man backfield shifted off-center in a square formation — the coach found unique formations to confuse defenses and exploit resulting imbalance.

A part of this strategy included opening a portion of the field to deploy passes, then still something of a novel concept despite the play having been legal for the previous two decades.

In the same era Rockne built Notre Dame into a national powerhouse, the Ivy League remained the sport’s standard bearer.

Jesse Hawley spent some time away from football after leaving Iowa following the 1915 season, focusing his energy on the Hawley Products Company. Among the Company’s notable works: development of steel helmets the United States Armed Forces adopted ahead of World War II. 

Hawley’s prominence in the business world makes him something of a forerunner to a modern-day innovator of passing offense, recently retired Coastal Carolina coach Joe Moglia. The one-time TD Ameritrade CEO coached the Chanticleers to the FCS Playoffs and led the program’s transition to FBS, utilizing an uptempo scheme emphasizing high-volume passing.

Likewise, the innovation that drove Hawley in the business world played out on the gridiron when he returned to head coaching at his alma mater, Dartmouth. Hawley worked as an unpaid advisor for Dartmouth football beginning in 1919, then ascended to unpaid head coach in 1923.

Hawley lost just one game in his first three seasons with the Big Green, employing the same leadership strategies that translated in two different avenues.

“Whether you’re in the business world or in football...you’ve got to be able to produce, you’ve got to continue to grow,” said Moglia, who was himself a defensive coordinator at Dartmouth in the 1980s before embarking in a career on Wall Street. “That’s going to be expected of you, no matter how good a year you had last year.”

As it was for Moglia at Coastal Carolina almost a century later, Hawley’s strategy for producing on the football field included an emphasis on the pass.

Hawley’s crowning achievement came in 1925 when the program won its first and still only national championship, and the crown jewel came via a 62-13 drubbing of Cornell that foreshadowed the kind of quick-strike potential of passing offenses that later fueled a comeback the magnitude of UCLA’s at Washington State in 2019.

The New York Times recap of Dartmouth’s win provides details:

A magnificent Dartmouth team, playing with the sky as the limit, let loose one of the most devastating forward-passing attacks ever witnessed in American football…

Opening up in the first few minutes of play, the Dartmouth team filled the air with passes and [previously undefeated] Cornell’s weakness was immediately apparent. Two touchdowns were scored before the first period had progressed very far, both on 22-yard passes by [Andrew “Swede”] Oberlander to [Henry] Sage and [Myles] Lane.

Before the final whistle had blown the Green had scored four times more through the air on two passes of 50 yards each, one of 54 and a fourth of 25.

Cornell coach Gil Dobie was reported to have dismissed the thrashing as a 13-0 Big Red win because, “passing is not football.”

One can only imagine the reaction had Dobie been seated alongside Gardner Minshew on a September night in 2019.