JRN 362 - Lecture Twenty-Three (Epilogue)

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
Lecture Twenty-Three (Epilogue)

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• If you were 10 years old in the
1840s, this is what football looked
like.

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• If you were 30 in the 1860s, this is
what football looked like.

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• This is what football looked like to a
10-year-old in the 1930s.

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• This is what football looked like to an

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• If that 90-year-old continued to live at
least to the end of 2021, that person
would have seen Tom Brady win
Sports Illustrated’s Sportsperson of
the Year twice - in 2005 and 2021.
Only Tiger Woods and Lebron
James have won it three times.

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• This is what football looks like to a
• Black QBs in college such as the
great Eldridge Dickey were for
decades told they couldn’t play the
position in the NFL. Now, several
such as Patrick Mahomes, Jalen
Hurts and Kyler Murray are stars.

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• But problems persist when it comes
to Black coaches in the NFL and
college.
• Despite the NFL’s Rooney Rule
designed to encourage the hiring of
Black coaches by requiring
interviews with minority candidates,
few are chosen.

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• In 2022, only three Black head
coaches were on the sidelines: Mike
Tomlin in Pittsburgh, Lovie Smith in
Houston and Todd Bowles in Tampa
Bay.
• Almost 70 of NFL players are Black.

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• Black coaches can be traced
exclusively to one Black coach: Tony
Dungy, now with NBC.
• That points to a need to hire more
Black coaches to create more
coaching trees with Black
coordinators and assistants.

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• In November 2022, a 1957 photo of
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones
surfaced that showed him at his Little
Rock, Arkansas, high school in a
group blocking Black students from
entering the building after the
Supreme Court three years earlier
ordered schools to desegregate.

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• Jones acknowledged his actions and
vowed to work to make sure the NFL
would break the old-boys network to
hire Black coaches.
• He said the issue comes down to
forming relationships between
owners and more Black coaches.

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• Only two of the majority owners of
the NFL’s 32 teams are minorities:
one Asian American, the other
Pakistani American.

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• Progress is possible.
• Football also looks like this to a 10-
year-old in the 2020s, who witnessed
the first all-Black officiating crew in
2020.

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• The 10-year-old’s great grandfather
probably did not witness a Black
game official at all unless he or she
attended a game featuring two all-
Black teams.

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• And it looks like this to a 10-year-
old, watching games officiated by
women, including the first, Sarah
Thomas, who joined the NFL in
2015.

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• And the 10-year-old witnessed Sarah
Fuller of Vanderbilt become the first
woman to play in a Power Five
college football game – and the first
to score when on Dec. 12, 2020, she
kicked an extra point. Some 2,500
women have played high school and
college football.

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• But what took so long for the
American game to become open for
Black and women players.
• 1939, LIFE magazine reported on
women’s football played fiercely in
Los Angeles. But girls played tackle
football throughout the U.S., too.

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• In the 1930s, a 14-year-old girl
played center for her Connecticut
high school team. A girl in Texas
kicked for her high school.

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• But the male establishment then in
control of school athletic
departments and town parks and
recreation institutions sought to
prevent women from playing after
LIFE published the photos.
• Girls and women would be banned
from the game for decades – until

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• Today, girls are fueling the growth of
one of the fastest-growing sports in
America, with 1,640 leagues: flag
football.
• Six states have certified girls’ flag
football as a varsity sport, with
another 2o considering it. The NFL
sponsors girls’ flag football leagues.

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• “That’s the beauty of flag football,”
Andrea Castillo, quarterback of
Panama’s Bronze Medal team at the
World Games in 2022, told the Los
Angeles Times. “Everyone can play.
It accessible and inclusive.”

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• The NFL is also supporting the
growth of girls’ flag football in Latin
America, where the sport’s following
is growing.
• International women’s flag football
championships have been held since
2002.

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• With equality of opportunity in the air,
the 10-year-old also witnessed the
first woman to serve as an assistant
coach during a game when
Cleveland Browns chief of staff Callie
Brownson roamed the sidelines
directing the team’s tight ends in
their Nov. 29, 2020, game against
Jacksonville.

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• A 10-year-old would see Carl Nassib
become the first active NFL player to
announce that he is gay when he
shared an Instagram video in June
2021.
• Michael Sam had become the first
openly gay athlete to be drafted by
the NFL in 2014.

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• The 10-year-old is also watching
coaches make decisions such as
whether to go for a first down or
attempt a two-point conversion
based on analytics, developed in the
1960s in large measure by an
accidental NFL quarterback named
Virgil Carter.

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• Carter ties together many parts of
the modern NFL.
• Summoned to play quarterback by
coach Paul Brown and offensive
coordinator Bill Walsh of the Bengals
after Greg Cook was hurt, Carter in
his spare time authored a study that
created a metric called expected

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• Called the expected points metric, its
a computation that rests at the
foundation of contemporary NFL
analytics.
• The metric is the typical number of
net points a team can expect based
on ﬁeld position, down and distance.

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• Carter played college football at BYU
under coach Lavell Edwards, who
refined a spread offense later copied
by college coaches and now pro
coaches.
• He is thus the single link between
spread offenses and the analytics,
components of the 21st century

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• And there is another piece of football
magic to disclose.
• Red Grange, the college star who
gave the NFL credibility when he
signed with Chicago in 1925,
announced one of the first televised
league games, the 1949
Thanksgiving Day game in Detroit.

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• And running the football – the
elemental part of the game Grange
pursued- may be back
• In the first half of the 2022 NFL
season, points scored fell to a five-
year low, two years after teams set
an NFL record for most points in a
season with 12,692.

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• Through Week Eight of the 2022
NFL season, quarterbacks have
passed for the fewest touchdowns
since 2016.
• Could the spread be dead? Or is it
just that quarterbacks are running
more than ever?

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• These examples show that the long
history of the game and its roots are
not all that distant, popping up down
and then to remind us that the game
remains close to history and the
connections are tighter and more
personal than we recognize. What’s
old is new again.

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• Come to think of it, the old rugby
game of yore mashed with the
modern appeared in 1982 when
California beat Stanford on a kickoff
return featuring laterals and
backwards passes that led to the
winning TD as the Stanford band
took the field.

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• “Working on a book about the
inexplicable (game) … I interviewed
coaches and players, fans,
journalists and officials. I learned a
lot about football, but more about
brotherhood, regret and hope,” wrote
James Rainey of the Los Angeles
Times in a Nov. 19, 2021, story on
the game.

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• So, in this period of acute medical
trauma, anxiety and political anger, it
may be no accident that Americans
are looking to football for redemption,
for togetherness and hope amid the
grieving of incomprehensible loss.

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• As such, football will continue to
reflect that “ ... subterranean river of
untapped, ferocious, lonely and
romantic desires, that concentration
of ecstasy and violence which is the
dream life of the nation” as writer
Norman Mailer wrote of American
life.

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• It is, after all, the same game as
ever: a player carrying an air-filled
bladder covered by animal hide must
be brought to the ground before
crossing a line, all in an exercise of
ecstasy and violence experienced
directly and vicariously each autumn
and winter by millions of Americans.

JRN 362 - Lecture Twenty-Three (Epilogue)

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JRN 362 - Lecture Twenty-Three (Epilogue)