Rams Setting Game Back to Flying Wedge

The forward pass was legalized in football in 1906. Knute Rockne didn’t invent it. He just helped popularize it.

It was seldom used, even as a desperation weapon. It was like taking out the rent money in a poker game. Walter Camp paid no attention to it in his early All-American teams. No passer made them.

When Notre Dame came to The Plain to play West Point in November of 1913, the Irish not only stunned the brave old Army team, they stunned the known football world with their use of the forward pass.

They took one look at the massive Long Gray Line and decided a frontal assault would be futile. Quarterback Gus Dorais called a huddle and announced, “We’ll go over and around ‘em.”

The generals should have been paying attention. It was probably history’s first recorded instance of the blitzkrieg principle. Army’s infantry was routed, 35-13. Dorais, throwing mostly to Rockne, completed an unheard-of 14 of 17 passes for 243 yards.

The really puzzling thing is that every football coach in the land didn’t leap on the innovation. The pass went right back into mothballs for all intents and purposes. Oh, an occasional team would rise in the Southwest that would throw the ball more than half a dozen times a game and the press would be wide-eyed. “Coach Ray Morrison and His Aerial Circus,” headlines would proclaim them.

The pros were quicker to catch on. They didn’t have the emotional tug at the heartstrings that dear old alma mater would bring out in the college crowds. They had to be entertaining.

In those days even the college football Establishment legislated against the pass. You had to be five yards behind the line of scrimmage to throw. Two incomplete passes in a row resulted in a penalty. An incomplete pass in the end zone and the ball went over to the defending team on the 20-yard line. They didn’t want games won by any la-dee-da junk tosses over the goal line, any Hail Mary soap bubbles from the 40-yard line.

The collegiate game went back to ground. The stars were Galloping Ghosts, Four Horsemen, Dream Backfields, nicknames that glorified the overland game.

The pros, particularly George Preston Marshall, wanted none of this. They took the game out of the trenches and put it on the high wire. You could pass the ball anywhere, at any time and to almost anybody. You could fill the end zone with incomplete passes with impunity.

The pros didn’t want a game like two woolly mammoths in a tar-pit. They wanted Swan Lake with shoulder pads.

They got it. Some of the hard-liners were scornful. “Volleyball!” they sneered. “Football is arm-ball.”

But it was exciting. It changed the game from a mud fight to a ballet. The public loved it.

The run became archaic. It was used for show only. Pro coaches talked grandly of “establishing the run” but what they meant was that they used it only as a feint before delivering the real knockout blow--the bomb, the long touchdown pass.

I can remember a day in the locker room after a game when defensive end Deacon Jones was peeling off his bandages after a tough afternoon chasing the passer, and said in response to a question: “The run? Forget the run! We will never get beat by the run. No pro team will ever get beat by the run.”

A few collegiate coaches resisted. Like Neanderthal military types, they remained dedicated to the foot soldier.

They talked darkly of the forward pass as a tool of the devil. “He who lives by the pass dies by the pass,” was one of their favorite warnings. They liked to remind you that, “When you put the ball in the air, three things can happen--and two of them are bad!”

They clung stubbornly to the notion that defense and a strong running attack won football games, even when essential ground game formations like the single wing and the Notre Dame box gave way to a passing stratagem, the T-formation.

The pendulum swung clear the other way. The Galloping Ghost nicknames gave way to Slingin’ Sams and the Springfield Rifles and the Mad Bombers. The Four Horsemen, it was widely realized, would be two wide receivers, a flanker and a passer if they played today.

Runners decreased in importance. When superior runners such as Earl Campbell and O.J. Simpson couldn’t get you to the Super Bowl, you couldn’t get there on foot. It became known as the Get-Bob-Griese (a highly efficient, undervalued quarterback)-never-mind-his-halfback school of recruiting.

And then John Robinson and Eric Dickerson came into the league.

John Robinson came off the campus of USC, where they establish the passing game as a decoy so they can go into the real bread and butter part of the game--the student-body-right-give-the-ball-to-the-tailback onslaught.

Robinson joined a team, the Rams, that hadn’t had a quarterback since the late Dutch Van Brocklin. They had almost everything else. Around a race track when a horse who was once great has to beat a younger field on remembered skills, they say he won on class alone. That’s the way the Rams won games.

Until they got Dickerson. Dickerson and Robinson have taken the game, if not back to Walter Camp or 1913, at least back to Galloping Ghosts and Four Horsemen. They win games on the run.

The pass has become so all-pervasive that three-man lines are the rule in the NFL today. Linebackers peel back at the snap of the ball, defenses are called nickel because five backs retreat when the ball is put in play, or dime because everybody on defense retreats.

Red Grange might never have been tackled if they had done that in his day. It looked like an invitation to 1913 to Coach John.

Dickerson-Robinson won a football game Sunday that they almost didn’t have to blow up the football for. Dickerson ran 40 yards for one touchdown, ran 36 yards for another touchdown that was called back, and 42 yards for the game-winning touchdown. In between, he gained 125 other yards.

Deacon Jones would be shocked. You have to think that if Rockne and Dorais came upon an NFL defense today they would hold a meeting and say: “Let’s spring a surprise on them. Let’s run the ball.”

Have the exotic pass defenses, the nickels and dimes and prevents brought back the run? Possibly. “I saw so many gaps out there I almost had to stop to see which one to pick out,” Eric Dickerson said as he laughed in the locker room after the game Sunday.

They may have to change the rules again. Touchdowns won’t count unless the scorer catches the ball five or more yards ahead of the passer. Two running plays in a row will result in a 10-yard penalty. Running plays will not be permitted inside opponents’ 20-yard line or in overtime, and it shall be illegal to mount a running play anywhere on the field without first notifying the defense so it can be readjusted.

Plus, we’ll have to have a rule that anyone who has two or more 40-yard gains shall be ineligible for any overtime or the fourth quarter, for all of that.

We’ve worked too long and hard to bring the forward pass to its present preeminence and designed too many sophisticated defenses to go with it to see two upstarts such as Robinson and Dickerson revolutionize it. Who do they think they are--Rockne and Dorais?