5/29/2023 0 Comments Flying wedge football![]() ![]() You're not going to have the fever you would have associated with an infection." The only common symptoms would be loss or change in consciousness and mental status. "Meningitis would give you a fever, mental status changes, a very sore neck when you try and move it, which concussions tend not to do unless you injure the spinal cord or the spine of the neck. To be more precise, as Matava explains, "Meningitis is basically an infection of the cerebral spinal fluid that coats your brain." When I asked him if the symptoms of meningitis could be confused with football injuries, he expressed severe doubt. An infection isn't a cause of death from football any more than an infection is a cause of death from breathing. 5, this Springfield, Mass., native played in an inter-class football game, which, according to one account, "resulted in meningitis," and he then died on Nov. This is a pretty clear-cut case where modern medicine would have saved James's life. Louis he "received a kick on the knee, which resulted in blood poisoning." Now, it seems odd to claim a glorified kick in the shin could be a cause of death, but as Matava explained, he likely received an infection as a result of a cut or wound. James Squires: As reported by the New-York Tribune, among other papers, James was a member of the Alton (Ill.) High School football team. Keep in mind, epidemiology of injuries back then was prehistoric as far as accurate data on injuries and all that." With that caution in mind, I present to you three cases that were reported in the 1905 newspapers as deaths "related to" or "caused by" football, yet seem suspicious upon reflection: There were no antibiotics to speak of at the time, really. They just didn't have much in the way of diagnostic tools at their disposal, their physical examination methods were crude, there was not a lot of pathophysiology, meaning the makeup of disease and what causes disease in the body. Matava also issued a general caution regarding all diagnoses from that era: "You have to keep in mind, in 1905, they knew very little about anything. Teams would strategize to control possession by bowling their way forward, inch by inch, yard by yard, punch by punch. Games were 70 minutes long players would take part in almost every play there was no neutral zone between the offensive and defensive line and since you needed only five yards for a first down, there was less incentive to run outside the tackles. The most you would see would be the occasional nose guard or hat. This was before leather helmets, before rudimentary pads, before everything. If you would run up the middle, then you would just slam them as hard as you possibly can in order to try and gain as much yardage as possible." As for padding, there was none. As Crippen explained to me, "They knew it would be effective. In the wedge's ancestral form, players would start a few yards behind the line of scrimmage and then embark on a sort of rolling train wreck. The most common play featured the flying wedge, a formation whose last vestiges-remember the play on kickoffs, the one with those fat dudes holding hands and clobbering a single, smaller guy running downfield?-were struck from the pro game a few years ago. Most obviously, there was no forward pass. He was 19.Įven though we call it by the same name, football was a different sport in those days. He was knocked unconscious by a blow to the head and died six hours later from a cerebral hemorrhage. In a game against New York University, halfback Harold Moore of Union College tried to "buck the line," in the words of the The St. Such was football in 1905 that the drop-kicking of Francis Burr wasn't even the worst thing to happen on that Nov. But they didn't write anything specific into the rules that you couldn't drop-kick a player." "It was one of those things where, as a gentleman, you wouldn't do that. "There was nothing saying you couldn't drop-kick or punch or anything like that," Crippen told me. But according to Ken Crippen, executive director of the Professional Football Researchers Association, the referee still called the play correctly. In his book, Watterson questioned the objectivity of the referee, Paul Dashiell, who as chair of the Intercollegiate Football Rules Committee had ties to legendary Yalie Walter Camp, the so-called "Father of American Football" and the author of an annual rules guide. ![]()
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