1881 Scoring Changes

More blasts from the past

1881 Scoring Changes

It doesn’t seem that there were any significant rule changes before the 1881 college football season.

However, there were changes to the scoring mechanism of the sport.

As you know from yesterday’s post, football in 1880 wasn’t exactly a sport conducive to offense. That continues to be obvious in game accounts from early 1881.

Take, for example, this game in old San Francisco from early March:

From The San Francisco Examiner, March 21, 1881, page 1

These games would constantly finish with extremely low scores, as the clear incentive for any team pinned back into their own territory was to try to advance by punting. And, if you’ve watched a lot of rugby (or Australian rules football), you’ll recognize this as a familiar tactic. Self-inflicted safeties had absolutely no negative aspects, and entitled the team to punt the ball to the other side unopposed.

From The Boston Post, March 23, 1881, page 3

When the rules committee met again early that October, safeties were at the top of the agenda:

From The Boston Globe, October 4, 1881, page 2

And that’s precisely what changed — though the compromise seems pretty odd by modern standards:

From The Morning Journal-Courier (New Haven, CT), October 11, 1881, page 2

Despite what some might say, this wasn’t really an attempt to “standardize scoring.” Rather, it was an attempt to create an incentive for teams to actually move the ball forward instead of playing extremely conservatively. The fact that it still took 4 safeties to register a single point indicates that there was still some sympathy for overmatched teams who were looking for a way to avoid a horrible defeat.