1894 Football Rule Changes

Back to the past

1894 Football Rule Changes

I’ve had 1894 on my mind for the past few days. Though it’s not always easy to reconstruct exactly what football rules were in any specific season, we can get pretty close. And the nicest part is that most newspapers in the United States published rule changes as they came up every year.

Here are the changes for 1894:

From The Indianapolis Journal, May 9, 1894, page 2

Now, these changes aren’t really very specific. For example, we saw just yesterday that the idea that “momentum mass plays” were prohibited wasn’t exactly correct.

This article is a bit more complete:

Note particularly the comment that the “mass momentum play” rules still allowed for 3 players to start before the ball was put into play.