Flying Wedge First Used in 1892 by Deland Coached Harvard Team

The following article is the first of a series on football, written for the Crimson by S. deJ. Osborne 1G., former University football and track manager and at present Director of Publicity for the H. A. A.

Modern football has been revolutionized by the great development in the forward pass which reached its apex in the Dartmouth attack of 1925, but modern football has not been barred from college activities because of this. Football in nineties was practically barred and would probably have been stopped had it not been legislated against most decisively, and the cause of this was the famous "flying wedge.'

This play which was developed at Harvard was the product of the mind of Lauren F. Deland who put it into play with the Harvard team of 1892. Deland who was not a college graduate, but a leading advertising expert in the East, made it his avocation to invent new methods of carrying out football plays or war tactics or in getting up time saving devices in everyday life.

Defensive Team Laid Down.

As football was played in the late eighties and early nineties the kickoff was effected by touching the ball with a man's fool, picking it up, and running behind the other ten men who started as scon as the ball was touched and formed a wedge. The defending team merely laid down in front of the wedge and the entire team went down in a pile having gained perhaps ten yards.

There was no rule to prevent "starting before the ball" on the offensive team but this rule did apply to the defense, and Deland thought that the wedge would be much more effective if it was in motion before the ball was kicked and recovered, and thus had a distinct start on the defending team who had to remain stationary until the ball was kicked.

Momentum Made for Force.

He therefore had the entire team with the exception of the kicker lineup about ten yards behind the regular line and start before the ball, thus reaching the kicker about the time he was recovering his short kick. Their momentum would carry them into the defense with terrific force, either injuring the player in the way or gaining considerably more yardage than did the former wedge.

In the game of 1892 he expected to start this play and run the wedge down the center of the field, hoping that Yale would come offside and could be warned not to do so on the next play. The penalty could not be refused in these days and if Yale had been offside and a touchdown had been scored the penalty would be administered but the touchdown would not count. On the next play with Yale onside the wedge would shift to the sideline and would force the brunt of the attack on only half of the Yale team, thereby increasing the scoring of Harvard.

Yale Stayed Onside.

When it came time to put this play on. In the second half of the 1892 game. Yale did not get offside as expected after seeing the Harvard team start ten yards behind the line. The Harvard coaches could not imagine why this had ever happened and it was never found out until on a trip to England of the Harvard-Yale combined track team, several years later, Walter Camp. Yale's headcoach of football, disclosed the fact that Yale had known about some new play of Harvard's and had warned its players to watch the ball and not the men. Their information had come in one of the most curious ways imaginable and it allowed them to win the game, 6 to 0.

Major Henry Lee Higginson '82 who had given the University Soldiers Field came to the field one afternoon with an elderly gentleman who was said to be going to California that night and would very much like to see the Harvard team practice. No objection was found and he saw Harvard carefully practicing the flying wedge. Several weeks later when he had reached California, he happened to be sitting in a cafe in San Francisco with another elderly man and unwittingly told the other the new development in Harvard's offense. The only trouble with his disclosure was that a Yale man happened to overhear the conversation and wrote to Walter Camp word for word what he had heard.

The Yale coaching staff was entirely unawares of what this new play could be but warned the team to "keep their eye on the ball" which prevented their false start and thus sounded the death-knell to the flying wedge in this game, but from this start the wedge developed rapidly and was the basis for Pennsylvania's famous "guards back" offense. It was the start of a series of momentum plays which combined brawn with momentum and had to be legislated out of the game.

This revolutionary offense and the first "scouting" seem almost modern with the talk of novel offenses and "non-scouting" agreements filling the football world with anxiety.