The forward pass in history

Including a look at gridiron

There are two laws that are essential to the orderly movement of play - off-side and the forward pass. They are distinctive features of rugby football.

It is an oddity of the game that you seek to go forward by passing backwards.

Strangely enough it is an ancient bit of law in some bits of football. In 1602 they wrote: "It is prohibited to deal a foreballe." That mean that you were not allowed to throw the ball forward, and the law spoke more of a throw forward than a forward pass.

The game really took its form at Rugby School where in 1866 it stated that throwing forward was "disallowed".

In 1874 the throw forward actually got a definition - "throwing the ball in the direction of the opponents' goal-line".

Originally, play was stopped for a throw forward only at the request of the other captain. In 1896 this changed and play had to be stopped and brought back at once if the other side did not claim a fair catch or gain advantage.

In 1898 the law said that if a throw forward happened over the goal-line, a scrum five yards out would be awarded if the defending team did it, a drop-out if the attacking team did it.

A free-kick and then later a penalty for doing it deliberately first got going in 1883, becoming a penalty in 1926. The willful/intentional/deliberate throw forward is probably one of rugby's rarest forbidden practices. It probably occurs in the law at  all only because the knock-on and the throw-forward were lumped together.

In 1926, too, the law declared: "If the ball is passed back, but after alighting on the ground behind the place from which it was passed, it bounce forward, the pass is in order."

The law has remained substantially unchanged for years and years, though it may still not be as clear as some people would like, as out recent treatise on the forward pass shows. (To go to it, click here)

Now it reads: DEFINITION - THROW-FORWARD
A throw-forward occurs when a player throws or passes the ball forward. Forward means towards the opposing teams dead ball line.

EXCEPTION
Bounce forward. If the ball is not thrown forward but it hits a player or the ground and bounces forward, this is not a throw-forward.

The Americans changed this, of course, and in so doing changed the game. If you change the laws, you change the game.

Football of a rugby kind, which may have gone to the USA with the Pilgrim Fathers, got going in the USA after the Civil War - perhaps in lieu of! The game would be played on the first Monday of the Harvard year, which was then dubbed Bloody Monday.

As was the case with rugby football it was a fairly dour affair for the spectators - with its "mass huddles, flying wedges and stretcher bearers".

Changing the passing law did much to popularise the game. In 1906 a coach John William Heisman did much to campaign for a change to the law on passing. The man who pushed a lot of law change through was Walter Camp, the Yale coach and gridiron's extraordinary lawmaker.

He got the number of players reduced from 15 to 11, set the size of the field at 110 yards, organised the points system, developed the backs, and introduced the system of downs.

But the game was in such trouble because of its injuries that President Theodore Roosevelt asked Harvard, Yale and Princeton to save the game. That was in 1905. Enter the forward pass.

The man who made the forward pass so spectacular was Knute Rockne, the legendary coach of Notre Dame University, probably the greatest and most influential coach in the history of the game.

He made little Notre Dame the greatest side in the USA as the Fightin' Irish swept all aside from coast to coast and allowed Catholics in the USA to lift their heads in pride.

By the way the forward pass is not a limitless option in gridiron. A forward pass may be made only during scrimmage, and then only from behind the line of scrimmage. A lateral pass may be made anywhere on the field anytime the ball is in play.

Let's face the fact that the forward pass is often a component of a spectacular try at rugby and is often, for all the apparent simplicity of the law, still much of a talking point in the game in 2004 as ever it was.