History of american college football Heisman achievements
"One of the greatest drawbacks of the game 50 years ago was the fact that there was no neutral zone between the two scrimmage lines. There was only an imaginary scrimmage line drawn through the center of the ball. Naturally the rush line players of both teams were constantly striving to crowd this imaginary hair line, in order to get the jump on their opponents.
This led to endless wrangling between teams and officials as to how many players were a hair's breadth over this hair line on each down. This resulted in so much charging and counter-charging, pushing and wrestling, that it often took the quarterback a full minute to get the ball in play.
"Bert Walters, a former captain of Harvard, introduced in 1903 the idea of the present neutral zone-a great improvement. "In the old days, players of one side were permitted to grab hold of their runners anywhere they could and pull, push or yank him along in any direction that would make the ball advance. Sometimes 2 enemy tacklers would be clinging to the runner's legs, and trying to hold him back, while several team-mates of the runner had hold of his arms, head, hair, or wherever they could attach themselves, and were pulling him in the other direction. I still wonder how some of the ball carriers escaped dismemberment.
"Some backs had leather straps, like valise handles, sewed or riveted on the shoulders of their jackets and on the hips of their trousers, so as to offer good handholds for their team-mates.
"Wouldn't it make your eyes pop out if you were attending a football game today and saw the defensive ends going out 30 or 40 feet from their adjacent tackle? Well, that's where defensive ends played in those days. Why? Because a defensive end was not asked, or expected, to do anything much beyond keeping the opposing runner from getting around his end. So they tried to take good care that it shouldn't happen, by playing so close to the boundary that the runner had to go out of bounds to pass them, "We were allowed only 3 downs in those days, but were required to gain only 5 yards on those 3 tries.
"Whenever the ball went out of bounds it was not brought in 10 paces and put in play on that spot, as is the case nowadays. Instead, both rush lines faced each other at right angles to the boundary line. The man who had recovered the ball out of bounds brought it to the spot where it went out, and threw it out into the field of play with both sides scrambling to recover it."
