1892 The Flying Wedge Or Mass Momentum Plays

Certain ingenious plays featured in the early days of football was the flying wedge, invented in 1892 and brought out by Harvard University. Almost every team in the country promptly copied the play. in the flying wedge, however, nine of the eleven players of the team withdrew about 20 yards from the midpoint of the football forming two lines and on command started simultaneously and at full speed, converging on a point indicated by the ball. by the time they arrived at the ball, they had worked up a mass momentum, and the interference they gave for the runner was something wonderful to behold, and terrible to stop. In 1894 Coach Woodruff, at Penn, drafted the principle of the flying wedge for his famous flying interference, which could be put into operation by the team that had the ball in ever scrimmage down. this consisted in starting the tackle and end ahead of the snapping of the ball. They swung back together, between their line and the backfield, and then kept on to reinforce the work of their companion tackle and end, on the other side of the ball. Just before they hit the defensive line the ball went into play, and the results were again almost as disastrous to the defense as was the flying wedge.So unstoppable was the flying wedges that the rules committee was forced to legislate them out of existence within a few years in order to preserve the proper balance between offense and defense. In 1896, a rule was established to limit motion to only one player, thus, eliminating the brutal momentum plays. Coach CAmpbell