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The first forward passes: In a decade of change, Eddie Cochems and Saint Louis saw the future of foo

Editor’s note: Throughout the offseason, The Athletic is celebrating the 150th anniversary of college football, one decade at a time. For more on the 1900s, read Matt Brown on the best players, teams, games and coaches.

Edward B. Cochems became the football coach and athletic director at Saint Louis University in February 1906, at a moment when the American obsession with the skies had begun to take hold. In late January, the Aero Club of America — the first major organization devoted exclusively to aerial navigation — held a public exhibition in New York City, a parade of dirigibles and balloons and kites and a display of the crankshaft and flywheel of the primitive airplane flown by brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright three years earlier in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

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There were stories in the newspapers of a young Russian flying something he called the “Aerautomobile” over Long Island; there was speculation about the success of a “goose-shaped balloon” that would soon sail over Teddy Roosevelt’s White House; there was a debate in Congress about appropriations for the flying machines Wright Brothers were tinkering with, leading one representative to declare the entire notion to be “absolutely absurd.”

That summer, as the Wright brothers, after years of wrangling, finally received a patent for their new and improved version of their flying machine — and as skeptics continued to believe that their claims of man-made flight were wildly exaggerated — Cochems settled into his new job and found himself pondering how to exploit the wild and risky and dreamlike aerial contrivance known as the forward pass.

Cochems was not quite 30 years old, and he had broad shoulders and a massive jaw and deep-set eyes. One local reporter referred to him as “a chunk of man.” He was an unlikely adopter of what was viewed by many in the football establishment as an unnecessarily gratuitous flourish: He had made his name as a stout and bruising player at Wisconsin who once pounded the Notre Dame defense for four touchdowns in a single game. He’d built winning teams at North Dakota State and Clemson by embracing the wedge-heavy offensive style he’d picked up in college.

But now Cochems had taken a job at a small Jesuit college better known for its medical school than its football team. Now he needed something to provide an equalizer for his undermanned squad, and the forward pass seemed as good a possibility as any.

That year, after a public debate about football’s seemingly intractable violence wound up being moderated (at least in part) by Teddy Roosevelt himself, several rules changes were approved, including the legalization of the forward pass.

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Thanks in part to Walter Camp’s protestations, the pass came with restrictions: Quarterbacks had to make throws from at least five yards behind the line of scrimmage, and the ball had to cross that line five yards to the left or right of where it had been snapped. It couldn’t result in a touchdown through the air — if it was caught on the far side of the goal line, it was ruled a touchback. If the ball wasn’t touched before it hit the ground, it resulted not only in an incompletion, but a loss of possession.

Cochems was as suspicious of the impact of the new rules as many of his colleagues were. He believed, as Camp did, that colleges had a mission to educate their students both mentally and physically. He feared that “puny” academics like Harvard president Charles Eliot were compromising those ideals. He believed that football should be vigorous physically and “open enough to unfairness to produce moral stamina.” The game was now rife with trickery, Cochems wrote in the university’s student yearbook in 1906. But he was also not above embracing that trickery: He understood that things were different now that, due to Camp’s lobbying, an offense had to gain 10 yards instead of five yards over the course of just three downs. In order for Cochems’ undersized team to compete, they couldn’t simply rely on their physicality. The forward pass, Cochems acknowledged, had the potential to produce a tremendous amount of beautiful football.

Cochems had one advantage over his colleagues in that he’d contemplated and processed the possibilities of the forward pass for a longer time than most. He coached Clemson two years after John Heisman departed for Georgia Tech. They discussed the untapped potential of the pass when they crossed paths, and Cochems had become an advocate of Heisman’s ongoing campaign to legalize the pass. But now that it was here, there were still so many questions: How, Cochems wondered, could he incorporate the pass into an offense while minimizing the risk that skeptics like Camp had built into it?

In addition to the forward pass being legalized with heavy penalties for failure, it would have to compete against simultaneous innovations. At the same time that it legalized the pass, the rules committee had approved another change aimed at opening up the game and forcing the defense to scatter more widely: The liberalization of the onside kick. Now every offensive player was eligible to recover an onside kick as soon as the ball touched the ground, which meant it could potentially become a weapon if you were willing to take the chance. If you wanted to embrace the risks of the new rulebook, this seemed the safer way to go than the forward pass, with all of its restrictions and penalties and mechanical challenges. This, some coaches believed, was a throwback to football’s roots, to a sport rooted more on the ground than in the air.

But Cochems didn’t see it that way. The onside kick, with its wild and crooked and unpredictable bounces, felt more grounded in luck than the forward pass. If executed properly, the forward pass could both gain yards and help a team maintain control of the ball.


The 1906 Saint Louis football team was the first to take advantage of the forward pass.

And yet Cochems had no real idea how to do this. At least, not at first.

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Not only did he have to find a way to mitigate the penalties that had been attached to it; on a fundamental level, the forward pass was a physical challenge. No one knew how to effectively throw a zeppelin-shaped projectile — colloquially referred to as a “blimp” — that hadn’t been designed with anything like that purpose in mind. The ball had been constructed to be struck by the instep of the shoe for kicking and tucked under an armpit for running. At first, the conventional wisdom was that the best way to pass this object was to push it end over end, as with a backward lateral. A quarterback could throw it underhand by grasping the end of the ball with the palm and fingers, or he could throw it side-armed, swinging his throwing arm and thrusting it toward a receiver, or he could throw it with both hands from his chest, like a basketball pass. All those were adequate, if you were willing to settle for short throws to receivers near the line of scrimmage.

But how, Cochems wondered, could he push the ball farther downfield? How could he stretch a defense and turn the forward pass into the equalizer his undermanned team would need in order to compete with schools like Iowa, which had beaten Saint Louis 31-0 the season before?

The answer would come hours north of St. Louis, in a tiny town called Lake Beulah in Cochems’ home state of Wisconsin. There, the Jesuit Order of Missouri had purchased an island that once housed a resort hotel and turned it into a summer retreat. The property had dormitories and a kitchen and a billiards room. There was a windmill and a spring that provided fresh water. This was where Cochems chose to take the 16 members of his team, most of them aspiring doctors, to train for two months that summer. And amid that relative isolation, the modern forward pass was incubated.

The centerpiece of Cochems’ experiments was transfer student Bradbury Robinson, who had earned a letter in football at Wisconsin before coming to Saint Louis, and who had helped convince the administration to hire Cochems from Clemson. Two years earlier, during a practice at Wisconsin, Robinson had been practicing his kicking and asked a teammate to kick the ball back to him; instead, that teammate, Howard Savage, threw the ball back to him overhand in a neat revolving spiral. It was amazing, Robinson said. Savage could throw the ball almost as far as Robinson could punt it.

It was the first time Robinson — who was also a baseball player — had ever seen anyone actually throw a football overhand, and he asked Savage to show him how to do it. He would practice his passes for fun, honing his methods, perfecting his grip — fingers on the last two or three of the lacings, the only place where he could get a solid hold on the thing — and improving his ability to propel the ball without it wobbling or losing momentum. He began by throwing to teammate Jack Schneider from 15 yards away. They kept on extending the distance until one day Robinson called out to Cochems, “I can throw the danged thing 40 yards!”

Robinson had all the qualities that would later become desirable in a quarterback, both tangible and intangible: He was 6 feet 4, a natural athlete in multiple sports, and his hands were huge, which allowed him to grip even the blimp of a ball he was forced to throw in those early years. He was also a natural-born leader. While at Wisconsin, he had been summoned to a dinner with the state’s governor Robert La Follette — who was also mulling a presidential run — to discuss Roosevelt’s proposed reformation of football. After college, Robinson served as an infantry commander in World War I and would eventually become the mayor of St. Louis, Michigan, and crusade against the usage of the agricultural pesticide DDT.

Cochems drilled his team constantly at Lake Beulah. They would run and throw the ball through hoops and send receivers deep downfield to catch those passes. And this would become the centerpiece of Cochems’ offense: He called it the “overhand projectile spiral pass.” His receivers would run their routes with their backs to the line of scrimmage until the passer — usually Robinson — called out “Hike,” and then, when the receiver turned his head and caught the ball, he too would call out “Hike,” a signal for the teammates around him to start blocking.

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At the same time, Cochems developed a running game predicated on deception and centered around the deep threat that the pass would potentially pose. He set his backs farther from the line of scrimmage and experimented with an unbalanced offensive line so that backs like Robinson could come in motion and pose a threat to kick, pass or run. He set his receivers far apart so that one defensive player couldn’t cover two of them, and he taught his players to run or pass out of the same formation, so that, as one player said, “We didn’t telegraph our passes.” He sent a man deep downfield behind the intended receiver in case of an interception.

Cochems was so certain that others would adopt his philosophy that he also built a staunch pass defense by teaching his linemen to rush from a standing position to bat down any passes that came their way, and by instructing his defensive backs to play a zone defense, like a baseball outfield. But Cochems’ only mistake was that he overestimated his colleagues’ penchant for risk: It turned out that the offense he devised in Lake Beulah was largely adopted, in those early years, by a small band of outsiders like Cochems, most of them far removed from the East Coast establishment. And it turned out that those outsiders were so far ahead of the curve that it would take that establishment years to catch up.

There are retrospective tales of college football players throwing overhand spirals long before Robinson did, just as there are stories of coaches who claim to have been planning for the pass long before its legalization. “The fact is that all coaches were working on it,” Chicago coach Amos Alonzo Stagg would say of that summer of 1906.

The pass had been used in an experimental exhibition in December 1905 between a pair of Kansas colleges, Fairmount and Washburn. The manager of the Fairmount team reportedly wired Walter Camp (and possibly Teddy Roosevelt himself) to seek permission. But it was a wintry day on the plains, neither team could figure out how to truly make the forward pass work and the game mostly consisted of dropped balls and kicks and a total of five completed passes, the majority thrown underhand. The final score: 0-0.

And yet it was easier to speak about it retroactively, because nearly every other coach only utilized the forward pass sporadically, if at all, that first season. Sequestered on a literal island, Cochems had no real conception that he was working ahead of nearly everyone else. He and his players were laboring within a vacuum, wedding themselves to a progressive ideal. They would not just rehearse the forward pass; they would live by the forward pass.

On Sept. 5, they traveled to nearby Waukesha to open their season against Carroll College, a veteran-laden team with 10 returnees. For the first 30 minutes, Cochems kept it conservative; neither team scored a point. Finally, a frustrated Cochems called a timeout. That, he said, was enough of the old ways. Now, he told his team, was the time to run the play they referred to as “air attack.”

Robinson dropped back, gripped the blimp and hurled the ball downfield. It dropped to the grass, untouched. Carroll took over possession of the ball but could do nothing with it, and on Saint Louis’s next offensive possession, Jack Schneider ran a 20-yard out pattern. Carroll’s players had never seen a football passed before that afternoon, and when Schneider caught the ball, he realized there were no defenders anywhere near him. He scored a touchdown, and Saint Louis won the game, 22-0. It won three more games within the state of Wisconsin after that, and then it headed home and won four more games after that.

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None of the competition was exactly formidable — the seventh and eighth wins came against the Rolla School of Mines and Kansas City Medics — but the way Saint Louis dominated was utterly thorough. The combined score of those first eight games: Saint Louis 302, Opponents 0.

With just 118 days until #CFB150, we recognize Bradbury Robinson, who threw the first legal forward pass on Sept. 5, 1906. It went 20 yards and helped @SLU_Billikens to a 22-0 victory over @FootballCarroll pic.twitter.com/LKoBp8O5Yy

— CFB150 (@CFB150) September 5, 2018

There was virtually no press coverage of that Saint Louis-Carroll game. Even the Carroll College student newspaper glossed over the details in a single-sentence recap. And yet it was almost certainly the first time a forward pass had been utilized in a regular-season football game. And even as Robinson and Cochems began to perfect their passing game, the college football establishment remained skeptical that it would ever amount to much of anything.

Some Eastern coaches saw it as a gimmick. Some of them believed, like Camp, that it cheapened the raw physicality of the sport. And some simply couldn’t — or wouldn’t — summon the creativity required to adapt to it. Dartmouth coach Fred Folsom called the new rules a farce and accused Camp of angling for a fourth down for the offense with the new rules, because no team could regularly gain 10 yards in three downs.

In late September, a few days after a game between Villanova and the Carlisle Indian School that featured several completed passes and multiple errant ones (final score: Carlisle 6, Villanova 0), a hundred coaches and administrators — many of whom would open their football seasons the next day — gathered in New York to discuss how to interpret the new rules. Nobody in attendance seemed to know how to implement the passing game into an offense. The contention was that no one could gain 10 yards in three downs, and that football was in danger of degenerating into an interchange of kicks.

That entire season in the East, there were two notable forward passes: The first came when Wesleyan completed a pass against Yale in October, and the second came in the final week of the season, when Yale’s Paul Veeder threw a 30-yarder to teammate R.L. Forbes, helping to set up the winning touchdown to beat Harvard.

For the most part, Camp ignored it, as did much of the Ivy League. The forward pass, The New York Times wrote, while “exceptionally pretty” when it worked, was too laden by the restrictions surrounding it to have any real impact. One of the leading football writers of the era, Parke Davis, wrote that players regarded it lightly, if at all.

A thousand miles removed from the Times headquarters, a parallel reality was unfolding. The forward pass, declared the St. Louis Post Dispatch, was “the most potential play” under the new rules of football. Cochems’ team manager traveled back East and reported that teams were still relying upon the old formations; when Cochems himself went to watch a game between Indiana and Chicago in late October, the one forward pass he saw thrown was an underhand toss by an Indiana quarterback that failed so miserably that Cochems found it laughable.

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“Why is it that the other teams are not taking advantage of the changes?” Cochems said. “I am sure I can’t figure it out.”

Saint Louis completed that season having scored 407 points and allowed 11. One of the referees in that Iowa game, a West Point lieutenant, called Saint Louis’s utilization of the forward pass the “most perfect exhibition” of the new rules he’d seen anywhere. At Yale and Harvard, the passes that were thrown often hung up in the air while teammates ran interference against defensive backs. At Saint Louis, the passes were thrown hard and accurately.

It would only be a matter of time, Cochems said — maybe one or two more seasons — before other coaches came around to his way of thinking. Slowly, the story of his 1906 team trickled eastward, and Camp enlisted Cochems to write an article for a Spalding football handbook he edited. Cochems convinced a local manufacturer to construct a prototype of a streamlined and smaller football that would not require someone with Robinson’s massive hands to throw it.

But here again, Cochems had underestimated the reticence of his colleagues to embrace new ideas. By 1912, he had abandoned football for politics. Meanwhile, football’s establishment clung stubbornly to conservatism. This was a sport that had become untenably violent largely because that violence had offered the most risk-averse path to victory. And given the restrictions on the pass, this was still true. Why bother with flying machines when you could win on the ground?

What the pass had done, however, was make football appear different — more strategic, more interesting, more wide-open and less focused on the brutality. The majority of fans enjoyed it. Yet those perceptions were tenuous, and those perceptions would not be altered in the long-term until the pass was unshackled and until the restrictions on it were lifted. Only then would it be accepted into the mainstream; only then would it become a part of American folklore.

(Photos courtesy of Saint Louis University)

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Artie Phelan

Update: 2024-04-22