PSU Historic Connections to Plays
Penn State’s Ties to the Birth of Major Plays/Formations—
Did Penn State Invent the Fake Reverse?
Allison Danzig (former Cornell player and long ago New York Times sportswriter) suggested in his 1956 book “The History of American Football” that Penn State was one of the first (and possibly THE first) to use the classic of all ‘Razzle-Dazzle’ plays, the ‘Fake Reverse’. And it was a complete accident.
Danzig’s book quotes Dick Harlow (former Penn State player and coach) that in the 1919 season, State ran its first fake reverse while it was attempting to run a regular reverse. The specific game was never mentioned in the book, although the Nittany Lions played at Cornell in 1919 (PS won 20-0), and Danzig would have been a student there at that time.
As for the play in question, Harry Robb QB took the snap and looked to hand off to the wingback crossing behind him in the opposite direction hoping to surprise the defense with the reverse run. Somehow, the wing missed the signal and never took the ball leaving Robb to run in the original direction of the play. Luckily, Harry found a huge hole in the line for a big gain on the “broken” play. The team talked about what went wrong and then decided to call the reverse play again only to have the exact same thing happen; the wingback never took the handoff. After that, Penn State Head Coach Hugo Bezdek simply added the “fake reverse” to its playbook. The moral of the story—Don’t fix it, if it’s not really broken!
Did Penn State Invent the Placekick?
There’s some disagreement on this, but on a very windy day in late November 1894 at Oberlin College in Ohio, Penn State’s Charles Atherton (FB/End/Kicker 1890-94) kicked a roughly 25-yard field goal (‘goals from the field’ were then worth 5 points) from the hold of right halfback Charles Thomas to win the game 9-6 (State’s center on the kick was also its first ever head coach, George Hoskins).
This was only the third Penn State football game ever played outside of Pennsylvania. In the second half, about 9 minutes in, State cut the Oberlin halftime lead to 6-4 on a touchdown run by Atherton. The wind may have caused Charlie to miss the ensuing drop kick for the ‘goal after touchdown’ that would have tied the game at 6. Later, with about 10 minutes left in the game, State has the ball on the Oberlin 25-yard line. With the previous miss into the wind no doubt still in mind, Atherton would make Penn State history with the successful kick from the hold of Thomas for the eventual win. This, in fact, was the only successful field goal that entire season for State. Oberlin head coach, the legendary John Heisman, protested the legality of the play, but the kick was ruled legal during the game by the three referees (2 of whom were actually from Oberlin per the student newspaper Free Lance) and later by a college rules panel (the result was actually in doubt for several weeks). If not THE first, it was certainly one of the very first kicks from placement in college football history.
Charles Atherton was the son of Penn State president George Washington Atherton (1882-1906) and he arguably might have been State’s first star athlete. Earlier that same season, Atherton went 10 for 10 on “PAT” kicks and scored 3 touchdowns in the 60-0 season opening win over Gettysburg at Old Beaver Field. Atherton scored 32 of the game’s 60 points, but he missed his lone field goal attempt in the 1st half (rules prior to 1897 awarded 4 points for a TD, 2 for a PAT kick, & 5 on a FG). The 10 for 10 Penn State single game PAT record was finally matched just under 105 years later by Travis Forney in 1999 (10 for 10 vs. Akron in a 70-24 win), and then again by Jake Pinegar in 2019 (10 for 10 vs. Idaho in a 79-7 win).
NOTE: George Hoskins’ 1894 team would complete the season with a 6-0-1 mark making it the first undefeated team in Penn State history in a season with more than a single college opponent on the schedule. 1894 is the first year honored on the East Suite façade at Beaver Stadium.
Was Penn State the victim of the first “hidden ball” trick?
Penn State faced coaching legend Glenn “Pop” Warner 13 times from 1897 to 1923. Pop owned Penn State beating them 9 times (State’s record vs. Pop was 1-9-3). Warner coached three different teams against State—Cornell, the Carlisle Indians, and Pitt. At Cornell, the Big Red beat Penn State in Pop’s only game involving the two, in 1897 (the first of his two seasons with Cornell).
A 1937 story on Pop Warner (published in a University of Pittsburgh gameday program) alleges that he invented the “hidden ball” play and reveals that he actually first used it against Penn State in their 1897 game at Cornell’s Percy Field in Ithaca, NY. It was the closing minutes of the game, and it was beginning to get dark, it had been icy and drizzly all afternoon per The Free Lance (a forerunner of the Collegian), State fullback Charles Mechesney kicked to the Big Red who then bunched up around the receiver and then burst out in different directions. Penn State players were unsure who really had the ball. Supposedly with assistance from another player, Cornell LHB Allen Whiting tucked the football under his jersey (which reportedly had been modified with a sewn-in elastic band) and took off running past the State defenders for 100 yards and the TD in a 45-0 rout (it was Whiting’s 6th TD of the day). It was also State’s 5th straight shutout loss, so this was a classic case of “running up the score”.
For the record, another coaching legend is also credited by some as the inventor of the hidden ball trick. John Heisman, then coaching Auburn, is reputed to have used the hidden ball in the jersey trick as early as 1895 vs. Vanderbilt and used it again later that year on Pop Warner himself when he was still the coach at Georgia. And, Warner, in turn, used it on Penn State in 1897. It was later outlawed, but not before Pop put it to use during the early 1900’s with the Carlisle Indian School.