JRN/SPS 362 - Lecture Twenty-Three (December 3, 2025)

Here is the presentation that accompanied Lecture Twenty-Three.

1. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Rich Hanley , Professor Emeritus Lecture Twenty-Three (Epilogue)

2. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ If you were 10 years old in the 1840s, this is what football looked like.

3. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ If you were 30 in the 1860s, this is what football looked like.

4. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ If you were 50 in the 1880s, this is what football looked like.

5. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ If you were 60 in the 1890s, this is what football looked like.

6. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ If you were 70 in the 1900s, this is what football looked like.

7. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ If you were 80 in the 1910s, this is what football looked like.

8. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ If you were 90 in the 1920s, this is what football looked like.

9. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ This is what football looked like to a 10-year-old in the 1930s.

10. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ This is what football looked like to a 20-year-old in the 1940s.

11. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ This is what football looked like to a 30-year-old in the 1950s.

12. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ This is what football looked like to a 40-year-old in the 1960s.

13. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ This is what football looked like to a 50-year-old in the 1970s.

14. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ This is what football looked like to a 60-year-old in the 1980s.

15. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ This is what football looked like to a 70-year-old in the 1990s.

16. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ This is what football looked like to an 80-year-old in the 2000s.

17. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ This is what football looked like to a 90-year-old in the 2010s.

18. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ If that 90-year-old continued to live at least to the end of 2021, that person would have seen Tom Brady win Sports Illustrated’s Sportsperson of the Year twice - in 2005 and 2021. Only Tiger Woods and Lebron James have won it three times.

19. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ This is what football looks like to a 10-year-old in the 2020s. Black QBs in college such as the great Eldridge Dickey were for decades told they couldn’t play. Now, several such as Patrick Mahomes, Jalen Hurts, Jayden Daniels and Kyler Murray are stars.

20. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Even the persistent issue with the failure of the NFL to hire Black coaches in the NFL is changing, but not so much in college. Despite the NFL’s Rooney Rule designed to encourage the hiring of Black, few were chosen.

21. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ In 2022, only three Black head coaches were on the sidelines: Mike Tomlin in Pittsburgh, Lovie Smith in Houston and Todd Bowles in Tampa Bay. The NFL in 2023 consisted of 68 percent minority players, including 54 percent Black.

22. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ At the start of 2025 season, nine head coaches identified as minority, including five Black men: Bowles, Aaron Glenn (Jets), Raheem Morris (Falcons), Tomlin, and Houston’s DeMeco Ryans.

23. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Other minority coaches included David Canales, who is Mexican (Panthers) and Mike McDaniel, biracial (Dolphins).

24. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Many Black coaches can be traced on the coaching tree to one Black coach: Tony Dungy, now with NBC. Today, there are a number of Black coordinators and position coaches from different coaching trees who will compete for head coaching posts in the future.

25. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ In November 2022, a 1957 photo of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones surfaced that showed him at his Little Rock, Arkansas, high school in a group blocking Black students from entering the building after the Supreme Court three years earlier ordered schools to desegregate.

26. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Jones acknowledged his actions and vowed to work to make sure the NFL would break the old-boys network to hire Black coaches. He said the issue comes down to forming relationships between owners and more Black coaches.

27. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Only two of the majority owners of the NFL’s 32 teams are minorities: one Asian American, the other Pakistani American.

28. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Progress is possible. Football also looks like this to a 10-year-old in the 2020s, who witnessed the first all-Black officiating crew in 2020.

29. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ The 10-year-old’s great grandfather probably did not witness a Black game official at all unless he or she attended a game featuring two all-Black teams.

30. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ And it looks like this to a 10-year-old, watching games officiated by women, including the first, Sarah Thomas, who joined the NFL in 2015.

31. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ And the 10-year-old witnessed Sarah Fuller of Vanderbilt become the first woman to play in a Power Five college football game – and the first to score when on Dec. 12, 2020, she kicked an extra point. Some 2,500 women have played high school and college football.

32. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Today, girls are fueling the growth of one of the fastest-growing sports in America with 2.4 million youth participants: flag football. Twelve states have certified girls’ flag football as a varsity sport. Another 19 states have pilot programs in place.

33. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Meanwhile, the NFL is aggressively promoting flag football throughout the world, with 2,000 leagues in the U.S.. Some 800,000 boys and girls participate.

34. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ “That’s the beauty of flag football,” Andrea Castillo, quarterback of Panama’s Bronze Medal team at the World Games in 2022, told the Los Angeles Times. “Everyone can play. It accessible and inclusive.”

35. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Flag football will be included for both men and women in the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

36. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ With equality of opportunity in the air, the 10-year-old also witnessed the first woman to serve as an assistant coach during a game when Cleveland Browns chief of staff Callie Brownson roamed the sidelines directing the team’s tight ends in their Nov. 29, 2020, game against Jacksonville.

37. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ A 10-year-old would see Carl Nassib become the first active NFL player to announce that he is gay when he shared an Instagram video in June 2021. Michael Sam had become the first openly gay athlete to be drafted by the NFL in 2014.

38. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ The 10-year-old is also watching coaches make decisions such as whether to go for a first down or attempt a two-point conversion based on analytics, developed in the 1960s in large measure by an accidental NFL quarterback named Virgil Carter.

39. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Carter ties together many parts of the modern NFL. Summoned to play quarterback by coach Paul Brown and offensive coordinator Bill Walsh of the Bengals after Greg Cook was hurt, Carter in his spare time authored a study that created a metric called expected points.

40. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Called the expected points metric, its a computation that rests at the foundation of contemporary NFL analytics. The metric is the typical number of net points a team can expect based on field position, down and distance.

41. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Carter played college football at BYU under coach Lavell Edwards, who refined a spread offense later copied by college coaches and now pro coaches. He is thus the single link between spread offenses and the analytics, components of the 21 st century game.

42. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ And there is another piece of football magic to disclose. Red Grange, the college star who gave the NFL credibility when he signed with Chicago in 1925, announced one of the first televised league games, the 1949 Thanksgiving Day game in Detroit.

43. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ And running the football – the elemental part of the game Grange pursued- may be back In the first half of the 2022 NFL season, points scored fell to a five-year low, two years after teams set an NFL record for most points in a season with 12,692.

44. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ That trend continued into the 2024 season when total points scored fell to 2006 levels. Through October 22, 2025, more points have been scored than in a similar period in 2024.

45. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Could the spread be dead? Tom Brady thinks the NFL is mired in mediocrity.

46. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Brady said on ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith Show broadcast on November 20, 2023, that he “doesn’t see the excellence I saw in the past.” He blamed lousy coaches and poor player development.

47. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Still, football goes in cycles. What’s old is new again.

48. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Yale, where Walter Camp formalized the game in the 19 th century with rule changes that both popularized and saved the game, just finished its 151 th year of football.

49. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ And the old Blues retain an influence over the modern game and, in fact, may be making it even more popular in the process.

50. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Yale alum McDaniel has reconceptualized the game’s tactics along with other coaches in the Mike Shanahan coaching tree from Washington, but his Dolphins sputtered in 2025.

51. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Come to think of it, the old rugby game of yore that Yale’s Camp refashioned mashed with the modern appeared in 1982 when California beat Stanford on a kickoff return featuring laterals and backwards passes that led to the winning TD as the Stanford band took the field.

52. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ “Working on a book about the inexplicable (game) … I interviewed coaches and players, fans, journalists and officials. I learned a lot about football, but more about brotherhood, regret and hope,” wrote James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times in a Nov. 19, 2021, story on the game.

53. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ And that hope is evident in Southern Methodist University, the only school to be given the death penalty by the NCAA in the mid 1980s. In 2023, the Mustangs won a conference title for the first time since 1984 and are now in the ACC.

54. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ SMU was nationally ranked throughout the 2024 season and looked to be contender for inclusion in the expanded 12-team national championship playoffs.

55. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ Michigan, meanwhile, the school with the greatest fight song ever composed, won its 1,000 game in 2023 and the national championship. Hail, indeed, to the Victors.

56. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ So, in this period of acute medical trauma, anxiety and political anger, it may be no accident that Americans are looking to football for redemption, for togetherness and hope amid the grieving of incomprehensible loss.

57. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ As such, football will continue to reflect that “ ... subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation” as writer Norman Mailer wrote of American life.

58. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Review+ It is, after all, the same game as ever: a player carrying an air-filled bladder covered by animal hide must be brought to the ground before crossing a line, all in an exercise of ecstasy and violence experienced directly and vicariously each fall and winter by millions of Americans.

59. JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football