College Football SMQ: A brief history of spring football

With spring football in full swing once again, Sunday Morning Quarterback gets in the spirit. This week we briefly look back at the history of spring games.

The second Saturday in April featured a full schedule of spring football scrimmages for college teams around the country. On the heels of April 7 spring games, this weekend’s round of scrimmages provided some of the first public opportunities to watch college programs on the field since Alabama’s championship comeback over Georgia in January. The day saw more than three dozen schools hold public scrimmages.

These scrimmages provide teams a final chance to take the field after a series of spring practices. They also offer fans a chance to see who might emerge as a new star for their favorite programs. Over more than a century of spring football, the offseason practices and scrimmages have provided the canvas for any number of experimental advances in the sport.

This year, inclement weather around the country forced some colleges to cancel their spring football games. Even with the cancellations, though, 38 schools still hosted spring games this weekend. Each scrimmage afforded the opportunity to get one last set of reps in until fall practices commence.

At a time when the workload on student athletes is under greater scrutiny than ever, why do colleges even hold spring football games? Two more weekends of spring football still remain on this year’s calendar. With that in mind, let’s answer a few questions about the history of college football spring scrimmages in this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback.

Where and when did spring football originate?

Just as college football’s growth originated in the tony Ivy League colleges of the northeast, so too did spring football. Harvard was the first program to hold a spring practice when they took to Jarvis Field in March 1889. This inaugural example of practices, however, did not include an intrasquad scrimmage. Instead, the players engaged in kicking, tackling, and ball recovery drills.

Scrimmages soon became a regular part of spring drills, though, as the practice spread out of Cambridge and around the college football world. By the turn of the 20th century, teams around the country were undertaking their own versions of spring practice.

In this period we even find examples of spring games between college programs. The University of Oregon, for example, played its first-ever intercollegiate game on March 24, 1894 against Albany College. As the sport first coalesced into existence, there was not yet any standard for scheduling out a season.

How has spring practice evolved over time?

Teams could gain a significant advantage from new advances in spring protocols. Programs began to practice, but the institution of a public scrimmage to cap the schedule would come later. At Michigan, for instance, the spring game first went public in 1925. For their rivals in Columbus, the first public spring scrimmage wasn’t held until after World War II in 1946. Another blueblood program, Nebraska, didn’t hold spring games for the public until 1950. Even then, it took six years until the Wolverines settled on a consistent format for their spring scrimmage.

Not only did formats change, though, but also policies designed to protect student athletes. As the NCAA grew into an oversight organization, spring practices were standardized across the country. Policies were implemented to protect players’ rights and health, ending decades of spring football that were often more violent than the fall version that went into the record books.

Take the mythicized career of Bear Bryant. An ardent advocate for hard-hitting spring practices, Bryant turned around fortunes at Kentucky, Texas A&M, and then Alabama thanks in large part to spring football. Bryant insisted on full-pads practices day after day, heavy on blocking and tackling drills. This ethos spread to other programs throughout the 1960s, as teams sought to replicate the results achieved by Bryant’s squads on the gridiron.

Eventually, the NCAA stepped in and tried to limit the contact and the risk of injury to student athletes. A sweeping series of reforms in 1998 scaled back the number of allowable practices and limited the amount of time in pads. Injuries, however, are still a fact of life for college athletes playing football in the spring.

How has spring football helped innovate the sport?

With the stakes at their lowest, spring provides an opportunity for football programs to experiment and try out new things on the gridiron. As a result, numerous innovations have originated from spring football.

Early in the 20th century, legendary coach Pop Warner allegedly invented the single-wing offense in his first season of spring practices at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. The program under Warner would go on to win 10 or more games in five of his eight seasons at Carlisle. The school’s success was due in part to his tactical innovation.

Decades later, Bob Devaney’s Nebraska Cornhuskers used the spring to institute an advancement in conditioning rather than tactics. In 1969, the Cornhuskers hired Boyd Epley as the first strength coach in college football history. The results were almost immediate, as Nebraska went on to win back-to-back national championships in 1970 and 1971.

When did spring football become big business?

Of the 10 spring games with the highest attendance in college football history, all 10 took place over the past decade. Leading the way is Ohio State, which boasts the two highest-attended spring football scrimmages on the list. In 2016, the Buckeyes became the first school to play a spring game in front of more than 100,000 spectators.

Based on the list of attendance records, it seems that spring games are most popular in one of two circumstances. Attendance rises when a new coach arrives to take over a program. It also climbs when a team is a preseason contender for the national title.

We saw this play out in both Tallahassee and College Station on Saturday. Jimbo Fisher’s former school Florida State and Fisher’s current program Texas A&M both boasted record attendance at their respective spring games. With the novelty of a new leader at the helm, fans came out in droves. The thrill of the new leads fans to see what might be on the horizon for their favorite teams.

The flip side of this all, however, is that a program in a holding pattern often sees its attendance suffer. Weather certainly played a factor in keeping the numbers low, but 50-degree weather alone could not explain the sparse crowds at Missouri’s spring game. The Tigers have a chance to make waves in the SEC East this season. But skepticism about the direction of the Tigers program also helped tamp down attendance figures.

Next: 5 takeaways from April 7 spring games

Over the next fortnight, stay alert to potential shifts in the college game as they transpire in the low-stakes laboratory of spring football. Innovations that take place this time of year can translate to big games when the games count in the fall.