ROUSES_SeptOct2019_Magazine

Sack This term is credited to one of the most fearsome pass rushers of all time, Hall of Famer Deacon Jones, who made his indelible stamp on the game terrorizing

say what?! You know all the terms, but do you know their origins? Football language is fully ingrained in our daily vocabulary, and there are stories behind the verbiage. Sometimes they’re literal (you can probably figure out Pigskin), sometimes they’re borrowed, and sometimes they are the product of divine inspiration. Here are seven points, what most people would refer to as a …

by luke johnson

quarterbacks in the 1960s for the Los Angeles Rams. And terror is exactly the kind of vibe he was looking for. The term sack is not meant to represent a bag, but is to recall the image of a conqueror sacking a city. Sacks became an official NFL statistic in 1982, eight years after Jones’ retirement.

Touchdown While this is now synonymous with scoring plays in American football, the term initially came from rugby to describe when the ball literally touched down on the other side of the goal. In fact, in American football’s earliest form,

Hail Mary The Hail Mary pass — a desperate

heave toward the end zone, often from midfield or further, at the end of a half — has its professional roots with the Dallas Cowboys and quarterback Roger

Staubach. After his toss that beat the Minnesota Vikings in the 1975 playoffs, Staubach, a Catholic, said, “I closed my eyes and said a Hail Mary.” But the spirit of the term really started at Notre Dame in the 1930s, where players used it to describe plays with a low probability of success.

players who crossed the goal line had to touch the ball down on the ground in order for the points to count. That rule was amended quickly, allowing for today’s players to commence their celebration as soon as they cross the goal line.

Once the merger was complete, the NFL reorganized slightly, adding teams, and rebalancing and renaming its two erstwhile rivals — now as the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference. They would also keep the Super Bowl tradition alive. In 1970, Monday Night Football premiered on ABC, bringing in an entirely new audience with such technological innovations as slow motion and multiple camera angles, as well as celebrity guest stars and a lively trio of commentators: Frank Gifford, Howard Cosell and Don Meredith. In case you are wondering, the New Orleans Saints joined the NFL in 1966; they played in Tulane Stadium and spent 40 years being beaten pretty soundly, with the occasional punctuation of a winning season. In 2009, however, football would be changed evermore for the better, when Drew Brees led the team to victory in Super Bowl XLIV. I pause here to note that, 10 years later, that felony failure to throw a flag on the Rams in the NFC champion- ship game was the second instance in the same game (indeed, the same quarter ) in which refs magically missed a pass interference call against the Rams (indeed, again, against Robey-Coleman). The restraint exhibited by the ghost of Tom Benson during both calls was

impressive enough; a lesser spirit would have reached a phantom arm from the field below and pulled the referees one by one beneath the Superdome and deep into the belly of the Earth. THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL If the first 100 years were about assembling a professional football league and setting it on sound financial footing, the next 20 years will likely be devoted to solving the problem of traumatic brain injury inflicted upon the game’s players. Football is a thrilling, violent sport where anything can happen because very large, very fast men have set themselves the task of moving a little brown ball from one side of a field to the other. But when you get very large, very fast men set in violent opposition, things can get ugly out there. In the mid 1990s, the NFL established a group called the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Com- mittee to look at the effects of concussions sustained over a profes- sional football career. “At first, they kind of downplayed it,” says Weathersby. “They argued that there wasn’t much connection between repeated hits to the head and concussions.” By the early 2000s, the evidence was essentially irrefutable, and the medical community picked up the flag

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SEPTEMBER•OCTOBER 2019