Prior to the twentieth century, American football teams tended to call their plays via a quarterback
simply giving signals while the team either stood in more or less a generic near-set position
or back from the line a bit as the quarterback called out what they’d do next. So where
did the idea of standing well behind the line of scrimmage in a huddle come from?
While there are no contemporary news reports or other definitive primary documents from
the time period to support the story, it is generally claimed that quarterback Paul Hubbard
of Gallaudet University invented the huddle sometime between 1892 and 1895, though if
so, perhaps after 1892 as Hubbard wasn’t team captain until 1893.
For the uninitiated, Gallaudet University is a school formed to educate deaf and hard
of hearing individuals. Hubbard, like the rest of his teammates, relied on American
Sign Language to communicate game strategies and specific plays, something easily interpreted
by opposing teams intent on gaining the upper hand, especially teams that also consisted
of deaf and hard of hearing players and coaches.
The two general ways around this problem, whether signing or verbally shouting out,
are to code the signals or to simply block the other team from being able to see them.
Hubbard supposedly chose the latter, instructing his teammates to form a circle around him
to discuss the plays.
As to how the huddle spread to other teams (and even other sports), this isn’t any
clearer than the commonly touted Hubbard origin story, at least as far as hard, documented
evidence is concerned. It is often claimed to have spread via deaf and hard of hearing
students taking it to other schools after graduating from Gallaudet University, with
some of them going on to teach or coach at said other schools for the deaf.
In fact, it is often stated that Hubbard himself did this. After leaving Gallaudet in 1896,
he returned to his hometown of Olathe, Kansas as a teacher at the Kansas School for the
Deaf. In 1899, he started the school’s football program and coached for many years, with it
claimed he taught his players the huddle. However, Hubbard himself doesn’t seem to
have ever said he did this and there is no contemporary evidence backing up that the
team at the Kansas School for the Deaf used the huddle under Hubbard. Of course, if Hubbard
really did use the huddle previous to this, presumably he would have brought the practice
over to his new team.
As for an alternate origin story, it is noted by Dr. I. H. Baker in the 1945 work Football:
Facts and Figures that the huddle was used by the University of Georgia in 1896 in a
game against Auburn University. Baker’s claim here is in turn derived from the History
of Southern Football, written by Fuzzy Woodruff in 1928. In it, Woodruff gives an account
of the game in question and describes a huddle being used. (I wasn’t able to find a copy
of the book nor a transcript of the statement in question to see if Woodruff was simply
basing this account off of his own memory of events some 32 years before or something
a little more concrete.)
Unfortunately, contemporary documented evidence seems to fail us on both Hubbard and Woodruff’s
claims, though there is no reason to think either were making anything up here, and we
do know from a 1942 letter from one of Hubbard’s former classmates that Hubbard was being credited
as inventing the huddle by a news report concerning Hubbard’s retirement. In the letter, one
Herbert C. Merrill writes to Hubbard,
The item ascribes the origin of the football ‘huddle’ to you. It must have been during
the time that the College had that scrub team that made all the teams around Washington,
including the Naval Academy, look silly.
However, it’s not completely clear from the letter whether Merrill, who was valedictorian
of his graduating class at Gallaudet in 1896, himself is corroborating Hubbard’s claim-
that Merrill remembers Hubbard using the huddle- or was simply pointing out the news report
to Hubbard. False memories being extremely prevalent, as much as we humans don’t like
to admit it, and a near half a century separating the letter from the events in question, even
if he was more explicit about it, this wouldn’t really help us much either way in being more
definitive. Also very unfortunately, it isn’t clear what news report Merrill was referencing
to see what they were basing their claim on to perhaps shed a little more light on the
issue.
So that’s the commonly touted origin story. But when did the huddle first start being
recorded in first-hand contemporary reports that have survived to today?
This appears to have occurred in a game involving Oregon State University and Seattle’s University
of Washington on November 18, 1918. (Incidentally, it was at the University of Washington that
the sporting wave first started becoming popular, though it wasn’t invented there, contrary
to popular belief, see Who Invented the Wave?)
During the game in question, Oregon State, coached by Bill Hargiss, found themselves
with a little problem on their hands. One of the Oregon State players in that game,
Jack Foster, later recalled the issue,
As I remember, in the first half of that game, the U. of W. team was reading our signals
as the quarterback called them, and was stopping us cold on nearly every play. So during halftime
Coach Hargiss told us to whisper the play out of hearing of the defensive team, and
then our plays began to work. We did not use it on every play.
Famed Seattle Post-Intelligencer editor Royal Brougham noted of this then bizarre move in
the game, “I remember how puzzled the writers were when the Oregon… team lined up in a
group five or ten yards behind the line like they were holding a prayer meeting or something.”
Hargiss, however, did not claim to have invented the huddle, simply claiming he was the first
to use it in a college game as far as he was aware. As to where he got the idea from, he
stated,
I was refereeing a high school game out there and it was one of those close grudge, battles
where the crowd cheered loudly and the band played the same way. The offensive team got
down to a do-or-die play and the boys couldn’t hear the quarterback’s signals. So he called
them into a huddle to give ’em the play. I thought a lot about that, and I experimented
with it at Oregon State. Other coaches criticized it because they said it cost time. But I put
a stop-watch on it, and it often was faster than the signal calling system.
With the huddle seemingly being a success in 1918, Hargiss continued to use it on occasion
and later brought it to Emporia State University in Kansas in 1920. Within a year of that,
famed football coach Bob Zuppke of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, who is
sometimes credited as inventing the huddle, started using it. Notably, columnist Frederick
Meagher in an article published in The Frat in September of 1946 claimed Zuppke didn’t
himself say he invented the huddle, nor that he got it from Hargiss, but that “Zuppke
admits he took it from an un-named deaf football team he saw somewhere.”
Whatever the case, soon after Hargiss and Zuppke pioneered the huddle in college football,
many teams at every level of the sport began adopting it.