Football wasn’t always a game dominated by strong-armed quarterbacks flinging the ball sixty yards downfield. In its beginnings football was mostly a messy affair in which brave men with altogether insufficient protective equipment would carry the melon-shaped ball into an angry thicket of defenders and scratch and plod and push for yardage. Rarely was football real estate acquired by way of the forward pass. The ball was so large that most players couldn’t grip and throw it; the best they could do was hold it in their palm and heave it. That’s why photographs of quarterbacks posing as if to pass in those early days evoked the image.
