A Lasting Impact from St. Louis: Initiating Football’s Forward Pass

How did the forward pass begin? Where did it all start? Who was it that made it a part of the great game known today as football?

For the longest time, the game of football was primarily played as a running game, and once the ball handler got tackled, that was the end of the play. What about receivers? Did they even exist in football at the turn of the 20th Century?

Well, let’s go to 1906. It didn’t happen in professional sports, but it did happen in America’s Heartland. Right at St. Louis University, a school at the intersection of Grand Boulevard and Laclede Avenue, and it may be the biggest turning point in the history of the game of football.

At the end of the 19th Century, football was a sport that was not yet played professionally (NFL didn’t come around until 1920) and was the most physically demanding as the game may have ever been.

Think about it. Every play was a running play, so you already have 11 defenders after you because they know who’s going to get the ball. Come the 20th Century, matters were not getting much better. While the games would get brutal, regardless of the equipment and protection, they would also get fatal.

Broken bones, of course, were common, but what about broken heads or backs? By 1905, it was reported that 19 football players around the United States had passed away as a result of an on-field accident.

Then, President Teddy Roosevelt comes into play.

President Roosevelt had seen enough with the brutality and deaths the game had witnessed. He wanted the game to continue to be played, but it needed to be safer.

Come 1906, a committee meeting was held discussing ways to improve the game’s safety. One of the more popular opinions, hard as it may be to believe, is that the committee members, mostly football enthusiasts, deemed a legal forward pass as an option, but quickly shot it down.

The New York Times wrote, “There has been no team that has proved that the forward pass is anything but a doubtful, dangerous play to be used only in the last extremity.”

Most teams across the country were skeptical about how to go about the game, doubting that the forward pass, now made legal, would make a big impact in the game.

Then, Saint Louis University came in, and was the first team to initiate it, and eventually proved the newspaper, and enthusiasts wrong.

It was September 5, 1906, and SLU was opening their season against Carroll College. What followed was a forward pass from quarterback Brad Robinson that connected 20-yards down the field to receiver Jack Schneider which resulted in a touchdown.

They weren’t afraid to give it a go, and once they proved it can happen, they never looked back.

A man who deserves a lot of the credit is SLU Head Coach Eddie Cochems, a football enthusiast himself and pioneered the use of the pass, and it soon became SLU’s calling card throughout the 1906 season.

Eddie Cochems.

A name in St. Louis that seems long forgotten but should be remembered as much as Lamar Hunt or even Patrick Mahomes!

He was born on February 4, 1877, in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and played football as a child, eventually becoming a scholar-athlete at the University of Wisconsin — Madison playing halfback for their football team.

He was admired by his teammates, coaches, and peers.

Max Loeb, a classmate, remembered Cochems as “one of the most spectacular men of my time… wonderfully built, handsome, and affable,” when he spoke at Eddie’s funeral in 1953.

In his last game as a University of Wisconsin football player, Cochems ran back a kickoff for a 98-yard touchdown run against the University of Chicago Maroons.

Then, about five years later, Cochems accepted the job as the football head coach at Saint Louis University in February 1906, and was ready to transition his talents on the field to the sideline as the field general.

He coached at SLU from 1906–1908.

Throughout the 1905–06 offseason, Cochems trained his players, practiced the forward pass every day until they were able to perfect it, and began using the pass consistently.

While other coaches were reluctant to try this new approach, Cochems embraced it, and led his SLU Billikens to a season of demolition on every opponent.

The SLU Billikens went on to win their season opener 22–0, the date that Bradbury Robinson threw the first forward pass and went on to an undefeated 11–0 record that year.

Eddie Cochems became known as “The Father of the Forward Pass” and if it weren’t for his willingness and ferocity to try something significantly new, who knows what the game of football looks like to this day.