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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 4505890, member: 289"] Traditionally, football players played both offense and defense and position players did the kicking. After WWII, depth in college ball was unusually great, especially for those schools that had coaches who had coached service ball and knew who the best players were. The guys that would have been in college during the war joined the guys who became college age in the late 40's. Any school from that time who had a good team usually regard that team as their best ever for at least a generation afterwards. Fritz Crisler, the coach at Michigan, came up with the idea of forming separate offensive and defensive units made up of the players who were best at that. He won national titles in 1947-48 and other coaches copied him. The pros also followed suit. In1953, the NCAA decided 'one platoon' football was a purer version of the sport and tried to legislate it back into existence by limiting substitution rules. The used a modified version of baseball's system: if a player leaves the game in a quarter, he cannot return to that game in the same quarter. Instead of separate offensive and defensive teams, you had a first team, a second team and maybe a third team. They all played both ways. A coach would pull out the first team late in the 1st and play the second team until early in the second, then put the first team back in and do the same in the second half. Paul Dietzel at LSU won a national title by giving his third team a nickname "The Chinese Bandits" and starting the game and the half with them. But with the pros using two platoons, pressure on the colleges to conform to that cause the NCAA to loosen up the substitution rules and by 1964, the colleges were two-platoon as well. Jim Brown and Ernie Davis didn't play the whole game on offense, something to remember when looking at their stats, (they also didn't play varsity and freshmen and the length of the seasons were less). Floyd Little and Larry Csonka played only offense and did that for a larger portion of the game. [/QUOTE]

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