This book tells the story of Hugh L. Ray, an unassuming American hero who saved a violent, dysfunctional sport from extinction. It explains the singular role he played in the redesign of American football and its rules. I have long felt the need to write this book, since none of the major conferences Ray was so closely associated with have accorded him proper credit for his historic contributions to their game. The NFL, NCAA and the High School Federation (NFHS) have benefited enormously from his decades of creative rulemaking and inventive football science, but have said little or nothing about his contributions. Ray has become the missing link in American football history due to organizational greed, blatant overreach by his closest associates and copyright ownership concerns. In 1978, the NFL slandered Ray’s legacy in an attempt to discredit his body of work, and my research.
Hugh Ray is my grandfather. I’m telling his story in order to set the record straight in an attempt to establish his proper place in history. I hope my book about Ray, and American football history will become a useful contribution to sports literature, and lead to a constructive debate of the facts.
To put Ray’s work into perspective I will summarize how football’s rules have evolved throughout its colorful history, and how brutality almost killed the sport. Ray, a nationally known collegiate official and rules expert came forward in the 1920s in response to football’s growing violence and fatalities. Through the power of his unconventional thinking he led a great new era of rules innovation and invention. In 1909, Ray began his officiating career in the Big Ten. He was the top-rated official for over 30 years, and is the only man to ever officiate three major sports; football, basketball and baseball. By 1912, Ray began suggesting innovative rules ideas through well-known intermediaries to the Big Ten and NCAA Rules Committee, and would continue do so for the next 25 years.
Ray also formed the Chicago Public High School League in 1912, the first of its kind, and then organized the American Officials Association in 1917. By 1925 he had grown frustrated with football’s needless self-destruction, and gathered his colleagues into the AOA. Where, Ray worked to elevate officiating standards at every level of the sport to improve knowledge of the rules and player safety. In 1929 Ray was hired by the struggling National Federation of State High School Athletic Associations, when they had difficulty obtaining group injury insurance, to write a new set of football rules and train their officials. He began by inventing the revolutionary Play Situations Book in 1930, which taught the rules by example, renamed the Case Book, it is still universally used. In 1932, Ray issued the first streamlined football rulebook in history for the high school game along with a comprehensive set of safety rules which he shared with the NCAA. His Rules Book quickly became the standard format for both football and basketball and remains so. By 1946, Ray’s new playing rules, and his focus on player safety, had reduced football injuries by over 70% for the NFHS. His pioneering work saved the high school game from extinction.
At the same time, Ray began working quietly behind the scenes with legendary Chicago Bears owner George Halas to reshape and revitalize the brutal, sluggish NFL game. Ray accomplished this feat of football engineering by devising rules that increased safety, speed, and scoring. He went on to author over 200 new rules over the next 20 years (1933-1952). These historic changes opened-up the game by introducing hashmarks (the inbounds line) and unshackling the once-highly-restricted passing game, changing football’s direction forever. Ray devised the 30-second rule and the two-minute warning to maintain game tempo and competitive balance. He also pioneered free and unlimited substitution and modern officiating procedures to maximize player safety, speed and scoring.
By 1935 Ray began augmenting his inventive rules and redesign of the NFL game with a comprehensive set of 77 indices, and then analyzed the statistics to measure and improve the game. In 1937, Ray and the NCAA experienced an irrevocable split when his rules modernizing passing were considered too radical, and his close relationship with the then-hated NFL was discovered. Despite their deep-seated enmity, the NCAA eventually adopted most of the rules Ray created for the NFHS and NFL. In 1938, the NFL appointed Ray their first Technical Advisor on the Rules and Supervisor of Officials. Late in 1939, Ray began the first scientific studies of football to maximize the actual minutes of playing time. When those results were combined with his prodigious stream of playing rules, they revolutionized NFL football. His brilliant ideas increased average plays per game by 25 percent; tripling the number of touchdowns in each game from two to six, and quadrupling average NFL attendance over the span of his career. Today, NFL football is considered the world’s most scientific action-sport, primarily because Ray designed it as such.
Ray accomplished these stunning results over several decades with the help of dedicated men from every level of the sport. While it is important to understand that rules-making is a collaborative process, Ray was the game’s unquestioned genius and authority. During the final decade of his prolific 50 years in sports, he received a good deal of recognition for his scientific work. But, little has ever been said about his principal role as the author of football’s modern rules and Rules Book. Sportswriters of his era referred to him as “Mr. Football” and “Football’s Mr. Einstein” for his intuitive and scientific brilliance. His work transformed the game into an exciting human chess match that continues to elevate the National Football League to new heights of popularity.
Hugh Ray is the unknown hero at the center of the modern football rules revolution which he began in the 1920s and had largely completed by the time of his retirement in 1952. Mr. Ray was posthumously enshrined in the Pro Football Hall Of Fame in 1966 for his outstanding contributions to the rules of professional football. Since then, powerful protégés, and their respective football conferences have ravaged, and destroyed his legacy. Neither the Hall nor the NFL will admit to his role as the author of the modern playing rules or Rules Book despite their prior references, and my repeated efforts for them to do so. Since 1966, the NFL has deleted all references to Ray’s rules work and his authorship role in its history and the Hall of Fame has done much the same with changes to his biography.
I intend to shed some much-needed light on Hugh Ray’s great mind, character, and his profound contributions to the NFL, and American football. This book was written so football fans can learn more about the rules giant who did so much to save football from itself, and create a lasting template for the modern game.
September, 2014
Vero Beach, Florida
