Jack Harris

One of the fun things about football is that if you go back far enough, you can find players scoring touchdowns in offenses nobody uses to beat teams that no longer exist.

Such is the case for Packers back Jack Harris, who appeared in 21 games for the Packers in the 1925 and 1926 seasons. In those years, the Packers took on such opponents as the Rochester Jeffersons, the Dayton Triangles, the Pottsville Maroons, and the Frankford Yellow Jackets. Of that lineup, only the Yellow Jackets survived until the 1930s, and they folded after going 1-6-1 in 1931 — though they did win the league title in 1926.

The Packers faced those opponents using a variation of an offense called the Notre Dame Box, an offense so archaic that virtually no program above the high school level even runs a variation of it today. But that’s not to say it wasn’t devastating in its day. It was, and its schematic versatility, coupled with the great players running it, was a big reason for the Packers’ early success.

Whether it was the version Knute Rockne ran or the version Curly Lambeau deployed in Green Bay, the Notre Dame Box is almost incomprehensible compared to modern offenses. There’s plenty of presnap motion in the NFL today, but it looks quaint compared to the shifts and motions that were a regular feature of the Notre Dame Box or offenses like it.

Typically, the Box featured a five man line with two ends on the line of scrimmage and four men in the backfield: a quarterback, a left and right halfback, and a fullback. In a play diagram shared at Packers.com, one example of a Box play shows the quarterback lining up under center, with the fullback lined up a few yards back straight behind him. The left and right half back lined up to either side of the fullback.

Sounds simple enough, right? It was, and it’s not all that different from the T-formation football that would become common near the middle of the 20th century. But the difference was what happened next. Before the snap, virtually everyone in the backfield would move. In the play we’re describing, the quarterback moves from behind the center to behind the right guard. The right halfback moves up and takes a spot just off the outside hip of the right tackle. The fullback takes a step to his right and sets up where the right halfback had been, and the left halfback moves to where the fullback had been, ready to take the snap. Now the four backfield players are lined up in a formation roughly resembling a box, which is what gives the offense its name.

Different shifts could move this box to the right or to the left, or send any configuration of players moving in just about any direction you could imagine. Misdirection was the name of the game, and with as many moving parts as this scheme could muster, there was plenty of misdirection to go around. Watching film of this era is almost an exercise in futility. If you’re used to seeing the traditional patterns and movements of offense today, keeping up with the constant movement of the players on the field, to say nothing of the ball, will be a challenge.

This was the environment in which Jack Harris played, lining up at both fullback and halfback for the Packers. Statistics from this era are sparse, to say the least, but Pro Football Reference credits Harris with three touchdowns during his stint with the Packers.

The first came in a 1925 showdown with the Milwaukee Badgers, who made the trip up to Green Bay’s City Stadium just to find themselves on the wrong end of a 31-0 beating. Harris plunged in for the final score “with half the Milwaukee team clinging to him,” according to the Green Bay Press-Gazette.

As an interesting sign of the times, the game was actually a failure for the Packers. They won, yes, but the game was poorly attended — fewer than 2,300 paying customers showed up, according to the Press-Gazette. That meant the Packers actually lost more than $1,000 on the game once everybody got paid, equivalent to more than $18,000 in modern currency.

Harris scored his final two touchdowns against another defunct team, putting two across in a 1926 game against the Racine Tornadoes. Again it was a southern opponent making their way up to Green Bay to get pummeled, and the Packers were happy to oblige, handing the Tornadoes a 35-0 beating.

Harris scored the fourth and fifth touchdowns of the game. His first came on another short yardage plunge, again carrying additional defenders with him. “He lugged about three Raciners with him on the way over,” the Press-Gazette said. The Packers threatened again late in the game, and Harris battered in the final touchdown just as time expired.

Curiously, though we know what offense the Packers were playing, there’s very little description of how it affected the game. None of the noteworthy plays Harris made include significant depictions of strategy, just that he was the man selected to carry the ball. However, given what we know about the Notre Dame Box, you can bet there was some amount of pre-snap movement and some subtle ballhandling before the brute force took over.

In any case, that was that for his NFL career. He’d play three more games with the Packers — a win, a loss, and a tie — before hanging it up. Three touchdowns may not be much to speak of, but in an era where we know very little about what football was really like, we know quite a bit about the system that helped put Harris in the end zone.