Who invented the huddle?
The story is muddled Who was first to gather football players some distance behind the line of scrimmage to call the next play? Gather all the candidates for the inventors of it and you might get flagged for too many men in the huddle: •Credit often goes to Paul Hubbard, a quarterback at Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf in Washington, D.C. Legend has it that he noticed teams stealing his sign language and he came up with the revolutionary idea to have his offensive mates gather around him so he could call plays with his back to the defense. That was 1894. Irony alert: Gallaudet ran the no-huddle this season. •Alfred E. Bull also was hard of hearing. He played a pivotal role in the debut of the huddle at the University of Pennsylvania, the story goes, also in 1894. Penn began huddling up that season because Bull, an All-America center, could not hear plays called at the line. Arch Ward, Chicago Tribune sports editor of yore, believed Penn’s was the first instance of a team hu
