In football, there’s offside — and then there’s what Minnesota end Usher L. Burdick got away with against Nebraska in 1904.
Burdick took encroachment to a whole new level on a second-half play against the visiting Cornhuskers. That’s his story, anyway, and we’re sticking to it — with a few revisions.
With underdog Nebraska on the offensive in Minnesota territory, Burdick brazenly decided to line up on the Cornhuskers’ side of the ball as if he were a Nebraska player. Perhaps due to dwindling daylight and soiled uniforms, this went undetected by game officials, reporters and even the Cornhusker players. At the snap, Burdick found a clear path to Nebraska’s ball carrier, John Bender, and threw him for a loss of 10 to 15 yards. End of scoring threat.
The story of Burdick’s chicanery surfaced publicly about three decades later. It was a tale that oozed drama: The play, it was said, happened on the game’s final snap with the Cornhuskers on the cusp of victory just a few yards from the Minnesota goal line. Some versions of the yarn even had Burdick receiving the play call in the Nebraska huddle.
Burdick himself recalled in 1935 that in the “general pandemonium” between plays, “I shifted across and lined up with the Nebraska forwards. When the ball was snapped I tore back and threw the quarterback for a 10-yard loss.”
It’s obvious, however, from the play-by-plays in the St. Paul Globe and Minneapolis Journal that no such thing happened near the end of the game. One sequence of events does jibe with Burdick’s stealthy feat, and it happened about a third of the way into the second half. Nebraska trailed by 10 points and had the ball at about the Minnesota 30, having just been set back 15 yards by penalty:
