This is the first of two Little House episodes that featured a game of football. The other one comes as "Fight Team Fight" in Season 7.
Having gotten friendly with orphan Albert, Charles cannot convince him that going to school is worthwhile, so he bribes him, offering a princely sum of 25¢ per week. I can easily figure that Charles figured it would get him to start school and after a while Albert might like it enough that he wouldn't need to continue to pay him. Remember Charles had no control over this street urchin at this time.
Meanwhile, at the blind school, we met an older boy, Tom, who we learned from what Adam told the boy's father, wasn't making any progress and didn't seem to care. His father revealed that he only enrolled him as a promise to the boy's late mother, but he thought it was all a waste of time. He loved his son but did not see this blind boy ever being any use to him again, or to anyone else.
After school, we see the boys in Laura's "Livery School" playing an early form of football, with a ragball instead of a proper football. They were led by the biggest kid in school, Luke Hoskins, who towered over everyone else like Lurch on The Addams Family. They encounter a well-uniformed group of boys from the private school, where Nellis and Willie Oleson now go, and they are boasting about their school's football team being the undefeated champs of the Dakota Territory.
This, of course, leads to young Albert challenging them to a game, even making a wager of a quarter. This sets up a game for the coming Saturday, giving the new team less than a week to get organized. Luckily, they have a former NFL star for a coach—Jonathan Garvey—well, at least Merlin Olsen is that.
But Mr. Standish, owner of the saloon and hotel where the Ingalls, Jonathan and Olsons work, sees big Luke and a couple of days before the big game, lures him to enroll in the private school—on a scholarship. Suddenly, it appears the big game will be a big slaughter.
Re-enter Adam, who gets the blind boy, Tom, to temporarily enroll at the regular school, so he can help the football team. With the close formations of the day, he leads the way as a blocker, and makes them a formidable team.
But Albert has a brilliant, if dishonest idea. He tells Luke that the game has been moved to some field outside town, an hour's ride away. So Luke's father and Luke are missing as the game is played at the field in town.
We actually get to see quite a few football plays, complete with the women watching and someone keeping scoreboard on a big chalkboard.
I won't be giving away anything really by revealing that Tom does contribute and his father learns that he can learn to do useful things, and they plan to work together on their farm.
This was a very light-hearted episode that gave you lots to smile about. It certainly brought the young urchin Albert closer to Charles and family. I know lots of people on this show's message board love to rip that character. My viewpoint is that, at least initially, even though he was totally fictional—as was almost everything presented on the entire series—he was an interesting character and they had some very fine episodes featuring Albert.
As for the football: It was barely recognizable to modern football fans. It wasn't 100% authentic, but it was actually fairly close. There were no forward passes, no first downs, and, of course, no helmets. Teams snapped the ball—that was new the year this was set, 1880—as mentioned by Laura at the end, specifically stating that the game was on November 29, 1880. They used a wedge or other formation of blockers with a runner somewhere behind the blockers and ran downfield until tackled.
Touchdowns were shown as being 2 points, which I wasn't able to confirm or deny. Initially, scoring was done by kicking the ball, tries (touchdowns) set up chances for those types of scoring. In the 1870s, the tries became scores also. I know that in 1883 it was established that a touchdown was worth 2 points, with the conversion kick worth 4, and a field goal was worth 5 points. These totals evolve several times over the next couple of decades with touchdowns not worth 6 points until 1912.
In the Little House version, there were no scores made by kicking. Like modern rugby, they "touched" the ball down after crossing the goal line. Of course, since the game was so new—having the famous 1869 Rutgers-Princeton game considered the first "football" game (with vastly different rules than this Little House version)—it is truly unlikely that any elementary or high schools had "teams by 1880," at least, not as far west as the Dakota Territory. But I wouldn't want them to have skipped this episode just because it was historically unlikely/impossible/improbable.
Laura is shown as coming up with the nickname for their team--Warriors--in honor of the people who were first to live in the territory. Considering the furor these days over such nicknames, it was fun to see this show, which tried so hard to be P.C., did something quite the opposite--that is, as of 2014 it was.
I finish by noting that Nels delivered a line that is probably the most inaccurate part of the entire script, in terms of how old he was clearly portrayed as being, and the fact that the first college game was played just 11 years before this show was set. Nels was recruited along with Charles to scrimmage (not called that) against the school's team for practice. He smiled and said "I haven't played football since I was on the scrub team in college."
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