The football huddle was first used at a college for the deaf, so the players could keep their signing hidden.

The football huddle was still unusual enough in the 1920s to make fans at college games wonder what was going on and led to complaints about the game being slowed down. There are a few different stories about how it originated (in 1918 at Oregon State, in 1921 at the University of Illinois, in 1924 at Lafayette College), but it had first been used in the 1890s when Paul Hubbard, the quarterback for Gallaudet, a deaf college in Washington, D.C., and now a university, had his offense form a tight circle so they could discuss plays without the other team seeing what they were signing.