In the 1890s, Massachusetts inventor Moses G. Crane looked at a football field and decided the problem was obvious: the ball was too small. His solution was a leather-covered wooden sphere six feet three inches in diameter, weighing 70 pounds — a ball so large that “a player on one side could not see who was on the other,” guaranteeing “much merriment, as well as skill.” Pushball was born, and for about fifteen years it captivated American colleges, then crossed the Atlantic. At Harvard, 20,000 people watched the first exhibition match during halftime of a football game against Penn in 1895. Spalding published official rules, complete with plays like “the flying wedge,” and British promoter E. V. Hanegan called it “a game for giants — such a game as the gods on Olympus might have played.” The British improvised variants on horseback and in cars; a hay-stuffed replica left out overnight in the rain swelled from 50 to 500 pounds. At Miami University in Ohio, pushball replaced a banned brutal capture-the-flag tradition, fielding thirty students per side who shoved the borrowed ball (from the University of Michigan, 240 miles away) across the field. But the fad faded fast: by 1912 the students were back to tug-of-war, and World War I finished what practicality had started. Today, Miami’s “Traditions” page is silent on the battle of the giants.