A very cool post from the excellent UniWatch blog that leads with a photo of fans gathered in the streets of New York watching the 1911 World Series play out via the Playograph, essentially a former-day version of the ESPN Gamecast. Play-by-play game updates were wired in and represented on the board for fans to enjoy (and apparently everyone was required to wear a hat): As Paul of Uni-blog notes, Michigan was a pioneer in bringing the road game experience to fans back home. According to the wonderful U-M Bentley Library, the Michigan Daily posted score updates during the early days of the Fielding Yost Point-A-Minute era, but then stepped things up prior to the 1903 game against the Gophers in Minneapolis: In 1903, a UM student, the Athletic Association and the Bell Telephone Company teamed up to bring Wolverine fans in Ann Arbor a nearly “live” account of the Minnesota game played on October 31 in Minneapolis; a game that would determine the “Champion of the West.” Reporting the game from a specially built tower at Northrop Field, Floyd (Jack) Mattice, Law 1905, could lay a justifiable claim to being one of the first broadcasters of a college football game. Here’s how he did it: In Minneapolis, Bell engineers erected a wooden tower 40 feet high at the 55-yard…