In 1909, he had accurately predicted, "With the new ball, deeper offensive formations could be logically planned and carried into execution." In a 1932 interview with a Wisconsin sports columnist, Cochems claimed that Yale, Harvard and Princeton (the so-called "Big Three" football powers in the early decades of the sport) all called him in having him explain the forward pass to them. Failure of the forward pass to catch on quickly Cochems was disappointed that his pass-oriented offense did not catch on quickly. In 1907, after the first season of the forward pass, one football writer noted that, "with the single exception of Cochems, football teachers were groping in the dark." It would be seven years before Knute Rockne began to follow Cochems' example at Notre Dame. Rockne acknowledged Cochems as the early leader in the use of the pass, observing, "One would have thought that so effective a play would have been instantly copied and become the vogue. The East, however, had not learned much or cared much about Midwest and western football; ondeed, the East scarcely realized that football existed beyond the Alleghanies ..." In his history of the game, College Football Hall of Fame coach and football authority David M. Nelson echoed Rockne's point, noting that "eastern football had little respect for football west of Carlise, Pennsylvania... [they] may not have recognized what was happening in the West, but the new forward-passing game was off to an impressive start." Author Murray Greenberg, in his biography of 1920s passing sensation Benny Friedman, agreed that the passing game as Cochems implemented it just did not catch on: "Cochems and his St. Louis eleven aside, rarely during the early part of the century's second decade did a team try to dominate the game through the air." 1907 and 1908 seasons Cochems led the St. Louis football team to a record of 7–3–1 in 1907. In September 1907, Cochems introduced another innovation at St. Louis, having his players wear numbers to allow spectators to identify individual players. The move was called "a decided innovation" and was compared to the numbering of jockeys in horse-racing. Cochems team defeated the Nebraska Cornhuskers on November 28, 1907, by a score of 34 to 0. Cochems took his team to the West Coast for a Christmas Day game against Washington State College. St. Louis lost the game by a score of 11 to 0. The