"Football is a game designed to keep coal miners off the street"
-Jimmy Breslin, Columnist
The American version of football has been played in some form or another for a very long time, perhaps for hundreds of years. Like soccer and rugby and baseball it was first officially organized in the nineteenth century. In its present form American football is essentially based on the English game of rugby.
The main distinguishing features of American football that differentiate it from rugby are the ability to physically block opponents, and the forward pass, both of which are illegal in rugby. The game is also distinctive for it's use of measuring yards on the field to determine when a team must relinquish the ball to its opponent.
Since the game was inherited from the old British universities, it was logical that is was first adapted by similar schools here in the States, specifically Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Tufts. However the game soon spread to schools outside the North-East and became as important to the culture of middle class, working class and rural people as it had been to the University set.
19th Century Footballers
Indeed, as other schools, particularly those in the Mid-West became better at the game and the competition more important to alumni, schools like Harvard and Princeton and Yale began secretly paying professional players, the first ever professionals. Even so, by the turn of the century the grip on the game by the "Ivy League" (or "IV", for "four": Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Pennsylvania) was slipping.
The first organized professional football leagues developed in Pennsylvania in coal and steel regions where folks related to the gritty, relentless play on the field.
Gritty indeed! The game was a giant sprawling mess with few rules. At one point Teddy Roosevelt, the President of the nation, actually demanded that the rules be changed to prevent deaths and maimings on the field.
Many of the features of the modern game, such as the forward pass, and yardage markers, came from that decree.
- Printer-friendly version
- Login to post comments