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History of American footballThe history of American football, the most popular spectator sport in the United Statescan be traced to early versions of rugby football. Both games have their origin in varieties of football played in the United Kingdom in the mid-nineteenth century, in which a ball is kicked at a goal or carried over a line. American football resulted from several major divergences from rugby,Costa Rica tourism most notably the many rule changes instituted by Walter Camp, considered the "Father of American Football". Among these important changes were the introduction of the line of scrimmage and of down-and-distance rulesIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gameplay developments by college coaches such as Amos Alonzo Stagg, Knute Rockne, and Glenn "Pop" Warner helped take advantage of the newly introduced forward pass. The popularity of collegiate football grew as it became the dominant version of the sport for the first half of the twentieth century. Bowl games, a college football tradition, attracted a national audience for many teams. Bolstered by fierce rivalries, college football still holds widespread appeal in the United States.
The origin of professional football can be traced back to 1892, with William "Pudge" Heffelfinger's $500 contract to play in a game for the Allegheny Athletic Association against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. In 1920 the American Professional Football Association was formed. This league changed its name to the National Football League (NFL) two years later, and eventually became the major league of American football. Primarily a sport of Midwestern, industrial towns in the United States, professional football eventually became a national phenomenon. Football's increasing popularity is usually traced to the 1958 NFL Championship Game, a contest that has been dubbed the "Greatest Game Ever Played". A rival league to the NFL, the American Football League (AFL), formed in 1960; the pressure it put on the senior league led to a merger between the two leagues and the creation of the Super Bowl, which has become the most watched television event in the United States on an annual basis.Early yearsFirst collegiate gamesGames that resemble football were played informally in the United States as far back as the seventeenth cenutury. The games remained largely unorganized until the nineteenth century, when intramural games of football began to be played on college campuses throughout the United States. Each school played its own variety of football. Princeton students played a game called "ballown" as early as 1820. A Harvard tradition known as "Bloody Monday" began in 1827, which consisted of a mass ballgame between the freshman and sophomore classes. Dartmouth played its own version called "Old division football", the rules of which were first published in 1871, though the game dates to at least the 1820s. All of these games, and many more, shared certain commonalities. They were largely "mob" style games, with huge numbers of players attempting to advance the ball into a goal area, often by any means necessary. Rules were simple and violence and injury were common.[5][6] The violence of these mob-style games led to widespread protests and a decision to abandon them. Yale, under pressure from the city of New Haven, banned the play of all forms of football in 1860, while Harvard followed suit in 1861"Boston game"While the game was being banned in colleges, it was growing in popularity in various New England prep schools. In 1855, manufactured inflatable balls were introduced. These were much more regular in shape than the handmade balls of earlier times, making kicking and carrying easier. Two competing versions had evolved during this time; the "kicking game" which resembled soccer and the "running" or "carrying game" which resembled rugby. A hybrid of the two, known as the "Boston game", was played by a group known as the Oneida Football Club. The club, considered by some historians as the first formal football club in the United States, was formed in 1862 by schoolboys who played the "Boston game" on Boston Common. They played mostly among themselves, though they organized a team of non-members to play a game in November 1863, which the Oneidas won easily. The game caught the attention of the press, and the "Boston game" continued to spread throughout the 1860sThe game began to return to college campuses by the late 1860s. Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, and Brown all began playing the "kicking" game during this time. In 1867, Princeton using rules based on those of the English Football AssociationThe "running game", resembling rugby, was taken up by the Montreal Football Club in Canada in 1868Intercollegiate footballOn November 6, 1869, Rutgers University faced Princeton University in a game that is often regarded as the first game of intercollegiate footballThe game was played at a Rutgers field under Rutgers rules. Two teams of 25 players attempted to score by kicking the ball into the opposing team's goal. Throwing or carrying the ball was not allowed. The first team to reach six goals was declared the winner. Rutgers crossed the line first and went on to win by a score of 6 to 4. A rematch was played at Princeton a week later under Princeton rules (one notable difference was the awarding of a "free kick" to any player that caught the ball on the fly). Princeton won that game by a score of eight to zero. Both games, with rules based on those of Association football, bore a closer resemblance to soccer than to modern American football (or rugby). Columbia joined the series in 1870, and by 1872 several schools were fielding intercollegiate teams, including Yale and Stevens Institute of TechnologyRules standardization (1873–1880)On October 19, 1873, representatives from Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Rutgers met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City to codify the first set of intercollegiate football rules. Prior to this meeting, each school had its own set of rules and games were usually played using the home team's own particular code. At this meeting, a list of rules, based more on soccer than on rugby, was drawn up for intercollegiate football gamesHarvard, which played the "Boston game", a version of football that allowed carrying, refused to attend this rules conference and continued to play under its own code. Harvard's voluntary absence from the meeting made it hard for them to schedule games against other American universities, so it agreed to play McGill University, from Montréal, in a two-game series. The McGill team traveled to Cambridge to meet Harvard in a game played under "Boston" rules, followed by a game of rugby. On May 14, 1874, the "Boston"-style game, was won easily by Harvard. The next day, the two teams played rugby to a scoreless tie, quite a feat considering that the Harvard team was unfamiliar with the gameHarvard quickly took a liking to the rugby game, and its use of the touchdown which, until that time, was not used in American football. In late 1874, the Harvard team traveled to Montréal to play McGill in rugby, and won by three touchdowns. A year later, on June 4, 1875, Harvard faced Tufts University in the first game between two American colleges played under rules similar to the McGill/Harvard contestfirst edition of The Games—the annual contest between Harvard and Yale—was played on November 13, 1875, under a modified set of rugby rules known as "The Concessionary Rules". Yale lost 4 to 0, but found that it too preferred the rugby style game. Spectators from Princeton carried the game back home, where it also became popularOn November 23, 1876, representatives from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia met at the Massasoit House in Springfield, Massachusetts to standardize a new code of rules based on the rugby game first introduced to Harvard by McGill University in 1874. The rules were based largely on the Rugby Union Code from England, though one important difference was the replacement of a kicked goal with a touchdown as the primary means of scoring. Three of the schools—Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton—formed the as a result of the meeting. Yale did not join the group until 1879, due to an early disagreement about the number of players per teamWalter Camp: Father of American football Walter Camp, the "Father of American Football", pictured here in 1878 as the captain of the Yale Football teamWalter Camp is widely considered to be the most important figure in the development of American footballAs a youth, he excelled in sports like track, baseball, and soccer, and after enrolling at Yale in 1876, he earned varsity honors in every sport the school offeredCamp became a fixture at the Massasoit House "conventions" where rules were debated and changed. He proposed his first rule change at the first meeting he attended in 1878: a reduction from fifteen players to eleven. The motion was rejected at that time but passed in 1880. The effect was to open up the game and emphasize speed over strength. Camp's most famous change, the establishment of the line of scrimmage and the snap from center to quarterback, was passed in 1880. Originally, the snap was executed with the foot of the center. Later changes made it possible to snap the ball with the hands, either through the air or by a direct hand-to-hand passCamp's new scrimmage rules revolutionized the game, though not always for the better. Princeton, in particular, used scrimmage play to slow the game, making incremental progress towards the end zone during each down. Rather than increase scoring, which had been Camp's original intent, the rule was exploited to maintain control of the ball for the entire game, resulting in slow, unexciting contests. At the 1882 rules meeting, Camp proposed that a team be required to advance the ball a minimum of five yards within three downs. These down-and-distance rules, combined with the establishment of the line of scrimmage, transformed the game from a variation of rugby or soccer into the distinct sport of American footballCamp was central to several more significant rule changes that came to define American football. In 1881, the field was reduced in size to its modern dimensions of 120 by 53 1/3 yards (109.7 by 48.8 meters). Several times in 1883, Camp tinkered with the scoring rules, finally arriving at four points for a touchdown, two points for kicks after touchdowns, two points for safeties, and five for field goals. In 1887, gametime was set at two halves of 45 minutes each. Also in 1887, two paid officials—a referee and an umpire—were mandated for each game. A year later, the rules were changed to allow tackling below the waist, and in 1889, the officials were given whistles and stopwatchesAfter leaving Yale in 1882, Camp was employed by the New Haven Clock Company until his death in 1925. Though no longer a player, he remained a fixture at annual rules meetings for most of his life, and he personally selected an annual All-American team every year from 1898 through 1924. The Walter Camp Foundation continues to select All-American teams in his honorExpansion (1880–1904)College football expanded greatly during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. In 1880, only eight universities fielded intercollegiate teamsbut by 1900, the number had expanded to 43Many major rivalries date from this time period, including Alabama-Auburn, Army-Navy, and Michigan-Ohio State.
University of Michigan football game, 1902In 1879, the University of Michigan became the first team west of Pennsylvania to establish a college football team. Other Midwestern schools soon followed suit, including the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Minnesota. The nation's first college football league, the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives (also known as the Western Conference), a precursor to the Big Ten Conference, was founded in 1895Led by legendary coach Fielding Yost, Michigan became the first "western" national power. From 1901 to 1905, Michigan had a 56-game undefeated streak that included a 1902 trip to play in the first college football post-season game, the Rose Bowl. During this streak, Michigan scored 2,831 points while allowing only 40Another legendary coach, Amos Alonzo Stagg of the University of Chicago, spent most of his career in the Western Conference. He coached first at the Springfield International YMCA Training School, then Chicago, Costa Rica real estateand later at the University of the Pacific for a record total of 57 years. As of 2007, he still ranked seventh on the list of winningest football coaches of all time, with 314 wins