bet on pro football

In the days of yore when I was striving to make high school safe for grammarians, the parents of some kid flunking my class would diss me by alleging, “Anyone can be a teacher.” There was no point arguing against that mindset.
What I find more interesting is that a teacher cannot stop being a teacher. I don’t know whether teachers are born, evolve or get infected, but once they begin, teachers can never get over it. They have to pass things they learn on to someone else. Gotta teach!
For instance, you’re watching a game and a punter gets off a healthy boot. The guy on the next stool says, “That’s why they call it football.”
“Not so,” you say. “Five-hundred years ago, back in merry old middle-aged England, the activity was less a game and more a riot. To celebrate Shrove Tuesday or some other feast day, the yokels of two villages tried to shove a ball up each other’s aspect by pushing, hitting, ramming, slamming, kicking and occasionally knifing. They called the activity ‘football’ to denote it was played by common folks on foot. The upper classes had horses, so they played polo and jousted.”
“Almost no one jousts anymore,” the guy says, reaching for his beer.
“Actually,” you say, “when they wrote about it in those days, they called it ‘futball’ — with a U. Those merry old Englanders couldn’t spell a lick.”
As a teacher, I made an honest but frustrating living. I spent 25 years teaching the wrong subject. There I was, teaching English grammar and literature when I really wanted to teach history — football history. There I was, orating about gerunds, participles, and why Brutus et tu’d Caesar when I really wanted to teach my students how to tell the Sneakers Game from the Ice Bowl.
“Speaking of words,” I say to the guy, “those misspelling Englanders had a word ‘skyrmish’ that meant a minor battle. Eventually that got twisted into ‘scrimmage’ for any small tussle. When they started playing rugby at Rugby in the 1800s, the college boys noted that the game had a small melee every time the ball was put in play. The ball was up for grabs, and each side tried to grab it. For some reason, perhaps to differentiate rugby melees from all the other tussles, the word evolved into “scrummage” with a U.
“Rugby, huh?” The guy chugs the rest of his beer.
“Then, in the 1880s on this side of the pond,” I explain, “Walter Camp and his friends at Yale, Harvard and Princeton, redesigned rugby into football. Opposing teams faced each other across an imaginary line before the snap. But unlike the rugby scrummage, the American version allowed one team to hold possession of the ball. Instead of a melee, what ensued with the snap was like a small battle. They went back to the original word ‘scrimmage.’ ”
“They probably were proud of spelling it right,” the guy says. He drops two bucks on the bar and walks out.
The new guy who takes his stool hardly looks at the game. Finally, just to be friendly, I say, “I’ll bet you don’t know why that position is called quarterback.” He shrugs.
Taking that as a sign of interest, I tell him, “When Old Man Camp aligned his team, he identified the backs by their distance from the line of scrimmage. The fullback was about eight yards behind the line, two backs set on either side of him were half as far back, and the player who took the snap was about two yards away from the center — about a quarter as far back as the fullback. The ‘quarterback’ didn’t move up and reach under center like they do today until just before World War II.”
One of the teams on the TV throws a touchdown pass. We watch the receiver audition for the Rockettes.
“Did you ever wonder why they call it a touchdown?” I ask the guy next to me.
“No.”
I know he’s busting to find out. “This was back before they legalized the forward pass in 1906. For a touchdown to count, the runner had to actually touch the ball down. That’s right. Even after he crossed the goal line the runner had to touch the ground with the ball. That was because his team had to kick the extra point straight out from where the ball was downed. If he crossed the goal line near the sideline, a runner might try to fight his way toward the middle before touching down so as to get a better angle.
“Just before World War I they ruled all extra points would be kicked from in front of the goal posts. That meant there was no more need to touch the ball down.”
The guy looks at me. “I’ll bet you spend a lot of time on the Internet. Right?”
I’m on a roll.
“Incidentally, you probably don’t know the extra point counted before the touchdown did. In the rugby days, a touchdown counted for naught, but it let them take a free kick for a goal. In 1883, when the much-revered Camp and Co. cooked up numerical scoring for American football, a touchdown counted two points, and the goal after it counted four — twice as much!
“The next year, they reversed that with the TD counting four. It didn’t become an extra ‘point’ — singular — until 1898. The colleges introduced two-point conversions in 1957. The American Football League employed it in the 1960s, but the NFL didn’t adopt it until 1994.”
I’m ready to tell the guy about the different number of points field goals have been worth over the years, but he excuses himself to go to the little boys’ room. That’s OK. He’ll be able to concentrate on my lecture better. Come to think of it, that was quite a while ago when he left. He’s missed the whole third quarter of the TV game. Maybe I should go check on him.