The Roots of American Football and its changes
American football, the stars and stripes version of rugby, was born in New Jersey, officially, on November 6, 1869, in the city of New Brunswick, when the first official football match took place. The teams are two university representatives: Rutgers and Princeton, and to applaud them, according to the chronicles of the time, there are just a hundred spectators, the only eyewitnesses of a sporting event that will take on historical importance.
This was, in practice, the first of a series of three matches between the two university teams, but it was never completed. The first match was won by Rutgers 6–4, the second was won by Princeton, which then, due to the refusal of its opponents to play the so-called “bella”, the third match, won the series and, therefore, the mini-tournament.
What the Americans inherited from the London Football Association, exploiting some of its rules and doing their own thing for many others, was only a distant relative of modern American football. It is true that, after those two games, this new sporting discipline, albeit in a disorganized way, spread widely, always exclusively in American colleges, especially in the Boston area.
The first real meetings between coaches, players and managers took place around 1873, with the aim of studying a single text that had a detailed and precise regulation.
The beginnings of modern American Football
In all probability, even though rugby or, at least, a still primitive version of the sport was already being practiced at an amateur level in many American colleges since the 1920’s and 1930’s, Princeton is credited with laying the foundation for the future of American football.
In fact, it was a group of students from this university who spread from campus to campus a simple and effective game, consisting in advancing the ball beyond the opponents, with both hands and feet, with a lot of hand-to-hand combat, in a clash of strength based essentially on team play. The rules, in short, were essentially these.
The ball, the first modern specimen, so to speak, made on the shape of a big egg, appears and spreads thanks to Harvard students and to the launch of what will become a real tradition: every first Monday of each academic year, freshmen and veterans of the university clash in a game almost to the death, so much so that the event has become a sort of macabre fixed appointment, up to be known even outside the academic borders with the disrespectful expression of “Bloody Monday”. Even in Boston, this practice began to spread, taking hold from 1860.
After the end of the American Civil War, from 1865 onwards, many colleges began to organize internal football games, encouraging their spread. Princeton, once again, led the way, setting the first, basic, rules of the game.
The first regulations
The first historic match, as mentioned between Princeton and Rutgers, was played on a field that was decidedly different in size from those later sanctioned by federal regulations, which were set at 100 yards long and 53.5 yards wide.
The match was played on a field 120 yards long and 75 yards wide, therefore much larger. On the other hand, there were 50 players on the field, 25 against 25. Each score gave a point and every time a goal was scored, the field had to be reversed. The game was won by the best of 10 points (called “game”) and, what shows even more how rudimentary football was at the beginning, the same ball could be hit with feet, hands or head.
The players did not know about fouls or tackles, regular or otherwise: everything, in practice, was possible. It was, in a certain sense, a sort of primitive synthesis of European rugby and soccer, in an all-American version, privileging above all the aggressive, physical, corporal aspect.
For almost ten years, this reduction, so to speak, continued to be practiced, until the Americans and their colleges finally chose to approach rugby, effectively doing away with soccer. Even the rules, from that moment, became clearer and better assimilated to those of the other ancient sport born in England, also practiced with the so-called oval ball.
Towards NFL Football
1873 is another pivotal year in the history of this sport so loved by Americans, which towards the end of the twentieth century will become the first sport in the States, the most followed and spectacular through the media, able to mobilize stars of the show and glue in front of the television screens, for a final, millions and millions of people around the world.
In any case, it happened that that year representatives from Columbia, Rutgers, Princeton and Yale decided to meet in New York City, with the aim of finally putting down on paper a series of well-codified rules, as well as establishing a true intercollegiate football league. These four teams therefore ended up establishing an association, the “Intercollegiate Football”, setting at 15 players, as in European rugby, the maximum number of elements allowed per team during a game.
Walter Camp, a coach based at Yale, was the one who gave a very important turning point, making sure that American football was definitively detached from European rugby. In 1880 he introduced the rule of the line-up, known as the “scrimmage”, which was fundamental for starting every play. Three years later, the detachment was complete, with the reduction of the number of 11 players for each team.
Meanwhile, already the year before, many teams in many American states had created the first professional football clubs, given the popularity that the new sport was acquiring among the people. In this same period, there was also the first, true football champion: Jim Thorpe, who was also known to the general sports public for having been a multiple Olympic athletics champion and a great baseball player.
It was he who, on September 17, 1920, founded the modern National Football League (NFL), establishing the last rules of the game (such as the possibility of throwing the ball forward, one of the rules that is mostly forbidden in rugby and that mark the great difference between these two sports and the first rules on betting on the game), with the aim of reducing the violent aspects of this new sport, which only in 1905 led to the death of 18 athletes and the wounding of 150 others, with a denunciation by Congress of the American government, which directly called in President Roosevelt.
Since 1903, finally, there were the first real stadiums, with the construction of Harvard, still one of the largest in America and one of the first to be erected to accommodate thousands of fans. The capacity of many other stadiums, in the wake of Harvard, from that moment onwards began to settle on one hundred thousand seats.
