Football history
The history of soccer generally goes back to its beginnings in rugby union. The English game that is very similar to soccer and football that also started in England in the early 19th century.
Similar variations of football were played by all college campuses of Ivy League schools until the mid-19th century. Then shortly after the end of the Civil War, around the 1860s, some of the colleges began to play organized football. Princeton University skirted some of the basic rules of soccer, and the game was patented. It seems strange to be able to patent a game but nevertheless the sport began to grow. The first football game in college football history was played in 1869 between Princeton and Rutgers with Rutgers the victor, thus producing football history.
The history of college football took another big step in 1873 when several universities met to form the first rules of the game and established the number of players on each team. Yale coach Walter Camp assisted in the final step in the change from rugby-style football to the American-style. He limited the number of players to eleven on each team and sized the football field to 110 yards. He then created the down system in 1882, which originally consisted of three downs to gain 5 yards and later changed to 4 downs to gain 10 yards.
Without the proper safety equipment at the time, the sport had become extremely brutal and dangerous for all players. There were even a number of deaths that had taken place in the sport. It had become such a problem that the president at the time, Teddy Roosevelt, called for change and helped implement a select 7-member group to govern a rules organization and save football history. This committee eventually became the NCAA or National Athletic Association that we all know today.
The committee came up with a series of new rules, including the forward pass and a series of safety measures that penalized players for rudeness and unsafe acts. Football history changed when a common practice at the time of crossing one’s arms and blocking in unison also became illegal. The match was shortened to the sixty minutes we played today and a neutral zone between attack and defense was also incorporated.
The development of the sport led to an inevitable expansion in the area of college football. Since then, college football history has turned into one incredible weekly spectacle. Hundreds of college teams now compete each year under NCAA guidelines. Numerous college divisions now have conferences, and all are hoping to win a major New Year’s Bowl. Football history and nostalgia are very much alive in college football today.
Professional football was first played around 1895 and in 1920 the APFA, or American Professional Football Association, was formed. It was renamed what we all know today as the NFL or National Football League in 1922. The NFL started slowly and by the mid-1940s had only ten teams. A major merger then took place in 1970 that combined the 16 NFL teams with the 10 AFL teams to form a large two-conference association. Expansion continued to the now 32-team league, and professional soccer has grown tremendously since its inception in 1869 from a college game to a billion-dollar empire. So goes the history of football.