History of Football

American football is said to have emerged from Rugby in 1879, and Walter Camp is very well known as the father of American football as he was the inventor of the main rules. However, before all this, students of Princeton College were said to have been playing a game called Ballown. There weren’t any special rules or anything which applied to the game, and it just involved fisting the ball and using your feet to move the ball past the opposition players. Though it was considered the easiest form of football due to lack of rules, the physical part of the game was quite immense, and often turned violent!

Harvard students, too, played a game, like football, on the first Monday of every school year. Due to the extreme physical nature of the game, the day of the game was famously known as “Bloody Monday”. 1865 was a landmark year for American Football as the civil war had ended, and football was getting more and more popularity among colleges. This year also saw some basic rules for the game, and was also patented. Thus, on 11/6/1869, the first inter-college football match was played off between Princeton and Rugters, which was won by the latter 6-4. Read More