| 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.
Football was being played with a variety of rules, and so, 1873 saw the formation of the Intecollegiate Football Association by Columbia, Rugters, Princeton and Yale. The association brought into effect, the first set of rules of intercollegiate football, which only allowed 15 players per team. However, it was the Yale coach, Walter Camp, who really started the final process of evolution from a rugby – like game to American Football. The number of players allowed in a team was limited to 11, and the standard field size was set to 110 yards. Sometime later, downs were introduced, and tackling under the waist was allowed.
However, the violent nature of the game meant that a number of serious injuries came about, some even resulting in death. As a result of this, though the game was gaining popularity, it was banned in colleges. A directive from the then President of USA, Theodore Roosevelt, in 1905 saw Harvard, Yale and Princeton set up meetings between schools and formed a 7 member “Rules Committee”, which came to be later known as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
The NCAA legalized the forward pass, which resulted in a new design for the ball and a different style of play. The rough mass plays, which tended to cause serious damage to players, were banned. Locking arms with teammates to clear the path for ball carriers was also banned. The length of a game was reduced from 70 to 60 minutes and a netural zone was established, which seperates the 2 teams by the length of the ball before play begins or restarts. |
