History of Football
| American Football, which originated from English rugby, was first played in 1879, as per guidelines laid down by Yale University's Walter Camp, who was a player and coach. Camp played at the university and set out rules that distinguished the game of football from soccer and rugby. These same rules chalked out by him are those that govern American Football to this day. |
Born on April 17, 1859, in New Haven, Connecticut, Camp went to Yale to study business and medicine. He was in the university from 1876 to 1882. His credentials are many - author, director of a company, chairman of the board directors of another company, general athletic director and head advisory football coach at his alma mater (1888 - 1914), and chairman of Yale’s football committee (1888 -1912).
There were many significant changes introduced by Camp, which separated American Football from other ball games, namely rugby and soccer. He changed the number of players in each team, bringing it down to eleven instead of fifteen, introduced the forward pass, the line of scrimmage, created the positions we know as quarterback and center, and regularized the scoring system to numerical scoring. That is not all. Camp created many important ‘rules’ of the game, like creating safety, penalties, interference and the neutral zone. By 1888, tackling till the knee was allowed, and one team was allowed undisputed control over the ball, till they gave up due to own violations.
By 1912, a touchdown’s value was increased to 6 points, while points for field goals went down to 3. The year 1920 was when the governing body, the National Football League or NFL was formed.
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