Football. Versions of football were played in late seventeenth‐century Massachusetts. In the early 1800s, college students representing their classes played the “football rush”. Rutgers beat Princeton, six goals to four, in the first intercollegiate game in 1869, using rules similar to soccer. Players could bat the ball, but not carry or throw it. A crucial innovation occurred in 1874 following two Harvard‐McGill football games, one contested under soccer‐style rules, the second under rugby rules. The Harvard players enjoyed rugby's physical contact and ball carrying, and adopted the new game. In 1876, the Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA) was established using rules that emphasized kicking (one kicked goal equaled four touchdowns).
Yale's Walter Camp, a key figure, played for six years (1876–1882), and then became the unpaid coach. From 1883 to 1891, Yale lost just three games. Camp, an innovator, stressed rational management (organized practices, strategy, and precision) and commercialization. He arranged for off‐campus championships, usually in
New York City on Thanksgiving Day, that drew over thirty thousand fans by the early 1890s. Camp was responsible for most major rules innovations as a leader of the Rules Committee (1878–1925), including the number of players and field dimensions. He introduced the “down system,” requiring the offense to advance the ball at least five yards in three plays, and established a means to restart play after each down. At a time when elites worried about their sons’ masculinity, the violent mass plays of the 1890s helped observers identify football as a moral equivalent of war, certifying players’ manliness.
Midwestern and western universities adopted the sport in the 1890s to gain recognition. Pressures to win gave rise to the professional coach, such as Amos Alonzo Stagg of the University of Chicago, who won 323 games, a number that remained unsurpassed for many years. Success depended on recruiting top players through athletic scholarships and on using graduate students, “special students” who did not meet normal admission standards, and even nonstudents. Coaches enrolled their athletes in easy classes, hired tutors, and arranged special examinations.
Problems of eligibility, brutality, commercialism, and poor sportsmanship convinced some schools to drop the sport. In 1905 President Theodore
Roosevelt, the preeminent advocate of “the strenuous life,” invited college football leaders to the White House to discuss reform. A national conference followed, leading to the establishment of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association (IAA), renamed the
National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in 1910. The IAA banned freshman participation, required transfers to sit out one year, and limited eligibility to three years. New rules were introduced to open up play, including ten yards for a first down, no tackling below the knees, and legalization of the forward pass. Other changes intended to promote safety and spectator interest included requiring seven men on the line of scrimmage, four tries for a first down, revaluing touchdowns from five to six points, and streamlining the ball to make it easier to throw. In 1913 Notre Dame used the forward pass to upset Army, 35–13, popularizing the tactic and opening up play.
As football's popularity grew, Harvard in 1903 built the 38,000‐seat Soldier's Field, then the largest seating capacity of any American sports field. The Yale Bowl (1913) held 67,000, and similar edifices arose at Syracuse, Princeton, and Chicago. In 1928 the University of Michigan build a football stadium seating 87,000. During Knute Rockne's thirteen years as head coach at Notre Dame (1918–1931), his teams won 105 games, lost 12, and tied 15. To generate tourism, urban boosters instituted postseason bowl games on the model of Pasadena's Rose Bowl (1901) in Miami (Orange), New Orleans (Sugar), El Paso (Sun), Dallas (Cotton), and elsewhere.
Army, Notre Dame, Fordham, Pittsburgh, and the University of Southern California dominated the game in the 1940s, while in the 1950s Oklahoma won forty‐seven straight games. In the 1960s attendance rose by 50 percent while
television fees soared from $3 million in 1964 to $29 million in 1981. In 1984 the U.S.
Supreme Court ended the NCAA's cartel operations, allowing groups or individual schools to sell their own games.
Professional football, meanwhile, originated in western Pennsylvania, where industrialists hired mill hands or former collegians to entertain workers and alleviate labor tensions. The first pro, Pudge Heffelfinger, was paid five hundred dollars in 1892 to play a game for the Allegheny Athletic Association. By 1903 the center of pro football shifted to Canton, Massillon, and other industrial towns in Ohio. By 1915, some eighty‐six professional and semiprofessional teams were competing, sponsored by social clubs, ethnic fraternities, and especially industrial labor relations departments. In 1920 the American Professional Football Association (renamed the National Football League [NFL] in 1922) was organized. It was primarily a midwestern organization of company‐sponsored squads, including the Decatur Staleys (the future Chicago Bears), the brainchild of labor‐relations director George Halas. The APFA's first star was Jim Thorpe, the all‐around athlete who had excelled at the 1912 Olympic games. Thorpe played for the APFA's Canton Bulldogs, and was also the organization's figurehead president.
Initially, the NFL had a hard time competing with college football for fan support. Public acceptance was bolstered when Red
Grange, a celebrated football hero at the University of Illinois, signed with the Chicago Bears in 1925. Nonetheless, the NFL still struggled, paying most players about one hundred dollars a game. By 1934, all smaller NFL cities except Green Bay, Wisconsin, had dropped out. Important innovations included divisional play (1933); the College All‐Star game (1934); and a player draft (1936) to increase competition. After
World War II, the new All‐American Football Conference (1946–1949), with franchises across the country, competed with the NFL.
Television in the 1950s boosted the pro game, which continued to grow in popularity thereafter. The establishment of the rival American Football League in 1960 encouraged the NFL to expand. The bidding war for players led to a merger in 1966, and the first “superbowl” one year later. The sport was dominated in the 1960s by Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers, who won five championships. By the end of the twentieth century, pro football teams were among the most profitable sports franchises, profiting from capacity crowds, concessions, product endorsements by players, and pooled TV revenues involving many millions of dollars.
See also
Baseball;
Basketball;
Education: Collegiate Education;
Education: The Rise of the University;
Popular Culture;
Sports.
Bibliography
Tom Bennett et al. , The NFL's Official Encyclopedic History of Professional Football, 1977.
Ronald Smith , Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big‐Time College Athletics, 1988.
David S. Neft and and Richard M. Cohen , The Football Encyclopedia: The Complete History of Professional Football from 1892 to the Present, 1991.
Murray Sperber , Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football, 1993.
Robin Lester , Stagg's University: The Rise, Decline and Fall of Big‐Time Football, 1995.
Robert W. Peterson , Pigskin: The Early Years of Pro Football, 1997.
Steven A. Riess
