Rutgers and Princeton played the first college game in 1869
American football, called football in the US and Canada, grew from soccer and rugby into a gridiron contest of downs and forward passes. On 6 November 1869 Rutgers faced Princeton with twenty-five players a side and a round ball. It is now America's most popular sport at pro and college levels.
That first game allowed no carrying: players could kick or bat the ball with feet, hands, heads or sides, and Rutgers won 6–4. Seven years earlier, Boston prep-school graduates had formed the Oneida Football Club, the oldest known American club, which played from 1862 to 1865. The shift to rugby came after two Princeton athletes watched a rugby-rules Harvard–Yale match in 1875 and brought the idea home. Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Columbia then agreed to play modified rugby, and the 1876 rulebook adopted the name football; Harvard, the chief rugby champion, did not press for calling it rugby.
Walter Camp, remembered as the father of the sport, reshaped it from 1880. His uncontested snap had an unintended flaw. In an 1881 Yale–Princeton game both unbeaten teams simply sat on the ball without trying to advance, protecting their records. Camp's 1882 fix gave each team three downs to gain 5 yards or lose possession, the rule that split the game decisively from rugby.
Violence nearly ended it. Mass plays such as the flying wedge caused severe injuries, and after 19 deaths in 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt threatened to abolish football unless it changed. Sixty-two colleges met in New York on 28 December 1905, and the next year brought the legal forward pass, a first down of 10 yards instead of 5, and 60 minutes of play instead of 70. Harvard blocked a proposal to widen the field by 40 yards because its new stadium could not fit it.
Professionalism began openly on 12 November 1892, when Pudge Heffelfinger took $500 to play for the Allegheny Athletic Association. The NFL started in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association to curb bidding wars and illegal payments to college players. Its credibility rose when the Pottsville Maroons beat a Notre Dame all-star team in 1925, and a stronger passing game in the late 1930s set the pro game apart. Today over a million Americans play at high school or college level, and the Super Bowl ranks among the most-watched club events anywhere.
Source: American football
