History Of American Football

FOOTBALL

FOOTBALL. The game of American football as played today by high

school, college, and professional teams grew out of rugby-style

football which in the mid-1870s replaced a largely kicking game known

as association football. Although initially played on village greens

and on college fields, the first intercollegiate game took place on 6

November 1869 when Rutgers defeated Princeton 6–4 in a soccer-style

game. Five years later, Montreal's McGill University playing at

Harvard introduced rugby football, which would be rapidly adopted by

eastern teams.

Collegiate Development

For the first fifty years of football, college teams enjoyed a

virtual monopoly of what they called the gridiron (the term applied

to the football

By 1929, many of the serious

injuries and occasional deaths in the first three decades of the

twentieth century occurred during unsupervised play. Because of the

need for protective equipment and adult supervision, youth leagues

gradually evolved. What became the Pop Warner Leagues began as a

local Philadelphia area football club in 1929. The organization was

later renamed for Glenn Scobie "Pop" Warner, best known as a college

coach at Carlisle Indian School, the University of Pittsburgh, and

Stanford University. Beginning in 1947, the Pop Warner Leagues

initiated their own national championship modeled after college and

professional competitions in football and other sports.

Professional football had originated in the towns of western

Pennsylvania and taken root in the smaller cities of Ohio. In 1920, a

group of midwestern teams met to form the American Professional

Football Association, changed the next year to the National Football

League. In the 1920s and 1930s, NFL teams often went bankrupt or

moved and changed names, and professional football ranked a distant

second to college football in

That year, ABC Sports innovator Roone Arledge teamed up with NFL

commissioner Pete Rozelle to launch "Monday Night Football," an

instant hit on prime-time evening television. Professional football

franchises, which had once struggled for attendance, became

businesses worth millions of dollars.

Although the players' salaries rose, they would not reach the levels

achieved by major league baseball until the 1990s. Strikes in 1974

and 1987 led to victories by the owners, who effectively blocked the

free agency that had resulted in soaring salaries in major league

baseball. Attempts to found new professional leagues—the World

Football League in 1974–1975, the United States Football League in

1983–1985, and the XFL in the winter of 2000—failed to breach the NFL

cartel. Only the Canadian Football League (CFL), arena football

played indoors, the World League of American Football (an NFL minor

league with teams mainly in Europe), and the Women's Professional

Football League (WPFL) offered an outlet for players who could