Football

The origins of football—of entertaining oneself and others by kicking and throwing about a ball-type object—likely predates recorded history. Football player, coach, and historian Parke H. Davis made this clear in Football, the American Intercollegiate Game (1911), where he traces the history of the game to antiquity:

Football, or, as it was called in olden time, camp-ball, camping, or hurling, may be traced from the present backward through century after century until the trail is lost in the remoteness of antiquity. Indeed, abundant evidence may be marshalled to prove that this is the oldest outdoor game in existence.

In the 22d chapter of Isaiah [in the Bible] is found the verse, “He will turn and toss thee like a ball.” This allusion, slight as it may be, is sufficient unto the antiquary to indicate that some form of a game with a ball existed as early as 750 years before the Christian era [also called the Common Era], the epoch customarily assigned to the Book of Isaiah. A more specific allusion of the same period, however, is the passage in the Sixth Book of the Odyssey of Homer, familiar to all schoolboys: “Then having bathed and anointed well with oil they took their midday meal upon the river’s banks and anon when satisfied with food they played a game of ball.” [1]

A football-like game called episkyros, which involved the throwing of a ball over the opponent, was played between teams of 12–14 players in ancient Greece; the game was quite violent. Medieval England had a game called “Shrovetide football,” played annually during the festival celebrating “Shrove Tuesday” (also called “Fat Tuesday” or Mardi Gras), the last day before the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday. The rugby-like game (in which a ball is carried through the town in huge scrums called “hugs,” in which shoving, biting, punching, bleeding, and broken bones are common) is still played in the towns of Alnwick, Ashbourne, and Atherstone, where it was allegedly begun by King John in 1199; a bag of gold went to the winner of the game. Atherstone locals joke that there are only two rules: “Keep the ball on the town’s main street, and don’t kill anyone.” [2] [3] [4] [96]

These predecessor games to football (soccer), American football, and rugby grew so violent that English rulers routinely banned the sport. As long ago as 1314 the Lord Mayor of London banned football within the city due to the chaos it often caused. Breaking this law meant imprisonment. They banned it not just because of the violence but because it diverted attention and energy away from the more important military discipline of archery. (Scottish rulers also banned early golf for being a diversion from archery.) As FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association, the organization of international soccer) reports, “During the 100 Years’ War between England and France from 1337 to 1453 the royal court was unfavourably disposed towards football. Kings Edward III, Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V all made the game punishable by law.” [5] [95]

Since at least the 17th century, Native Americans have played a soccer-like game, originally using balls made from animal hides, called pasuckuakohowog (which translates to “they gather to play ball with the foot”). The game could involve as many as 500–1,000 players, and the goals could be as far apart as a half-mile to a mile. These games, however, were described as less violent than the European counterparts: “they never strike up one another’s heeles, as we do, not accompting that praiseworthie to purchase a goale by such an advantage. [6] [90]

In the 17th and 18th centuries, English ball games were carried to the American colonies, where they spread to America’s earliest colleges. Like the English games, these, too, were bloody affairs. As A.M. Weyand, historian and former captain of the West Point football team, wrote in American Football: Its History and Development (1926), “As early as 1827 the first Monday of the fall term was known at Harvard as ‘Bloody Monday’ because of the customary game between the two lower classes on that day.” The official objective of the game was to kick a ball over the other class’s goal line, but the game was actually a blatant opportunity for the sophomores to punch, kick, and beat up on the freshmen. There were also regular organized class games at Yale and Harvard in the 1840s, but the game was so violent that it was banned at both universities in 1860. [7] [91]

By 1894 shoes with iron plates and projecting nails were common enough in football games that both had to be banned, and severe injuries and deaths were all too common. But only in the 20th century would football safety reforms come about when Pres. Theodore Roosevelt stepped in and pushed for reforms to save the sport. The president loved physicality in all forms—as long as it didn’t result in death. “I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports. I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal,” he said. [8] [9]

Playing football, however, was too often fatal. So, Roosevelt convened a meeting at the White House with university representatives and coaches to discuss the problem of violence in the game. As the Theodore Roosevelt Center explains:

On October 9, 1905, he brought together seven men for a White House meeting: football coaches Walter Camp of Yale, Arthur T. Hildebrand of Princeton, and William T. Reid of Harvard, along with the three heads of their respective alumni committees, and [U.S.] Secretary of State Elihu Root. Roosevelt encouraged them to lay out methods to decrease gratuitous violence. He lacked authority to force the coaches to do anything, but he had faith in the ability of wise and good-hearted Americans to come to a mutually beneficial agreement. The men issued a statement denouncing on-field viciousness and pledged themselves to a higher level of play. It was the first time that a president had actively involved himself in reforming college athletics. [10]

Despite the meeting and joint statement, the brutality continued. The Chicago Tribune called the 1905 season a “death harvest” in which 19 players died and 137 were seriously injured. Harvard, in fact, was ready to ban the game. Still wanting to save the sport, Roosevelt again convened meetings at the White House with representatives of football to push for serious reforms, and the result was the 1906 formation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the U.S. (which became the NCAA in 1910) to reform the game and establish standards for amateur athletics. [8] [9]

As author Christopher Klein has reported, the intercollegiate organization “legalized the forward pass, abolished the dangerous mass formations, created a neutral zone between offense and defense and doubled the first-down distance to 10 yards, to be gained in three downs. The rule changes didn’t eliminate football’s dangers, but fatalities declined—to 11 per year in both 1906 and 1907—while injuries fell sharply.” [9]

Clearly, concerns about the safety of football are as old as the game itself.

The beginnings of organized football

The first organized “football team” was the Oneida Football Club. Established in the midst of the Civil War in 1862 Boston, the team had 16 members, many of whom went on to be key figures in Boston history. Though the team was not officially connected with the school, 13 of the members attended Epes Sargent Dixwell’s Private Latin School and had formerly played informal pickup games during recess. [11]

In June 1862 the “Dixwell” boys played against boys from Boston Latin School in a three-hour best three-out-of-five set, after which Gerrit Smith Miller, a student from Peterboro, New York, officially formed the Oneida Football Club and named it for a lake near his home. The short but historic run of the club would end in 1865 when Miller graduated and left for Harvard, taking the game with him. The game spread widely to Southern schools after the end of the Civil War in 1865. [11] [12]

The rules established by the Dixwell boys were called the “Boston Rules Game” or “Harvard Game” and proliferated throughout the elite universities attended by boys who had previously played a similar game in high school. However, this early version of football more closely resembled a hybrid of soccer, rugby, than what would become American football. Consequently, the Oneida Football Club is also frequently cited as a historic team in the history of soccer. [13]

The first official high-school football game was on May 12, 1875. It began the oldest existing high-school football rivalry: between Connecticut private boys’ academies New London High School (then Bulkeley School for Boys) and Norwich Free Academy. The schools have maintained their rivalry to this day, playing on Thanksgiving Day since 1921. Two of the oldest public high-school football rivalries can be found in Massachusetts, where the football rivalry between Wellesley High School and Needham High School dates to 1882 and Boston Latin and English High School have played every Thanksgiving Day since 1887 (with the exception of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic). [14] [15] [16] [17] [18]

Organized college football

High-school boys took football with them to elite universities and created both informal and formal teams. The first intercollegiate football game was played on November 6, 1869, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, between in-state university rivals Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) and Rutgers. Although this early version of the game was a modified form of English football, or soccer—it was played under a variation of England’s Football Association rules, with 25 men to a side, in which carrying or throwing the ball was forbidden—many cite this as the “first American football game.” [8] [92]

A rugby-style game then evolved, with carrying the ball, downs, and tackling. This version of the game gained popularity after the famous two-game competition between McGill University of Montreal and Harvard on May 14–15, 1874. The first game of the two-game match was played with a round ball under “Boston rules. This second game is cited by some as the first modern football game. [20] [21]

The game quickly gained popularity among adult athletic clubs and associations, the precursors to modern NFL teams. “Pro football” would officially begin on November 12, 1892, when William (Pudge) Heffelfinger was paid $500 (more than $17,600 in 2025) to play one game for the Allegheny Athletic Association against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club, a fact that wouldn’t be verified for 80 years, though Pittsburgh had suspicions. [19] [22]

On November 23, 1876, representatives from Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale universities, where football was becoming especially popular, gathered to write the first college football rules. Attending the meeting was Walter Camp, then a student of Yale, who would come to be called “the father of American football” for his formalization of the sport. He largely authored the rules that are still in place today including the line of scrimmage, the system of downs, the center-to-quarterback snap, and that only 11 players per team should be on the field at once. [23]

College football increased in popularity fairly quickly, especially with the rise of mass communication via radio. On October 8, 1921, radio station KDKA-AM in Pittsburgh was the first to broadcast a college football game—the still ongoing “Backyard Brawl” rivalry between West Virginia University and the University of Pittsburgh. On September 30, 1939, NBC broadcast the first college football game via television, featuring Fordham University against Waynesburg University. Other developments that changed college football include the advent of rankings (1939 by the Associated Press), instant replay (1963), the Bowl Championship Series (1998), playoffs (2014), in-helmet coach-to-player communications (2024), and sideline use of iPads (2024) for reviewing and designing plays.[23] [24] [25]

Pop Warner and other youth football leagues

Created in 1929, youth football has similar roots to collegiate football in wanting to channel boys away from destructive behavior and into organized sports. In the case of Pop Warner football, named after the legendary football coach Glenn “Pop” Warner, the league was established after an owner of a new factory in northeast Philadelphia enlisted the aid of friend Joseph J. Tomlin to distract boys from breaking his factory’s windows (100 windows had been broken in a single month). [26] [27]

After World War II youth football programs proliferated, with almost 100,000 kids playing tackle football by 1956. The youth game grew in popularity despite the National Education Association banning contact sports for kids 12 and younger in 1953 and the American Academy of Pediatrics declaring in 1957 that “body-contact sports, particularly tackle football and boxing, are considered to have no place in programs for children of this age.” Neither exhortation mattered, though, and by 1964, more than 500,000 boys aged 7–15 were playing Pop Warner football. [28]

As of 2025, the Pop Warner program boasted “over 400,000 boys and girls, ages 5–16, participating in Pop Warner programs in the United States,” plus “teams in Mexico, Japan and other countries,” which add up to “over 5,000 football teams, playing in eight different age/weight classifications.”[26] [27]

Innumerable youth football leagues have developed across the United States in the wake of Pop Warner’s popularity. According to USA Football, there are some 9,300 youth tackle football organizations with about 2.5 million players, including American Youth Football, Inc., which focuses on disadvantaged players (particularly those at risk of gang recruitment), with more than 30,000 teams.[29] [30] [31]

Flag football

During World War II American soldiers developed “Touch and Tail football,” which today is called “flag football.” The game differs from gridiron football in that instead of tackling a player, a player is “downed” by simply grabbing the flag from the opponent’s waistband. Flag football also allows fewer players on the field (5 or 7 players compared to 11 per team in tackle football), the field is shorter, and the games are generally shorter, too. To further eliminate contact, quarterbacks are not allowed to run with the ball, and diving, blocking, screening, and fumbles are disallowed. [32] [33] [34] [35]

The National Touch Football League was founded in the 1960s in St. Louis, Missouri, and the NFL founded the NFL Flag program for kids and teens in 1994. As of 2025, NFL Flag had over 1,800 local flag football leagues for more than 750,000 kids and teens from age 5 to 17 years old. Numerous other flag football leagues exist worldwide. [33] [36]

Because the game is mostly no-contact and more closely resembles a friendly backyard game, it is considered safer for kids to play than tackle football. The sport is also welcoming to girls and will be added to the Olympics at the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Games. [33] [34]

Friday night lights

Football for all ages grew increasingly popular throughout the 20th century, but the 1950s and ’60s were perhaps the golden era of high-school football. The local school football team was the heartbeat of many communities, with nearly everyone in town going to the stadium on Friday night. The wholesome image of the boy with a letterman’s jacket and a cheerleader on his arm proliferated as football became intertwined with the American experience. [37] [38]

Some observers have even tied football to America’s “manifest destiny” and violent past, as Jillian Jetmore explains:

Physical control of the ball playfully recreates America’s historical legacy of violently conquering and controlling territory. Following the introduction of possession, the first down was introduced. The first down is also linked to claiming land: the team advances the ball, holds territory, and defends that territory. The concepts of possession and the first down reflect early American cultural values and patriotism. Since football mirrored American values it rapidly diffused into American identity. [39]

Whether considered just a fun game or one intricately linked to the American character, every U.S. state and D.C. now has a high-school athletic association that is a member of the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS). The state-level associations run the high-school football programs in each of the more than 19,500 American schools with football teams, while the NFHS oversees the operations and rules that are largely similar to NCAA college football rules. [40] [41]

According to the NFHS, some 7,000 high-school games are played “under the lights,” involving some 1.5 million teens, every Friday night during football season. [42] [43]