Gridiron football is a version of the sport of football (characterized by two people or teams attempting to kick, carry, throw, or otherwise propel a ball toward an opponent’s goal) so named for the vertical yard lines marking the rectangular field. Gridiron football evolved from English rugby and soccer (association football). It differs from soccer chiefly in allowing players to touch, throw, and carry the ball with their hands, and it differs from rugby in allowing each side to control the ball in alternating possessions. The sport, played with 11 on each team, originated in the United States, where it was largely developed and eventually became the country’s leading spectator sport. It quickly spread to Canada—where it evolved into a 12-man game—though it never achieved the great popularity and status of ice hockey there.
Gridiron football has not been taken up in the rest of the world to the same degree as other American sports such as basketball and baseball. Since the 1980s, however, primarily through the marketing efforts of the National Football League (NFL), teams and leagues have been established in Europe, and the game has achieved a degree of international popularity through television.
Gridiron football was the creation of elite American universities, a fact that has shaped its distinctive role in American culture and life. After several decades of informal, student-organized games that were tolerated by faculty as an alternative to more destructive rowdiness, the first intercollegiate football game was played on Nov. 6, 1869, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, between in-state rivals Princeton and Rutgers according to rules adapted from those of the London Football Association. This soccer-style game became the dominant form as Columbia, Cornell, Yale, and a few other colleges in the Northeast took up the sport in the early 1870s.
In 1873 representatives from Princeton, Yale, and Rutgers met in New York City to found the Intercollegiate Football Association and to adopt a common code. Conspicuously missing was Harvard, the country’s premier university, whose team insisted on playing the so-called “Boston Game,” a cross between soccer and rugby. In May 1874, in the second of two matches with McGill University of Montreal (the first was played by the rules of the Boston Game), Harvard’s players were introduced to the rugby game and immediately preferred it to their own. The following year, for Harvard’s first football contest with Yale, representatives of the two schools agreed on “concessionary rules” that were chiefly Harvard’s. When spectators (including Princeton students) as well as Yale players saw the advantages of the rugby style, the stage was set for a meeting in 1876 of representatives from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia to form a new Intercollegiate Football Association based on rugby rules.
Harvard made the first breach in rugby rules. Rejecting the traditional manner of putting the ball in play—players from both teams massed about the ball in a “scrummage,” or “scrum,” trying to kick it forward through the mass of players—Harvard opted for “heeling it out,” or kicking the ball backward to a teammate. The further transformation of English rugby into American football came chiefly through the efforts of Walter Camp, who even during his lifetime was known as the “Father of American Football.”
Walter Camp is largely responsible for the advent of gridiron football in America. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
As an undergraduate and then a medical student at Yale, Camp played football from 1876 through 1881, but—more important—beginning in 1878, he dominated the rules committee for nearly three crucial decades. Two of Camp’s revisions in particular effectively created the gridiron game. The first, in 1880, further refined Harvard’s initial innovation, abolishing the scrummage altogether in favour of a scrimmage, which awarded possession of the ball to one of the two teams. It was then put in play by heeling it out. (Snapping the ball with the hand became legal in 1890, though snapping with the foot continued as an option until 1913.)
The second crucial rule change was necessitated by the first. Camp’s more orderly manner of initiating play did not require the team in possession of the ball to give it up. After Princeton simply held the ball for an entire half in its 1880 and 1881 contests with Yale, both games ending in scoreless ties that bored spectators as much as they frustrated Yale’s players, Camp proposed a rule that a team must advance the ball 5 yards or lose 10 in three downs (plays), or it would be obliged to surrender the ball to the other side.
Camp also was responsible for having 11 players on a side, for devising a new scoring system in 1883 with two points for a touchdown, four points for the goal after a touchdown, and five points for a field goal (a field goal became worth three points in 1909, a touchdown six points in 1912), for naming the positions (centre, guard, tackle, end, quarterback, halfback, fullback), for marking the field with stripes, and for proposing several other innovations. But it was those two simple rules adopted in 1880 and 1882 that most fundamentally created American football.
After the crucial rule changes, the play of the game was relatively open, featuring long runs and numerous lateral passes, as in rugby. In 1888 Camp proposed that tackling below the waist be legalized, in order to offset the advantage of speedy backs streaking around the ends. The new rule resulted in the rise of mass plays, an offensive strategy that massed players on a single point of the defense, most famously in Harvard’s “flying wedge” in 1892. This style of play proved so brutal that the game was nearly abolished in the 1890s and early 1900s.
The spirit of early football can be glimpsed in the introduction of a rule in 1894 that banned projecting nails or iron plates in shoes and any metal substance on the player’s person. Rules establishing boundaries between permissible and impermissible violence have been continually revised over the years, sometimes in response to periods of heightened concern over deaths and injuries (in the early 1930s as well as the 1890s, for example). To ensure greater safety, the number of officials grew from two in 1873 to seven by 1983.
Over time, improvements in equipment also provided more safeguards against serious injuries. In the 1890s players’ only protection against blows to the head came from their own long hair and leather nose guards. The first headgear, in 1896, consisted simply of three leather straps. It evolved into close-fitting leather caps with ear flaps. The suspension helmet, which used straps to create space between the helmet shell and the head of the wearer, was introduced in 1917. However, helmets were not required in college football until 1939 (1943 for the NFL). Improved equipment sometimes increased rather than curtailed the game’s dangers. The plastic helmet, introduced in 1939, became a potentially lethal weapon, eventually requiring rules against “spearing”—using the head to initiate contact.
In 1879 the University of Michigan and Racine College of Wisconsin inaugurated football in the Midwest. Michigan under Fielding Yost in 1901–05 and the University of Chicago under Amos Alonzo Stagg in 1905–09 emerged as major powers. The game also spread throughout the rest of the country by the 1890s, though the Big Three—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—continued to dominate the collegiate football world into the 1920s. Ever mindful of their superiority to the latecomers, the three (joined by the University of Pennsylvania to create briefly a Big Four) formed the Intercollegiate Rules Committee in 1894, separate from the Intercollegiate Football Association. In 1895 in the Midwest, colleges dissatisfied with this divided leadership asserted their independence by forming what became the Western (now the Big Ten) Conference. The game also spread to the South and West, though conferences were not formed until later in those regions.
Leather helmets, introduced in the early 1900s, did not provide as much protection as today’s plastic headgear, but they were a step up from the equipment used prior to that. Archive Photos/Getty Images
The brutality of mass play also spread through the nation. Over the course of the 1905 season, 18 young men died from football injuries. Concerned that football might be abolished altogether, President Theodore Roosevelt in October 1905 summoned representatives (including Camp) from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to the White House, where he urged them to reform the game. On December 28 of that year representatives from 62 colleges and universities (not including the Big Three, who would continue for decades to balk at submitting to the will of “inferior” institutions) met in New York to form the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, which became the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in 1910.
To reduce mass play, the group at its initial meeting increased the yardage required for a first down from 5 yards to 10 and legalized the forward pass, the final element in the creation of the game of American football. The founding of the NCAA effectively ended the period when the Big Three (and Walter Camp personally) dictated rules of play to the rest of the football world. It also ended student involvement in controlling the game, though the question of who should rule college football—coaches, alumni and boosters, or college administrators—would continue to bedevil the NCAA throughout its history.
Brutality did not end with the revised rules of 1906. New crises prompted additional rule changes in 1910 (requiring seven men on the line of scrimmage) and 1912 (increasing the number of downs to gain 10 yards from three to four) to eliminate mass play. Nor did the forward pass immediately transform the game. The restrictive 1906 rules made passes riskier than fumbles, and it was only after several years of cautious experimentation that Notre Dame’s upset of Army in 1913 highlighted the remarkable possibilities in the passing game. It would be another three decades, however—during which restrictive rules were gradually dropped and the circumference of the ball reduced to facilitate passing—before those possibilities could be fully realized.
This early period in American football was formative in another way as well. Beginning in 1876, the original Intercollegiate Football Association staged a championship game at the end of each season, on Thanksgiving Day, matching the two best teams from the previous year. Initially the game was played in Hoboken, New Jersey, but in 1880 it was shifted to New York City to make it easier for students from all the universities in the association to attend the game. The attendance for that first contest in New York was 5,000. By 1884 it had climbed to 15,000. Attendance rose to 25,000 by 1890 and 40,000 by 1893, the last Thanksgiving Day game to be played in the city.
By this time, accounts of the game in New York’s major newspapers were taking up as much as three pages in an eight-page paper, and wire services carried reports to every corner of the country. By the 1890s an extracurricular activity at a handful of elite northeastern universities was becoming a spectator sport with a nationwide audience. College football became known for its bands and cheerleaders, pep rallies and bonfires, and homecoming dances and alumni reunions as much as for its athletic thrills. Pursuing the institution’s educational mission while serving the public’s desire for entertainment posed a dilemma with which college administrators struggled for more than a century. For some of the public, college football’s association with institutions of higher education and immersion in college spirit imbued the game with a kind of amateur purity. For others, the colleges’ profession of commitment to academic goals while commercializing their sports teams only smacked of hypocrisy.
After World War I had put the game temporarily on hold, college football fully came of age in the 1920s, when it became widely recognized as America’s greatest sporting spectacle (as opposed to baseball, which was the national pastime). The first football stadiums at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were modeled on the ancient Greek stadium and the Roman Colosseum, their architecture revealing much about football’s cultural status. With a stadium-building boom in the 1920s, attendance more than doubled, exceeding 10 million by the end of the decade.
Newspaper coverage of the sport expanded at a similar rate. The daily newspaper had played a crucial role in the 1880s and ’90s, introducing football to a popular audience with no connection to universities and their teams. Commercial radio appeared in 1920 and began regularly broadcasting football games a year later. By the end of the decade three networks were broadcasting a slate of games each Saturday, and local stations were covering all the home teams’ games. By 1929 five newsreel companies were devoting roughly one-fifth to one-fourth of their footage to football in the fall. General-interest magazines such as Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post regularly published articles by or about famous coaches or players, along with short stories about the star who wins both the girl and the big game. Movie theaters each fall screened a handful of college football musicals and melodramas with kidnapped heroes who escaped just in the nick of time to score the winning touchdown.
The 1920s saw the emergence of Red Grange as football’s first true celebrity. Grange received national acclaim for his brilliant performances in games against Michigan and Pennsylvania, but he also created the sport’s greatest controversy since the 1906 rule changes when he left the University of Illinois (without graduating) to join the Chicago Bears of the professional NFL. “Professionalism” in any form—the paying of coaches, the recruiting and subsidizing of athletes, the commercializing of the supposedly amateur game—violated the sport’s purported principles, yet it was also at the heart of the popular spectacle staged in the enormous stadiums before as many as 120,000 spectators. College football was regularly attacked in intellectual journals, but the routine celebration of the game in the daily and weekly coverage of the popular media drowned out any criticism. A report by the Carnegie Foundation in 1929 documenting professionalism at 84 of 112 institutions troubled many college administrators but was generally shrugged off by the public and the sportswriters who fed its passion for the game.
In the 1920s and ’30s colleges and universities throughout the Midwest, South, and West, in alliance with local civic and business elites, launched campaigns to gain national recognition and economic growth through their football teams. They organized regional conferences—the Big Ten and the Big 6 (now the Big 12) in the Midwest; the Southern, Southeastern, and Southwest conferences in the South; and the Pacific Coast Conference (now the Pacific–10) in the West—and scheduled “intersectional” games with regional prestige at stake. The Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, on New Year’s Day, first contested in 1902 between Stanford and Michigan, then annually beginning in 1916, determined an unofficial national champion and was also a highly profitable commercial enterprise.
The Pasadena Tournament of Roses is the oldest American postseason college football contest, held annually in Pasadena, Calif. The first such festival, originally called the Battle of Flowers, was held on Jan. 1, 1890. Under the auspices of the Valley Hunt Club, it consisted of a parade of local citizens decorating their carriages and buggies with flowers and driving over a prearranged route, followed by amateur athletic events. (While the first football game was held in Tournament Park in 1902, chariot races and other contests were thereafter substituted until football was introduced as the annual contest until 1916.) Beginning in 1897, the tournament was conducted by a newly established Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association.
Each Rose Bowl game is preceded by a Tournament of Roses Parade, or Rose Parade, which is one of the world’s most elaborate and famous annual parades. The morning parade now consists of about 60 floats of intricate design, elaborately decorated with flowers and illustrating some aspect of the parade’s theme of the year. Interspersed among the floats are marching bands and costumed horses and riders, and included in the 5.5-mile- (8.9-km-) long procession are a grand marshal and a Rose queen.
The Rose Bowl stadium opened in 1922, in time for the 1923 game. (Because of restrictions on crowds on the West Coast during World War II, the 1942 game was relocated to Durham, N.C.) Originally, the championship team of the Pacific Coast Intercollegiate Athletic Conference simply invited a winning team from anywhere in the eastern United States to be its opponent. Beginning in 1947, however, the Rose Bowl brought together teams from the Big Ten and Pacific-10 conferences and their forerunners. With the advent of the Bowl Championship Series system in 1998, the Rose Bowl has loosely maintained its tie-in with these two conferences, generally matching their champions unless one or both of them play in the national championship.
Soon after the advent of the Rose Bowl, promoters in other Sun Belt cities developed rival bowl games—the Orange Bowl in Miami (1933), the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans (1935), and the Cotton Bowl in Dallas (1937)—eventually to be joined by so many others that the NCAA in the 1950s began to regulate them.
A distinguishing mark of American football is the renown and status granted to the most successful and innovative coaches. The first innovators were men such as Walter Camp (not literally a coach but an adviser), Amos Alonzo Stagg at the University of Chicago, George Woodruff at Pennsylvania, and Lorin Deland at Harvard, the coaches who developed the V trick, ends back, tackles back, guards back, flying wedge, and other mass formations that revolutionized, and nearly destroyed, the game in the 1890s. The most influential of the early coaches was Pop Warner, whose wingback formations (the single wing and the double wing), developed at Carlisle, Pittsburgh, and Stanford, became the dominant offensive systems through the 1930s.
Notre Dame teams of the 1920s and 1930s were immensely popular nationwide thanks, in part, to their charismatic coach, Knute Rockne (seated, in train). New York Daily News/Getty Images
The only rival to Pop Warner’s wing formations in the 1920s and ’30s was the Notre Dame box, Knute Rockne’s refinement of the shift from the T to a box-shaped formation that was first developed by Stagg. A series of rule changes eventually rendered the box shift ineffective, but Rockne, football’s first celebrity coach, was less an innovator than a master teacher and motivator. Under his guidance, Notre Dame developed the dominant football program in the country. It was the only team of the era with a nationwide following and the benchmark against which others were measured.
Rockne accomplished this under most unpromising circumstances. The 1920s were marked by anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant prejudice in much of the country, and Notre Dame’s teams were decidedly Roman Catholic and ethnic. College football was transformed in the 1920s and ’30s by the sons of Italian, Polish, Jewish, and other southern and eastern European immigrants, most conspicuously in the lineups of Catholic universities (Fordham, St. Mary’s, and more than a dozen others in addition to Notre Dame) and the state universities in Pennsylvania and the upper Midwest. Known as the Ramblers or the Nomads (the “Fighting Irish” nickname was adopted in the late 1920s), the Notre Dame team developed a national schedule out of necessity rather than design. Refused games by nearby Big Ten rivals, Rockne scheduled contests with Army, Georgia Tech, Southern California, Southern Methodist, Nebraska—an entire intersectional schedule rather than a key game or two. The university’s administrators soon recognized the advantages to be had, as Notre Dame became the representative school for Catholics and new immigrants throughout the country. In an era of university-building through big-time football, Notre Dame became the model that many others sought to emulate.
Initially the paying of coaches was controversial, as yet another mark of professionalism in the amateur sport, and there was always resistance to coaches’ increasing control over the game. Rules to prevent sideline coaching—sending in plays from the sidelines—were first established in 1892 and not abandoned altogether until 1967. After free substitution was permitted during World War II because of the wartime manpower shortage, a postwar controversy over one-platoon or two-platoon football (11 men playing both ways, or separate squads for offense and defense) arose in part out of concern that coaches not gain more control over the game. The colleges returned to one-platoon football in 1953, but in 1965 open substitution and two platoons returned to stay, and coaches soon took over all of the play calling. Successful coaches were well compensated, often earning more than full professors by the 1920s (a time when such disparities were controversial) and eventually more than college presidents; this trend culminated in the million-dollar—and even multimillion-dollar—salaries of the 21st century.
