Gridiron football has saturated modern American culture more than any other sport. Youngsters play the game early and often in the United States, whether it’s part of an organized youth league (often Pee Wee or Pop Warner football), at the junior high and high school levels, or merely a pickup game played on a vacant stretch of land. Unrivaled in its appeal to a television audience, watching college football and the fantastically popular professional National Football League (NFL) is a weekly autumn ritual for a vast—and continuously growing—audience.
The sport traces its roots to soccer and rugby. Football originated in 19th-century American universities, where students organized informal, soccer-style contests on various campuses. The first intercollegiate football game was played in 1869 between what are now known as Princeton University and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. The soccer-style game spread throughout colleges in the Northeast, with the notable exception of Harvard University, where a rugby-soccer hybrid known as the “Boston Game” was played. The two styles of football existed side-by-side until 1876, when four Northeast universities formed the Intercollegiate Football Association and based their game on rugby rules.
The rugby style of play began to transform in what is now recognized as gridiron football primarily through the efforts of Walter Camp, the “Father of American Football.” As a member of the game’s early rules committee, Camp initiated the change, in 1880, from a rugby scrummage for determining possession of the ball, which kept the ball moving back and forth between the two opposing sides, to a scrimmage, which awarded the ball to one of the two teams for a prolonged period in order to increase scoring opportunities. His other landmark innovation came two years later when, in an effort to stop the frustrating strategy of simply holding the ball for the duration of a game, he proposed that a team must advance the ball 5 yards or move back 10 in three plays, or else surrender possession. These two important modifications opened up the game, and speed became as important a skill for football players to possess as strength. Camp introduced a number of other features of the modern game, including position names, having 11 players on a side, and the legalization of tackling below the waist. Over time, the sport continued to change and came to resemble something completely distinct from rugby by the turn of the 20th century.
As football grew, a greater number of Americans began to become alarmed by the violence in the young game. In 1905 alone, 18 individuals died from football injuries, which prompted U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt to call on university representatives to reform the game. The reform movement resulted in the founding of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association, which later grew into the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the administrative body of all college athletics. In an effort to stop the dangerous “mass plays”—the strategy of massing offensive players on a single point of the defense that was the source of many of the injuries at the time—the NCAA increased the yardage needed for a first down to 10 and legalized the forward pass. These changes lessened football-related deaths, but it was only with additional rule changes over the years and the advent of safety equipment, namely helmets, that the sport began to become truly accepted by the public at large.
College football was the dominant form of the game through the early years of the 20th century. Beginning in 1902, an unofficial national collegiate champion was decided in a game known as the Rose Bowl, an incredibly lucrative venture that inspired a proliferation of regional bowl games, many of which were still being played into the 21st century. By the 1920s college football was one of the most popular sports in the U.S., with radio networks and newsreels dedicating a significant amount of their time to coverage of the sport and total attendance at college games exceeding 10 million annually.
As collegiate football grew in prominence it expanded well beyond its original narrow Northeast base. Today it has been embraced by all parts of the U.S., particularly in the Southeast and Midwest. From the University of Washington to the University of Miami (Fla.), popular college football powerhouses can now be found in nearly every corner of America.
The emergence of college football on the national sporting scene was due in large part to the thrilling play of the University of Illinois’ Red Grange, a halfback who captivated America with his signature long touchdown runs. Arguably his most significant impact on the sport came when he controversially dropped out of Illinois in 1925 and signed with the professional Chicago Bears of the nascent NFL. Grange’s move lent legitimacy to the NFL, which up until that point had long been considered disreputable by the general public. The move also symbolically marked the beginning of a torch-passing from college football to the professional game as the more popular version of the sport, a shift that came about in the following decades.
The NFL was founded in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association (the name was changed two years later) and comprised teams primarily based in Midwestern towns. The small population bases of the young league limited its broader nationwide appeal until, in 1933, the NFL was reorganized into two five-team divisions of teams based in large cities. The only exception was the Green Bay Packers, who established themselves as one of the most successful—and profitable—professional teams of the 1930s, allowing them to thrive in the new NFL. On the field, the game became even more fan-friendly during this decade, which saw the emergence of the forward pass—a tactic that had been used only sparingly since it was legalized—as a vital offensive weapon. Quarterback Sammy Baugh of the Washington Redskins was a key figure in this development of the game.
Over time, the NFL grew prosperous enough to inspire a number of short-lived competitors to form. One rival league, the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), was a serious enough challenger to merit the absorption of three of its franchises—including the Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers—into the NFL in 1950.
Professional football fully came into its own in 1958. That year’s NFL championship matched the New York Giants against the Johnny Unitas–led Baltimore Colts, with the game going into sudden-death overtime. The Colts were the eventual victors, besting the Giants 23–17 on a one-yard touchdown run by Alan Ameche. That contest became known as “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” not just because of its dramatic finish but because it was one of the first professional football games to truly capture the country’s attention through a live national television broadcast. What followed was a veritable golden age of professional football in the U.S. Stars of the 1960s—such as running backs Jim Brown and Gale Sayers, linebacker Dick Butkus, and defensive end Deacon Jones—became some of the most iconic figures in the history of the game, due in no small part to the unprecedented familiarity the public had with this era of players.
As the NFL grew more prominent, a rival league emerged that would forever change the face of pro football. The American Football league (AFL) was founded in 1960, with three of the league’s eight teams in direct competition with NFL franchises. The young league raided the NFL and lured away some of its best talent. The AFL also won the hearts of many football fans courtesy of the high-scoring aerial attack employed by most of the league’s teams. The AFL was such a threat that the NFL agreed to a merger of the two associations in 1966, which was completed in 1970.
In the interim, the two leagues began playing an annual championship game in January 1967, which was renamed the Super Bowl in 1969. The NFL’s Green Bay Packers handily won the first two titles, solidifying the common perception that the AFL was, while extremely popular, an inferior league. This belief was upended at Super Bowl III in 1969, when the AFL’s New York Jets—led by cocky quarterback Joe Namath, who had guaranteed victory before the game—upset the heavily favored NFL Baltimore Colts. Super Bowl III not only showed that the AFL teams could compete with the NFL in the post-merger league, it also served to announce the arrival of the media-savvy Namath, who himself was a precursor for the star-driven showmanship that would soon come to define the league.
The expanded NFL continued to make its mark on the American sporting scene in the 1970s as the Dallas Cowboys, Oakland Raiders, and Pittsburgh Steelers variously dominated the game and established iconic “football brands” (“America’s Team,” “the Silver and Black,” “the Steel Curtain”) that persist to the present day. But the most notable single team of the decade was the 1972 Miami Dolphins, who went 17–0 to become the first—and, to date, only—NFL team to finish a season (including postseason play) without a loss.
The 1980s saw the emergence of a great number of standout quarterbacks who propelled the sport to unparalleled heights. Dan Marino of the Miami Dolphins rewrote the record book while the Denver Broncos’ John Elway established a reputation as one of the greatest clutch performers in any sport. The greatest quarterback of this era—and, to many observers, the greatest of any era—was Joe Montana of the San Francisco 49ers. Montana guided the 49ers to four titles in the ’80s. His famed rapport with wide receiver Jerry Rice made for one of the most celebrated passing duos in NFL history.
The dawning of a new millennium has seen the proliferation of satellite television and the Internet, which have expanded football’s reach to every corner of the globe. The Super Bowl annually draws one of the largest international television audiences. Yet despite all this exposure, football has not gained the same degree of widespread popularity worldwide as certain other sports, such as baseball. An offshoot league, NFL Europe, proved to be a moderately successful venture but failed to ignite a passion for gridiron football in Europe. The league folded in 2007 after 15 seasons of play. The one country outside the U.S. that has taken to football is Canada. This is not surprising, considering that the country played a key role in the development of the game. McGill University in Montreal was one of the first North American universities to take up the sport, and it was McGill that introduced the rugby-style game to Harvard in 1874. The Canadian Football League (CFL), formed in 1956, has presented the Grey Cup trophy to the top Canadian football club for over a century.
Gridiron football is a game of contradictions. The same sport that, at its heart, is defined by the simple ethos of “find the ball, get the ball” is also, on a larger scale, an incredibly intricate and complex interplay of 22 players who move around the field like chess pieces. The game is both brutally physical and incredibly cerebral. The bone-rattling violence that has led many to call for a ban of the game over the years is balanced by the preternatural grace displayed by its greatest athletes. These contradictions are what make the sport appealing to a broad spectrum of fans in the melting pot that is America. As the U.S. populace continues to grow even more heterogeneous in the 21st century, football promises to remain one of the country’s few enduring cultural touchstones.