American football traces its beginning
back to the 1800s and the English game of Rugby.
Around the same time students at
American colleges were playing a similar football game known as
'ballown'.
At
Harvard, the classes competed in pick-up style football games with
no hard and fast rules in a bloody event that caught on and became
popular around 1860 and increased further in popularity after the
American Civil War ended.
Colleges began
organising games with Princeton leading the way in establishing some
rudimentary rules of the game. Encouraged
by Yale University's Walter Camp, the schools began to adopt rules
that would differentiate American football from rugby in the 1880s.
Camp set the number of players on
each team at eleven rather than Rugby's fifteen. He also introduced
a new scoring system in which a 'touchdown' would be worth six
points; a principle that still exists today.
The most significant difference
between Rugby and American Football was the system of 'downs', in
which a team is only given a certain number of plays to cover a
particular area of the field before they are forced to give up
possession of the ball to their opponents.
The forward pass was also
introduced and the game caught on quickly with other colleges. The
introduction of the new rules made the game recognisable as the
modern version of the sport. Subsequent rule changes during the
course of the 20th Century proved to be only minor alterations - the
fundamentals of American Football had been laid down.
The
origin of professional football can be traced back to 1892, with
William "Pudge" Heffelfinger's $500 contract to play in a
game for the Allegheny Athletic Association against the Pittsburgh
Athletic Club. In 1920 the American Professional Football
Association was formed.
This
league later changed its name to the National Football League (NFL)
and today the season's highlight game, The Super Bowl is the most
watched television event in the United
States.
