How American Football Evolved Into the Game You Love: Football History Rewind

You know, we as Americans like to think that football is America's game.

And it's true.

It is.

We have our own brand of football, but it's come from so many roots around the world that have developed their game of football and branded it as their own.

And we're going to talk about that and some more with some experts that I've dug up from the archives of the Pigskin Dispatch podcast.

And you're going to love this one with the early history of football coming up in just a moment.

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history.

Your host, Darren Hayes is podcasting from.

America's North Shore to bring you the.

Memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

And we are really going to go back into the realm of football history.

We're going to go back to the roots and even before there was American football.

And I have had the pleasure and the blessings to talk to some of the foremost experts in the field of football that are still with us today that have some, some great insights on where the game came from.

And I thought maybe this would be a good time to talk about the first years of football and how it developed in this part one of this series here.

So let's first talk about, you know, where football came from, the football genres, let's say, you know, everybody knows about American football, but over in Europe they call football quite something different, which is, well, more well known as association football, where we get the word soccer from here in the States.

Rugby football is around the world and played in different genres and styles and dialects around the world, especially in Europe, we play it here in the States, Australia plays it, but it's, it's played worldwide.

Australian Rules football has come out of that and some different European Union soccer or rugby and some of the other dialects of rugby as well.

And Gaelic football is another one of them, Canadian football and of course our own American football.

But what was rugby?

It sort of seems like that was the offshoot.

Well, a couple years ago we got to talk to the foremost expert of football, the genres, especially rugby, Dr.

Tony Collins.

It can't like, like all the, the different games that became, you know, modern football games.

It's, its roots are really in the kind of pre industrial society before people lived in towns and worked in factories and, you know, lived on the land and lots of football style games were played where the ball was kicked past thrown in order to reach a goal.

Which kind of the basis of, of all the football games that we know today.

And rugby itself emerged as, as the name implies from an elite private school in the English Midlands.

Rugby school in the town of Rugby and it's rugby schools.

And one of the things that made it, that was the importance that it placed on sport.

Both football in the winter and cricket.

Cricket in that which is another spot which we won't get time to get into, which we won't get into now in, you know, cricket was the summer game, rugby was the rugby, football was the winter game.

And one of the interesting things that happened which really I think gave rugby a massive advantage over the other football games that were played at other elite schools.

So all the English elite schools had their own version of football.

You know, some of listeners may have heard of place at very elite institutions like Eaton and Harrow, they, they also had their own vers versions of football.

But rugby's became popular beyond its school because of the popularity of a book called Tom Brown.

A kind of the equivalent of Harry Potter but without the magic.

And at the core of Tom Brown's school days was it was a football match played under rugby rules.

And the popularity of the book meant that you know, people, not just in Britain, but people in the English speaking world decided that you know, rugby football was an important part of a young man's education.

So, so the game had a kind of moral importance, not just a, and you know, not, it wasn't just a recreation or an entertainment.

So it had this moral educative importance.

And that meant that other schools took it up and also that you know, people in the general public read the book and wanted to play the game.

And yeah, that's also the case in the States as well.

I mean that's Tom Brown School.

They sold something like a quarter of a million copies in the States.

And perhaps most famously Teddy Roosevelt said that this is one of two books that every, every red blooded American boy should read.

So now as football transformed here in America, we put our own flavor into it.

Here's an excerpt from historian and author R.C.

christiansen.

And then at that point McGill introduced this.

They had modified rugby by then to some extent, and they introduced that game to Harvard.

And the fans actually liked it better there at Harvard, the other students that were watching the game.

And so Harvard adopted McGill's rules.

And so here we have the origin of the game then jumping from England to Canada and then down to the United States.

And the next day was the game that Harvard played, the Harvard game.

Well, Harvard loved the McGill game so much that it became the offshoot of what we transpired into American football.

So we can thank the Canadians for that.

And let's look a little bit more about what football was from historian Timothy p.

Brown of footballarchaeology.com People say all.

The time football evolved from rugby.

And yes, that's true, but I just want to emphasize football was rugby.

So the early days of what we now think of as gridiron North American football, U.S.

and Canada, it was rugby.

And you know, when they started the game, they made some minor tweaks, but it was rugby.

And they made some real changes that, including allowing tackling below the waist and things like that that made it harder to do the outside wide open running of rugby.

And so the game started steering towards this, what ultimately became mass and momentum football.

So mass meaning, you know, it was basically like playing goal line football.

You know, a goal line offensive goal against goal line defense, all 110 yards of the field at the time.

And so, you know, the mass refers to the idea of multiple blockers leading the runner through the hole and or grabbing him by the handles that he had sewn on his pants to pull him through the hole and the momentum referring to, you know, back then they didn't have rules on how many players had to be on the line of scrimmage.

So teams would, they had guards back or tackles back formations and different things.

And there was no limit on the number of men who could be moving forward at the snap, you know, similar to what Canada has in their football.

And so, you know, they'd have these guys running all at the same time and collapsing into a particular hole and just basically slamming into, you know, to basically overrun one or two players on the defense.

And so it became.

It was a very dangerous game.

And as a result, there were lots of injuries and ultimately deaths, you know, resulting from the nature of the play at the time.

So, yes, a rough game indeed.

And by design, we sort of skipped over when it.

You weren't allowed to carry the ball, and you had to score goals to win.

It was an association game, a soccer game.

So many experts, including myself, don't consider that the first American football game.

It was a brand of football played in America between two colleges, an intercollegiate game, maybe the first of its kind of football here in the States, but not American football as we know it.

And we have an expert that we got to talk to a few years ago whose great or whose grandfather, I'm sorry, was part of developing the game of American football.

How exciting is that?

Here's Upton Bell.

Well, actually, the most famous group of their time was called the Walter Camp Rules Committee.

And ironically, Walter Camp was the man that actually controlled college football, which was a totally different game then.

My grandfather, John C.

Bell Sr.

Was a part of the Walter Cam Rules Committee and was second in seniority.

Now, they were the forerunner of the modern NCAA.

And so what Camp did, along with my grandfather on my father's side, John C.

Bell, they negotiated with Teddy to change certain rules in football so it wouldn't be such a brutal game, which it was then, if you think it's bad today, or if you think it was bad way before that.

Even though they had leather helmets, the game was very close together.

So there were no receivers.

There's no real passing game.

You just beat the hell out of the person and anything went.

So basically, my grandfather, John S.E.

bell, negotiated with Walter Camp, with Teddy Roosevelt, to change the rules of the game.

And then he was the founder.

And one other book that people should read, because it's written by a Philadelphia Associated Press writer, Bob Lyons, is called Bert Bell's famous term on any given Sunday.

In that book, he details how Walter Camp, but with the help of John Cromwell Bell, was able to change the rules and that actually my grandfather founded what is today the modern ncaa.

So you can see there was this transformation of rugby football comes to the states, the Harvard McGill game, we adopt some Canadian aspects of the game Walter Camp is influenced by that puts in the scrimmage downs system, a snap of the ball.

So scrimmage instead of scrummage, that's in rugby, it starts to set itself apart and it's a brutal game.

In the early days, people were getting hurt, people were getting killed as, as Tim Brown told us.

But where would it go from here?

Well, that meeting with President Roosevelt between Walter Camp and John C.

And in the next time in this series, we're going to talk about some of those with some more expert wisdom and guidance in the history of American football.

Hope you've enjoyed this.

Till next time, everybody.

Have a great, great iron day.

That's all the football history we have today, folks.

Join us back tomorrow for more of your football history.

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