Exploring the Global Heritage of Football: A Comprehensive Discussion

You know, it's not earth shattering to say that football is derived from rugby and soccer.

And the game of football is worldwide and such a great event, one of the most popular sports around.

But there's different variations of it, including soccer, including rugby, including American football and many other styles.

Well, we're going to go to the other side of the world to have an expert tell us more about this.

Football in America is part in the family of football and it's all coming up in just a moment.

But before we do, I want to make sure that you know that if you hit the subscribe button on your YouTube and like that really helps us a lot to bring more content for you and you'll know exactly when that contest getting dropped at you.

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darren.

He's a pigskind.

Dispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal deposit of football history.

And tonight we go internationally with going to talk about football in other realms other than us.

But bring it back here to the US too, From, from our perspective, we have a gentleman on tonight that is very well knowledgeable about all these different versions of football because he now lives down under.

He is previously was born and raised here in the States.

His name is Dr. Spencer Kasmir.

Doctor, welcome to the Pig Pen.

Thanks for having me, Darren.

It's great to be here.

I've been here listening but now I'm here speaking.

So it's nice to make that transition to the other side of the speakers in the microphone.

Yeah, absolutely.

We are so glad to have you here.

Now, the folks that have listened to the show for a while remember a little over a year ago we had Dr. Tony Collins on, along with Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology and myself on to talk about different aspects and different disciplines of football around the world and how they sort of connect to American football that we know so well.

And I think, you know, we'll be touching a little bit about that with you today because you are also a specialist in that, but you are also down under where you were playing many variations of football.

So maybe you could describe how, how you, you know, got involved with this, you know, growing up here in the United States and how you became, you know, very knowledgeable and educated in all these other disciplines of football and now live in a different country.

Well, you know, it's a funny thing they talk about success is when hard work meets luck.

Well, I would like to say that I was very lucky that I was up very late on a Thursday night.

It's funny which memories Stick with you.

As a 16 year old flipping through channels, old school cable TV in the 90s.

And I came across a show or series of shows that featured games called football that were clearly not American Football.

Now I want to realize that I probably already triggered a lot of people by saying American football.

No, I'm not an apologist.

To me, when I'm in the US it's football.

Because as we discussed a bit earlier, before we started, football's origins as a word, as a phrase does not come from soccer.

So I'm not one of those people.

Then we have, let's see, Rugby league, which is not Rugby Union.

So the All Blacks would be Rugby Union, which everybody's familiar with from New Zealand.

Rugby League is the code that broke off from Rugby Union because they wanted to make sure their players, should they be injured, have payment so if they couldn't go to work that they would be properly supported.

And the administrators mostly in pockets along the M62 in the north of England, which is really the middle because it's halfway to Newcastle.

That's the end of the line, but it's called the North.

It's almost like San Francisco being Northern California.

And you realize how much further you have to go to the Oregon border and then Rugby Union.

So those were the three codes and then subsequently Gaelic football.

That's what I got exposed to because I was just flipping through the channels late at night.

I can remember I'm a little bit older than you.

Back in the 80s when cable television first came to our area, I can remember the Australian Rules Football coming on in the middle of the summer.

You're off summer vacation, you can stay up late, you know, hey, there's something called football on here.

And you see these guys, you know, dress weird.

The officials are signaling like this, you.

Know, pointing their fingering and.

Yeah.

And I'm like, what the heck is this?

It was kind of fun to watch because it was so different and unique, but I don't think I ever fully understood the rules of it.

But it was fun.

Nobody does now.

I've angered a lot of my neighbors here because I live in Melbourne, Australia, which is the home of and capital of Australian Rules football.

Imagine a line draw drawn from Chicago to Atlanta and that the whole northeast plays one football game called football and everybody else plays another game called football because that's how Australia works.

If you're on that northeast side of the border, you're going to play rugby league, most likely some rugby union.

And if you're south of that border, you're most likely going to play Australian Rules football.

And yes, Australian Rules football did come from a guy named Tom Wills who is Australian but was educated at the rugby school.

And he brought those original laws back.

And yes, later it was heavily influenced by what Americans know as Aboriginal Australians, indigenous first Nations Australians.

And I'm using all the names just so everybody's familiar with what I'm talking about.

But the game itself is so monumentally different that it's played for those that don't know, almost entirely off the boot without being soccer.

You catch the ball, you run with the ball.

For those that know Gaelic football, there are similarities, but that's where all of these punters that are going into the NCAA are coming out of predominantly.

They're coming most of them out of the state of Victoria.

Americans, this is a lesson.

Just because Canada has province provinces doesn't mean we do.

We have states in Australia.

So within the state of Victoria, where Melbourne is the capital, that is the largest concentration of players that will go to the NCAA to be punchers because their game is all about booting the ball constantly.

Now, is it fair to say that it's.

It's more drastic?

The disciplines of football in Australia you're talking about more so than.

I mean, I live right on the shores of Lake Erie, 20 miles north of me is Canada.

Is it more drastic than American versus Canadian football rules?

The difference between Australian Rules football and the rugby codes is extremely stark.

You can't mistake the two.

And we were talking about gridiron codes.

Use a Wilson that as a manufacturer predominantly.

And then Sharon makes an Australian football.

And going back historically, I know Tim Brown loves this as well.

The old white ball for our gridiron games in yesteryear, well, we use just the brown one because we have lights now in the US Well, Australian rules went the other way.

You know an Australian Rules football when you see it, because traditionally they were bright red for daytime mimicking cricket, frankly.

It's played on an oval that's about three and a half times the size larger than an American football field.

And it's a very wide open played game.

That is where the again Aboriginal, Australian, for those that don't speak Latin, Ab meaning from and original meaning the beginning.

Ab, original.

A little lesson there.

That's where their influence is.

Because our records show within the Australian rules game, it was very tightly packed originally more similar to again, nearly 150, 200 year old rugby, where you'd get tackled and you'd scrummage after each time.

However, the rules for Australian rules called it a scrimmage, not a scrummage.

It might be one of those two years.

I'm a little rusty.

So it just shows that the words may stay the same or they may stay similar, but the meanings change quite notably.

So now that the CFL is adopting new rules to become more like American football, shortening the field to 100 yards, which, which is actually quite, you know, it's not surprising, but when you think of the alternative rugby union and rugby league from England, they decided instead of measuring it as 110 yards, now it's just measured as 100 meters.

Rugby union decided to say the 25 yard line is now a 22 meter line, whereas rugby league had a massive departure.

It looked at the NFL, at the gridiron, said, this is very clear, let's have markers every 10 meters so their field size didn't shrink to 100 yards from 100 meters.

Whereas the CFL is doing something quite different.

They're saying, you know, let's just get on page.

We're going to do 100 yards, we're going to leave that wider field, which makes for a very expansive run game.

If you want to do it.

We're going to leave an onside kicker, an onside gunner, if you would, behind the punter.

So you could run downfield and field your own ball off of the punt.

But in other ways, taking the gooseneck or the slingshot upright, which used to be a broken H, which used to be an H, and moving it to the back of the end zone.

These are Americanizations.

And we can talk about CFL all day, but I think enough people know that exists in America.

It's always good to have more.

I love that game.

But maybe we should talk about rugby league, rugby union, Australian rules, and maybe a little bit of Gaelic football we can throw in there as a little treat.

Oh, well, I would like to get that.

But before we do, you said something I Found extremely interesting that I'm not sure I heard before you sort of told me what the derivative of where the word football came from.

From.

From something you heard.

Yes.

And this goes back to me always prefacing.

I'm not an apologist.

When we say football in America, it is football.

When we say.

When they say it in Canada, I say we.

As a CFL fan, it.

It is football, though I'm not Canadian.

Here in Australia, when you're on that southwest side of the.

We'll call it again the Chicago Atlanta line.

It's.

It's actually known formerly as the Barassi line after a football.

An Australian footballer you would be calling Australian rules football and rugby league is football.

And getting back to rugby league, even if you're in Australia, you would call it league as a name, not as, you know, the NFL or the national Rugby League.

Excuse me.

League is a style of football.

It is a separate code from union.

Whereas if you went to these pockets off the M62 in the north of England, you just call it rugby.

Some people just call it football because we're so far away.

We have our own customs of calling different things different things.

Unlike England where soccer is the majority code by a long shot.

And then we have rugby union and rugby league.

Those are three football codes.

And then you go over to Ireland and Northern Ireland, yet we can tack in Gaelic football as well.

But separate island does have a border.

You know that when you go from metric to imperial.

But Australia actually has four competing football codes.

You know, rugby league and Australian rules are up top competing with each other between the nrl, National Rugby League based out of Sydney, and the afl, Australian Football League based out of Melbourne, followed by soccer and rugby union.

So when we hear about a team like the Wallabies rugby union, this ties back to your question about the origin of the word football.

Though it is a lot of preamble, there are implications as to you ask the question, how can the Wallabies be so strong in a country with only 28 million citizens with four competing codes called football.

Well, that begs to answer, what is football?

Our best theory and our best understanding is going back to a quote from Shakespeare's King Lear where paraphrasing one of the leisure class, the aristocrats, refers to one of the servants, the labor class, as a simple footballer, simple football player.

The understanding of that is what does this mean?

If you were that wealthy, you would have had a governor or governess as your private tutor.

So what does that mean?

Most of the sport that we know from that time amongst the aristocrats is on horseback.

So calling somebody a footballer, you don't even have to call them.

Simpler, stupid, just a footballer means you're so poor you can't afford to play sport on horseback.

You're on foot with the ball, foot, dash, ball, football.

And we have the same problems by extension and extrapolation today as they had in yesterday.

The only difference is we cover much more ground.

We'll just call it elite so we don't have to go between public, private, for, you know, ease purposes that are coming up with their own rules to codify, to make them official.

A good example of a sport played for a long time without codification is hurling from Ireland.

You know, where it looks like, you know, lacrosse a little bit, you smack the ball.

And played for Ireland for eons, but not codified until a bunch of Irish expats here in Australia, in Victoria decided to codify it, because they didn't likely.

The likely mentality was, we don't want to lose our code, we don't want to lose our traditions.

We see this phenomenon in language as well.

Quebecois has so many archaic words that are not used in modern French.

In France, the ladino language has so many older Spanish words that modern Spanish doesn't have.

So the phenomenon of holding on to tradition when you live outside of your nation or outside of your culture as an exclave is consistent even beyond sport.

So we're back in England.

Rugby has a code.

Cambridge has a code.

Harrow has a code.

Eton has two codes, the field game and the wall game.

But the two codes that proliferate the most are the rugby code and the association code.

Rugby rules and association rules.

Now, if I invited you just from the US to come here to Australia to play a game of football today, we can look things up.

But it's likely there still will be a mistake.

You would know that not to bring a Wilson.

We're not.

We're most likely not going to be playing, you know, gridiron football of the American or Canadian variety.

But what you may not know unless you really do some good searching Is that the likeliness of you playing rugby league, rugby union or Australian rules is partially and largely geographic, amongst other factors.

So yesteryear, they said we need nicknames because people would travel with a round ball and show up and the team that invited them to play were playing a different code of football.

Different rules, different sport with a prolate spheroid using a pig's bladder.

The idea of a round ball was not as synonymous as it is today because creating a round ball is very difficult.

So they made nicknames.

Rugby football became known as rugger, a phrase still used in Japan to describe rugby players.

Ruggerman and the other code, association rules became soccer Soc from association, rugger and soccer.

The countries that still call it soccer have more than one football code being played.

That's genuinely the loose and fast rule, because there's another code.

You can't just.

Not just North America.

Is it called soccer?

It's called soccer other places as well.

Correct.

And there's a horrible prejudice largely amongst and within America that we must be some ignorant backwater nut jobs, because clearly foot to ball is football.

They were catching the ball too.

So I not picking on everybody, but we all create our own origin myths.

I've heard people say football is the real football.

I've heard people say that American football is the real football because it measures the ball roughly about 1 inch.

It's a little bit less.

I've heard Australian rules people and again saying, well, we're the only code that requires that you actually kick the ball to score a goal, as opposed to what's called a behind, you know, one point because you attempted the goal but you didn't kick it in properly or you kicked it outside of the main goals.

Everybody has origin myths.

But we're not the only ones as Americans calling it soccer, though many soccer fans will say, you're the ignorant ones.

And because people don't have the knowledge to equip to say no, actually, we then feel impossibly inferior, possibly wrong, possibly, you know, cut off from the global community.

And this is regardless of international politics.

But the feelings of saying, well, why do we do this?

Why are we calling this football?

That's so apparent that foot is to ball.

But it's so ingrained not just in America, but globally, that soccer is real football, because of football, that even the myth of William Webb Ellis picking up the football and running with it a la the rugby school, the rugby game.

And it is a myth.

There's no credibility to it whatsoever.

We can get into the reasons behind it another time.

But the actual history of it, if you look at that description, it makes it sound like they were playing soccer and then they picked up the ball.

That exact description is still used today and applicable to Gaelic football, where you can handle the ball, you're not allowed to pick it up off the ground in the men's game.

You must scoop it up with your foot somehow give it a little, or kick it off the ground a little bit.

So that's number one, picking up the ball.

Not allowed in Gaelic football, though handling is allowed.

Number two, running with the ball.

Gaelic football as well.

Sorry.

It's funny, balloons just popped up in the background.

So Gaelic football, you can run with the ball, but there's a restriction on it.

You have to part with the ball every four steps.

So whether it's a dribble a la basketball, which you can do once, but then it has to be followed by a solo, if you would, where you kick the ball off your foot, back to yourself and then you can dribble again back and forth.

Dribble, solo, dribble, solo.

So.

So that applies as well.

These, these are all factors where the definition of that, of the.

Sorry, this is the exact example of saying we are perceiving through our modern lens that they were playing soccer as we understand it today, because clearly he picked up the ball and ran with it.

But you can still say they were playing Gaelic football.

And.

And those rules or laws that William Ellis, again, through myth, allegedly broke, those would still be laws that broke despite the fact that Gaelic football handles the ball.

We believe this because there are origin myths.

We all believe them, you know, and then you find out, well, why.

This is why we think it really.

Because we've applied our modern contemporary sensibilities to Something that happened 200 years ago, allegedly.

So football itself just means.

It just means you're playing on foot with the ball.

That's it.

Versus being on horseback.

Yeah, that's It, Yeah, that's.

It's very simple.

Or as I like to say, saying I play sports or sport is like saying I speak a language.

Saying I play football means I speak English.

Well, what kind of English do you speak?

I have an American accent.

I grew up in the U.S. i've been out here for nine years.

But at the same time, by being out here for so long, a lot of my phraseology has just naturally adapted and adjusted.

It's a strange concept where you're not trying to change, but you're just surrounded by things and the brain naturally adapts.

In my research as a sidebar too, some of your spelling of words in the email correspondence labor with having a U in it.

And some things like that I picked up on too.

So I, I must have had it set to Australian English.

Okay.

Okay.

And I probably autocorrected because I actually, you know what, I tell my kids this.

They ask me, which word do I use?

Do I say hood and trunk or do I say bonnet and boot?

And I tell them consistently speak to people in the word they understand best.

Speaking is not about exposition of self.

It's about making sure communication is clear.

So my apologies on that one, because I do aim very hard to keep it constant.

But even a simple thing like that.

I live close to Canada, so I understand.

But no, even that origin, again, linguistics and sport are very similar.

Why do does.

Why does Commonwealth English have a U?

Let's, and let's just keep it simple for that one example, C O L O U R instead of C O L O R. A lot of people know that Noah Webster sacked a lot of these spellings, but where did it even come from?

And it's so simple.

You look at Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Romanian, all these Latin languages, none of them have a U in it.

None of them at all.

How did English get a U?

And it's because it's, you know, everybody knows Charles de Gaulle.

You know Charles de Gaulle.

Gull is a place.

Gaul was a language.

And when Latin came in to France, what's now France, they said, okay, we're taking on this Latin language.

You conquered us.

Whoopee.

We're still going to keep the spelling that we're accustomed to from Gull.

So when William the Conqueror, William the First, William the Bastard, whatever you want to call him, went into England and conquered from Normandy, they brought that Gull spelling into English.

So all of our Latin based words in the Commonwealth spelling comes from Gull based French, Latin.

Interesting.

Let me, let me take you back into the.

The Football realm.

Because you said something earlier I found very interesting and maybe you could sort of put a time perspective on it now.

Now you told me, told us that I believe down in Australia there, one of the disciplines was calling it, instead of scrums or scrummage, they were calling it scrimmage.

Was that scrimmage?

Did that come from the Canadian derivative?

How, where, how Walter Camp came into scrimmage?

Or did that have a different meaning?

Or did it.

Was that a predecessor in here in North America?

We got that from Australia.

It was actually so simple.

Beyond simple, scrummage and scrimmage were interchangeable.

They didn't really have a set defined meaning.

A good example of that is.

And a lot of my American friends that are still in America love this example is the word ask.

Before Gutenberg and the printing press people did spell it differently.

Axe was recognized.

You look at Chaucer, you'll find the word ax for ask in there.

Because there was no, there was no printing press.

There was no way to make consistency to that scale.

Scrimmage and scrummage again were interchangeable.

When you think about how much the English language has changed in.

Forget the last 500 years or the last thousand years, but even within the last 200 years, I mean, in the U.S. the ampersand was, was a letter in parts of the US at the end of the Alphabet because ampersand is just a slurred together, you know, contraction of and per se and et.

Et.

That's how we get it.

So scrimmage and scrummage were just used interchangeably and different groups took to different traditions.

Just as with Ask, an X act was more common further north towards Scotland.

We just in.

We do inherit a lot from our parents or grandparents and those before us that we don't even realize.

My kids and I are listening to the appropriate parts of the book.

Harpo speaks about Harpa Marks.

And a lot of the slang is completely unrecognizable for me, for them, for me.

I view it as old timey.

I found out that he lived a block and a half away from me, from where I grew up.

But he was there 100 years earlier or whatever it was.

But all of these things, when we look at our games and even the laws and the rules of our games, we've inherited a lot of, we've forgotten a lot of the whys.

And that's.

I don't want to say it's okay or it's not okay.

I would love it if we had notes on the side footnotes why this law was changed, why this was brought in.

Because I love the why.

It helps us better understand why we do what we do, not just what we do and how we do.

But that's not humanity.

We really don't do that very well.

And we never have.

We probably never will.

There'll always be a small group of people having a chat about these things, such as snapping the football.

How did we go from rolling.

Sorry, pushing the ball backwards with the foot.

Why did we even do that?

To rolling the ball from hand.

Why do we say quarterback, which is a Scottish tradition?

Why do positions over here get called 5, 8?

Why does one position in rugby league get called a dummy half?

Where the equivalent position would be known as a scrum half in the north, whereas in rugby union, but in rugby union in the south, that would be a halfback.

We're all inheriting different traditions, and based on what our locality is and what our traditions are, we just start assigning words to what they are as opposed to where they came from.

It's not a good or a bad thing.

That's just the reality.

Interesting.

All right, let's look at it from, you know, mainstream football, you know, that everybody knows around the world is the National Football League, and the National Football League is playing games in different countries.

You know, just this year we saw Ireland have its first game.

You and I discussed it earlier.

London and Berlin and I think Barcelona.

Some of these places have had a lot of games.

Mexico City.

Do you ever see in the near future an NFL game being played anywhere in Australia?

Next year, the Rams are coming.

They're going to play at the Melbourne cricket grounds, the mcg.

Or as everybody does here, shortened words, so it's known as the G. Oh, okay.

It's the.

And I'm pretty sure this is stat is still correct.

Yes, there are NCAA stadiums larger than the mcg, but this is the largest professional sports ground for capacity in the world.

Keyword is professional.

With the nil, we can make a better argument to say that it's not.

But again, potato, potato.

It seats a hundred thousand people and Taylor Swift sold it out previously, so as you'd expect, she would but that will be quite interesting because there are a lot of people who love, as they call here, the gridiron.

It usually takes a lot of explanation for me to get people to understand what the subtle differences are between the NFL, college football, high school football, Canadian football.

Because just as most Americans would call and have called even Australian rules, which you would never, not you would never mistake a game of Australian rules for either rugby game or either rugby game for each other.

But again, from the perspective here, they're all just gridiron.

The fact that the hash marks or the tick marks, if you want to be technical, are closer together as you go up the ranks, that's not really on the radar.

Now is the score.

Okay, we know that American football, Canadian football, the scoring is probably altogether different than other disciplines of football.

We know association soccer, it's one point at a time.

We know rugby is any of the other disciplines have their own scoring system like American football does.

Absolutely.

So ice hockey, to close up the North American gap, was meant to be an on ice version of football codes.

Hence offsides and icing.

But where it is less similar to the codes we're talking about and more similar to soccer is there's only one mechanism of scoring.

It's one point, it's one goal.

That's it over here.

Well, to break it down and we could do a chart if we had visualization, but we know about six for a touchdown, one for a conversion kick or a triad goal, which is where the word touchdown and try come from.

There was no point value originally for grounding the ball, for touching the ball down past the goal posts.

It only offered you the opportunity to try to kick a goal for points.

So that's number one.

And now I'll answer the scoring bit because that's more than enough preamble.

But we know it's six and one.

Or if you do a two point conversion a la the American Football League and other influences back in the day, three points for a field goal.

We know about the two point safety and the very, very, very rare one point safety.

So none of these codes have a safety.

That's the first thing.

They'll have a drop kick called a goal line dropout or another format of restarting play.

Rugby league is what I just described, because rugby league, frankly, is the most visually similar to football in America and Canada.

There are six tackles, meaning five downs to get to the other side of the field.

But their scoring system is four for the touchdown called a try, two for the conversion kick, and the kick is kicked in line with.

And this is true of rugby union as well.

It's kicked in line with where you grounded the ball.

So if you grounded it just inside the sideline, you can back up as much as you want to get a more favorable angle, but you're moving further away and you'll kick from there.

We used to do that as well.

We don't anymore.

We also used to snap the ball right next to the sideline.

So long as you could fit the requisite number of players.

Seven on the line of scrimmage.

Allah.

But we've noticed that in a forward passing game, when you have proficiency, it's better to spread the distance for the quarterback more evenly, to have a more offensive, attacking, exciting game.

From a.

From a viewer perspective, from an entertainment perspective, if you go to rugby union.

Oh, sorry, that's what I forgot.

Rugby league also has a drop goal, which we still have in American football.

We just don't do it.

I think the.

What was the last time?

Doug Fluty Patriots.

Yeah, yeah.

I remember that like yesterday.

It was very exciting because nobody'd seen it in ages.

But it's still only one point.

The Arena Football League did experiment with it as well back in the day that if you kicked a drop goal after a touchdown, that would have been worth two points, I believe.

So Rugby league has done something similar.

This is the 5 down, 6 tackle game in Australia.

If you kick a drop goal from within 40 meters, that's one point.

If you kick it beyond 40 meters, that's two points.

Now, so you have your touchdown for four, you have your conversion for two.

You've got a penalty goal for two, and you've got a drop goal for one if it's close, closer than 40 and you got it for two if it's beyond 40.

Now, if I may digress just a little bit right now I do want to point out that I'm very excited about this 68 yard field goal.

But I also want to point out the fact that the rules regarding K balls, kicker balls is different this year.

They're getting more balls than ever before the match even starts.

So they can work those balls out.

The sweet spot's bigger now.

They know the ball.

That's their preferred ball.

I'm not taking anything away.

That is a 68 yard field goal.

But instead of getting a ball 60 to 90 minutes before a game and having a pretty hard, unexercised ball, these balls are more forgiving.

Now it's not a different ball, but it's a more exercise.

So I believe they're only allowed to use it for three games.

They, they put a mark on them and once it gets three marks, the kicker can't use that for the fourth game.

You know what, they are very smart.

Coaches are smart.

They find ways to maximize what they're given.

So for those three games, you know, we still have the opportunity.

And I am not taking anything away.

It's almost like when people tried to say, oh, that you kicked a field goal in Denver.

That's mile high.

But you know, he was down in New Orleans, which is below sea level.

Nothing's ever going to be apples for apples.

Perfectly.

But if we're, if we're comparing apples, can we at least make sure they're all maybe red apples?

We're not bringing a Granny Smith to compare.

So again, not taking away anything from 68 yards.

But the idea is it's exciting for everybody when things are longer field goals.

I watched the same gentleman Cam Little in preseason Jaguars and the Steelers kicked a 70 yarder.

So.

And that used to be more common.

In Florida, you know, so, yeah, very, very humid air there.

Absolutely.

So that's why I say I don't want to speak down.

I don't want to speak in a way that would be interpreted as speaking down to the facts, but I do want to be transparent with the situation leading up to and surrounding an event.

That's where.

Would be doing at this, this, you know, pato Davies kicking 100 yard punts, you know, 110 yard punch.

Sorry, 110 yard punt.

And that will never be broken because we only have 100 yard field now.

Right.

But 60, 62 yard field goal, you know, drop goal.

There was nobody holding that ball.

But the ball was rounder.

It was, it was meant to be kicked back then.

So how do you compare that?

I mean, you know, to go biblical, people say it says what?

Noah was the greatest man of his time.

Some people say it's incredible he was so great because everybody was so horrible.

Other people would say, no, he wasn't as great as the later guys.

Ah, you know, Abraham, Moses, you know, so on.

But you know, some people say, oh, he was only great for his time.

He wouldn't have been great otherwise.

So I don't know.

One point in his life he was one of only, what, three or four guys?

Exactly.

I don't like to punch down like that.

I think everybody's great in their era.

I don't think it's fair to make those comparisons.

I think we need to appreciate what people did at their time.

Because if they did it at that time, that meant it was amazing then and it should be amazing now.

But can it be compared to somebody who's training professionally full time?

That's not fair.

That's not right.

Because even Roger Bannister breaking the four minute mile, nobody did it before now.

Now it's a fairly common thing.

So we have to look at this.

Going back to football.

Why there was unlimited downs.

Why would you give up the ball?

And you have to appreciate the world they came from.

They believed, and partially, rightfully so, that the human body couldn't handle that much abuse in that position.

Maybe it was gangrene, maybe it was sepsis, maybe it was a head knock where fluid just needed to be drained from the brain.

We had a really sad story come up recently in rugby league.

The guy is alive.

He would have died 100 years ago.

So there, there is good reason that we just don't really consider today.

So back to the point scoring and I'll make it quick now because that was great.

Tangential, but great.

Rugby union has five points for the try, two points for the conversion, three points for the penalty kick and three points for the drop goal.

Gaelic football has three points for the goal and it looks like a soccer goal and it has one point for the over.

So it's soccer goal with uprights that continue upward.

But if you kick it from beyond a certain distance, again, that's two points.

And that's a fairly new law.

Australian rules has four posts, no crossbar.

You've got six points if you kick it between and not touching those big ones in the middle.

And you get one point if it goes through after touching those but between the two shorter outside posts.

Those are called behind posts.

Back in the day, Gaelic football also had behind posts.

They also had five points for a goal.

These things are fluid and they have changed, but they have become more stagnant in recent years.

But for a few things.

Mainly the two point drop goal.

In rugby league from 40 meters out and the two points over in Gaelic football also from the past few years.

So just like we really haven't had much change or innovation in American or Canadian football regarding how we're scoring things.

We've found a really good system where people love the touchdown more than they love kicking a goal.

And if I want to be really pedantic and fun, why do we call them the goal posts there?

Because obviously the posts were going to kick through the goal.

So.

So by further reason, shouldn't the goal posts be on the goal line?

Why do we then call the goal line the goal line now?

The goal posts haven't been there since.

The 70s in the NFL.

Correct, correct.

Exactly.

CFL is changing.

There was no end line.

The goal line was the end of the field.

There was no end zones in American football, so.

Exactly.

There was no.

There was no.

What's called dead ball line.

You had.

You had the goal line, but there was no dead ball line.

And we see how we draw our dimensions differently.

Again, Aussie rolls is on an oval which was meant for cricket, became more popular for financial reasons than cricket down here.

And that proliferated the sport.

It was originally on a rectangle, but they realized they didn't have enough rectangular fields, so they started playing on cricket fields.

That's.

That's the short version.

Again, we changed shapes of football fields because they tried to make the game safer in America.

They figured shrinking it from 110 to 100, shrinking the width from about 65 to 53 would make it safer and we would have gone back to a bigger field.

But Harvard already built their stadium.

Well, they, they had built the stadium and they added the goal lines and the in the end zones wouldn't fit on 110 yard field.

So.

Yeah, so Canada actually has it right.

That's the way American football started.

It was 110 yard field everywhere.

Absolutely.

We.

Again, these were experiments at a time where people died.

It was serious.

They had to find ways to protect players.

It was known as murder ball.

Essentially it's they.

Just because you try to fix something that needs fixing doesn't mean you get it right.

And sometimes when you realize you'd like to go back and change it, you can't because there's external factors a la the stadium.

It's very true.

So we're a little bit short on time here, but I want to make sure we get this in there because you have a podcast where I believe you talk about some of this stuff and maybe folks can Go back and check out some of the archives, check out anything you might have new out on.

Why don't you give yourself a plug on where people can find you?

Thank you.

Absolutely.

I haven't done a new episode in a while.

Kid life, adult life with work and everything.

And I happen to also be, despite the accent, a rugby league referee.

I just got back from nationals for the wheelchair division and next year will be Rugby League World cup here in Australia.

Men's, women's and wheelchair will all compete at the same time.

So it's a big community event.

And then I am a cricket umpire, so I have hobbies.

But for those interested in the show, I interview luminaries and leaders from the international, from an American perspective.

Sports community, head coaches, CEOs, sometimes a few big name athletes.

I try to keep it to the people off the field.

So the gentleman in this case is retired.

Now.

The original show was called Chat and Business because we were chatting about leadership in the sports business and then it grew into rebranded, I should say, then it rebranded and grew into the title Lead from the Side.

Because when you're a coach, you're a CEO, you're a general manager, you're not on the field.

So perspective wise, how do you manage from not just an intellectual but an emotive perspective when bad things happen, when innovation is required.

So if people are interested in all of these other sports, I would highly recommend taking a listen and maybe tuning into the NRL or Super League.

For Rugby League, tune into Super Rugby, the URC or the English Rugby Union.

France has a great competition as well.

Check out the GAA for Gaelic football and for hurling and take a peek at Australian Rules and you'll see just why so many Australians, mainly based out of the state of Victoria Melbourne, are going over to be punchers and everything will start coming together and you'll realize, oh, I speak one kind of English, I play one kind of football and I love my kind of football and I wouldn't trade it for the world, but some of these are pretty cool too.

Yeah, I, I think you, you've proven it once again, you know, with, with all this information that the entire world is football crazy.

It's just whatever we are, football is in our area, our dialects, our disciplines that we, we have grown up watching and, and playing and it's all good stuff because it's all football and what, what a great international game the disciplines of football are.

And sort of not only they different but they sort of unite us in a way.

And you're a perfect example of that, an American that's an official for cricket and different rugby disciplines down under.

So that's amazing stuff.

So, doctor, really appreciate you coming on, sharing your expertise, sharing your opinion, sharing some great history of the game of football.

So thank you.

Thank you, Darren.

Thank you for having me.

Honestly, it was a pleasure.

And we can deep dive even further whenever you'd like.

It'd be my pleasure.

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