A Social History of Football

America's kickball games came from medieval Britain, where such games were derived from Greek and Roman teams competing for victory by forcing a ball behind the lines of the opposing teams. In 12th century Britain, teams from different towns played "football" on Shrove Tuesday, the festival day before Lent. These annual games were played without boundaries or rules or team size. Married women formed teams to play against spinster teams, and farmers played against herders and craftsmen.

According to Michael Real, "mass-mediated culture manages to elevate otherwise mundane events of no real consequence to the status of spectacles of a powerful, quasi-sacred myth and ritual nature. The Super Bowl 1974 telecast conveys this feeling of larger-than-life drama. The screen was filled with images of vast crowds, hulking superheroes, great plays from the past, even shots from and of the huge Goodyear blimp hovering over the field. A productive analytic framework for diagnosing the psychic involvement generated by live mass-mediated culture comes from philosophers and anthropologists who study the function of myth in preliterate societies. Generally speaking, mythic activity is the collective reenactment of symbolic archetypes that express the shared emotions and ideals of a given culture. Among nonliterate peoples, mythic beliefs and ritual activities cement together the social whole, while literacy frequently limits the role of obvious myth to formalized and secondary dimensions. The multisensory, simultaneous experience of Super Bowl viewing resembles standing on the edge of a ring of Dakota Sioux dancers, like Black Elk, hearing, watching, and feeling the collective energy unleashed by participation in ritual activities rooted in mythic beliefs - the aural experience. McLuhan, Carpenter, and others have stressed the parallel between preliterate aural communications and 'post-literate' electronic communications in creating a tribal consciousness that lives collectively, mythically, and in depth in contrast to the individualism, rationalism, and linear segmentation of "book culture.The case of the Super Bowl clarifies such claims. Whether constructive or destructive of the total ecology, modern, mediated, myth-with-a-million-members spectacles, like their ancient predecessors, do perform important functions for the spectator-participant and the larger human ecosystem."

King Edward III prohibited football in 1365 because in detracted from skills such as archery that were necessary preparation for war. By 1602, "hurling" was played with goals four miles apart. By 1800, the football field boundaries were limited to 80-100 yards, and the ball became an inflated bladder covered with leather that was aimed at a goal made of two sticks set three feet apart. The games were violent, played by workingmen of different towns.

At the Rugby School in 1823, rules were established for "rugby" games between prep schools. For the first time, it was allowed to carry the ball, and standard positions were created: forward, dodger (or halfback), quarter, keeper.

Independent rugby clubs developed after 1846, with 20-man teams, rules against offside, scoring by kicking.

In December 1863, the London Football Association published its own rules that prohibited carrying the ball, and thus "association football" (or soccer) was separated from rugby. This kind of association football was played in America by college teams, but with no standard rules.

In 1867 Princeton established the rules of intercollegiate football and played the first official American football game against Rutgers Nov. 6, 1869, winning 6-4. There was no time limit, the game ending as son as a team scored six goals. Carrying the ball was prohibited, and a goal was scored by kicking or batting the ball under the goal post, not over it.

In 1876 the Intercollegiate Football Association was founded and followed rugby rules, using a new egg-shaped leather ball. Over the next decades, led by the advice of Yale coach Walter Camp, the "father of American Football," new rules were adopted: in 1880, the new scrimmage rule allowed only one team to possess the ball at a time and a quarterback to receive the ball from the center (eliminating the randomness of the rugby scrummage), thus creating order and a division of labor. Football was rationalized as was industry at the same time by the "scientific management" of Frederick W. Taylor. In 1882, the gridiron field was created with lines every five yards, and teams of 11 players each were required to gain five yards in three downs of possession. In 1883, numerical scoring began with five points for a fieldgoal, two points for a touchdown, and one point for a safety. In 1897, a touchdown was raised to five points with a one-point conversion attempt allowed. The fieldgoal was reduced to three points in 1909 and the touchdown increased to six points in 1912.

According to Elliot Gorn, a Muscular Christianity ideology developed that linked sports with middle class values of discipline, order, individualism, progress, and sport became a moral force that "helped men slough off defeatist attitudes, replicate the heroism of their fathers, and gear up for battle in the new arenas" such as the Spanish-American War and reaffirmed that "strength, aggressiveness, and the will to win were the fundamentals of life." (Gorn pp. 142-145)

In the 1880s, American football became a power game, with tackles allowed below the waist and the adoption of the T-formation to break through the center after the quarterback tossed the ball to the fullback. Football spread from the East coast to other parts of the country. The Michigan Wolverines were the first Midwest team and Natre Dame played its first game in 1887, losing to Michigan. College football became increasingly violent and corrupt as its popularity grew. Yale captain James Hogan was paid to play by Yale and by the American Tobacco Company. Rules against kicking and slugging and piling on were rarely enforced. The flying wedge caused injuries, as unpadded players began running before the ball snap to crash through the center. The legalization of the forward pass in 1910 helped somewhat decrease the injuries. By the beginning of the 20th century, colleges built stadiums for the increasingly popular football games. In 1913, Yale built the first large football stadium, the Yale Bowl holding 71,000, using a design that would be a model for the Rose Bowl in 1922.

According to Michael Oriard, such stadiums and the mass media created "King Football" in the 1920s and 1930s. When Illinois dedicated its 67,000-seat Memorial Stadium in 1924, the game "was marked by Red Grange's astonishing six-touchdown performance against Michigan. That game became an instant legend because of the occasion, the size of the crowd, and the unusually large presence of the media‹all the elements, that is, of football as media spectacle‹now in place for the first time." (Oriand p. xvi) The national radio networks and sound newsreels joined such periodicals as Saturday Evening Post and the daily newspaper sports page to create a national sporting audience.

Professional football teams began to emerge in the 1890s from urban athletic clubs. In 1892 the Allegheny Athletic Association paid William Heffelfinger $500 to help defeat the Pittsburgh Athletic Club 4-0 on November 12. In 1897 the Latrobe Athletic Association football team became the first team to play an entire season with professional players. In New York, Pop Warner founded a team in Syracuse. Connie Mack organized the Philadelphia Athletics in 1902. Jim Thorpe played for a professional team in Canton, Ohio, the birthplace of the NFL.

In 1920, the American Professional Football Association was founded in Canton. By 1922, the APFA evolved into the NFL led by Joe Carr, with 18 teams that included the Chicago Bears of George Halas, and the Packers owned by the town of Green Bay. The parallel rise of radio helped increase the popularity of professional sports. In the 1920s, America became an urban, secular nation of consumers pursuing a leisure ethic.

According to Michael Real, "In a manner psychically similar to the traditional Maori Islanders or Yaqui brujos, the contemporary American uses "sacred" events of the Super Bowl type to escape the uncertainties of "profane" existence. In a secularized society, sports fill a vacuum left by religion. The cycle of games and seasons, culminating in the annual Super Bowl, provides crucial "sacred" markers breaking the "profane" monopoly of secular time and space in the advanced industrial, technological society of the United States." (p. 101)

1951 ad from Ad*Acccess
In 1945 the rival All-American Football league was founded, and merged with the NFL in 1950.

In 1950 Los Angeles Rams became the first NFL team to televise all of its games. As TV grew in popularity during the 1950s, more teams signed television contracts. In 1951, the DuMont Network televised the NFL championship game December 23 coast-to-coast for the first time; the Los Angeles Rams defeated the Cleveland Browns 24-17.

In 1959 the rival American Football league was founded, and its 10 teams were merged with 16 NFL teams in 1970 to form two conferences, expanded to 30 teams in 1993, and to 32 teams in eight four-team divisions by 2002.

In 1967 the first first AFL-NFL championship game, to be known as the Super Bowl (designated by roman numerals after 1971, "Super Bowl V") was won by the Green Bay Packers, coached by Vince Lombardi since 1959, defeating Dallas 34-27 on January 1.

According to Benjamin Rader, the "growing popularity of football in the 1960s and 1970s evoked an unusual amount of social commentary. many observers saw football as related to the larger social upheavals of the era. To right-wing political leaders, football was a miniature school for testing and nurturing physical and moral vigor. Proponents of the counterculture, on the other hand, connected the popularity of football to the war in Vietnam. Only a nation addicted to the violence of a sport like football, they said, could pursue such an immoral and brutal war. Several observers linked the popularity of football to the growing size of the white-collar and professional classes in the United States. Football was a corporate or bureaucratic sport; eleven men acted in unison against eleven opponents. Football was time-bound; the ever-present clock dictated the pace and intensity of the game. Teams 'worked' with or against the clock. Football embodied rationality and coordination; a game of staggering complexity, football required careful planning and preparation. The long completed pass and the breakaway run reflected not only careful planning and long hours of practice, but human potency, natural skill, and 'grace under pressure.' At a more primitive level, the violence so central to football may have attracted those who led lives of rigid self-control." (Rader pp. 262-263)

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