In order to know about the history, sports scores of American football.
It was in 1880 that the sport really began to take shape, thanks almost exclusively to one person: Walter Camp. Camp was a student at Yale from 1876 to 1882 and an avid athlete, playing on Yale’s football team from ’77 until he left school in ’82. He was also a fixture at the rules conventions, finally gaining traction with his ideas in 1880. It was then that the rules committee began to adopt his rule changes, which included establishing the line of scrimmage, the exchange between a quarterback and a center, awarding six points for a touchdown and three points for a field goal (though it would take years to come to those exact numbers), lowering the number of players to 11 a side and the concept of set plays. Even after Camp left Yale as a student, he continued to coach the team and be a regular presence at every rules convention held until his death.
Some of Camp’s most significant contributions, however, came after he had already left Yale. The first came in 1898, when Camp introduced the All-America team, a group of players he chose as being the best in college football. Camp had an All-America team every year from 1898 to 1924; after that, All-American teams continued to be named every year to the present, one of the highest honors in college football.
The second innovation was in 1906, though in this Camp merely played a role. The game of football had spread beyond a few Ivy League schools by this time, travelling through New England and into the Midwest. However, the sport had also become much more violent, especially because of “mass plays.” Mass plays featured every member of a side moving together to try to score; to counter them, the defenses would do the same, moving as one unit to gang tackle the ball carrier. One particular mass play, the flying wedge, was particularly vicious: 10 of the 11 offensive players would form a wedge, while one player, the ball carrier, would move behind them before leaping over them to move the ball forward and attempt to score. As a countermeasure, the defense would send a man of its own leaping over, colliding with the ball carrier in midair. Injuries were often the best outcome of these plays; in the 1905 season, 149 serious injuries were recorded from the sport, along with 18 deaths. Action had to be taken, and various cries for reform (including from President Theodore Roosevelt) led eventually to the creation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, which four years later would change its name to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, the body which still governs college sports in the U.S. As a representative of Yale, Camp was a part of the creation of this organization, leaving another indelible mark on the game of football (and sports in general).
Camp’s third innovation, as important as the NCAA is, is perhaps his most significant, and also developed out of concerns for safety within the game. While the NCAA was created to be an arbiter of sports in general, Camp and the American Football Rules Committee (which governed the sport of football) sought to deal with the issues within football themselves. They thought that by opening up the game, and making it more about speed and skill, rather than just brute strength and force, the number of injuries (and deaths) would be reduced. Out of this came the rule change allowing the forward pass, in which one offensive player could throw the ball forward to another instead of just backward, which had been the case up to that point. It’s important to note that the American Football Rules Committee did not invent the concept of the forward pass; it had been used occasionally in various collegiate games (including, supposedly, by Camp himself at Yale). However, up until 1906, the forward pass was illegal; by making it legal, the game opened up and mass plays were significantly reduced.
The Birth Of Professional Football