History of Football?

There are some historians in every coaching staff. Just sit back and wait for them to take over a drill and you can hear the entire history or cultural points of certain aspects of the game (rather than getting kids in and out of the drill as quickly as possible).

Football history is a broad subject that I've done a lot of research on certain aspects of. Almost all my research was done before the Internet era, in libraries.

Julien, probably you should explain what aspect of football's history you're most interested in. For instance, for all the reading I did, I couldn't tell you the names of many persons or institutions involved with the details, because for my purposes all the development of the game might as well have been done by a small group of obscure people playing with each other a large number of times over a long period in Mongolia. (I'm not much of a "people person".) I exaggerate that, but I hope you get the idea. There are other people who could tell you all about records and statistics and where to find them, but those don't much interest me. Nor am I likely to remember many dates closer than approximately, though I do have a few years memorized.

I'll give you a little tidbit you may not have known close to home: It's generally believed that the "game for 13" (known in the English speaking countries as Rugby League) became popular in France because Rugby Union was denigrated as British during World War 2. However, there are some who disagree and think that other coincidental factors were responsible.

Here's another: American football became 11-a-side in 1880 as a compromise to satisfy the players from Yale U., while those of other schools wanted to continue to play 15s, which had been adopted as the number in 1876 because it was widely practiced that way in Rugby Union -- although the actual rules of that game still didn't specify the number of players. The width of the field was reduced in close proportion to the number of players.

Another trivium: NCAA football rules for one season abolished the fair catch (1950), then restored it the next year.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_American_football

A good place to start.

Here are the biographies/moments in history I would check out, as the pertain to football:

Teddy Roosvelt (made football get organized)

Pop Warner (innovator par excellance)

1940 Chicago Bears championship game (indirect snap bursts onto scene)

Sid Gillman

Tiger Ellison

Bill Walsh


of course, that list is NOT extensive

The trouble with a lot of what you can read as individual sources about that is the tendency of the writers to assume that certain things are more recent and new than they actually are. It helps if you can get old books about things that might have been new then (but probably weren't).

The trouble is obtaining these books in France. Spalding's Foot Ball Guide, a very informative annual, has been archived by the New York Public Library and by the Nat'l Collegiate Athletic Ass'n. NYPL's collection is a little more complete. By now they may have been microfilmed, but I don't know about digital availability. In its pages you can read the complaint that football injuries had been exaggerated in the general press -- for instance, that when a child chased a football into the street and was run over by a truck, that counted as a "football fatality" (true story, I suppose).

One surprisingly good history is a book, Big Leagues by Stephen Fox, which is labeled as a history of American professional sports, but whose chapter on football especially is good on early development of the amateur game. Until I read it, I had no idea there was any relationship between early American football and baseball. However, Fox set it in the context of the rivalry for popularity in both cases between versions of the games played in and around New York and what was played elsewhere.

A source which has been criticized for inaccuracy a lot was a book titled How Games Began by an Australian clergyman who'd also written How It Began. I don't remember the author's name.

An example of the short time perspective is the ignorance by many sources of early importance of the "under center" "T" formation. By the late 1880s, despite -- and in some cases because of -- rules differences with later versions of the game -- a diamond or straight T had become the standard formation on offense -- and the diamond T was used as well on defense. And even those who do point that out still exaggerate the degree to which the T was eclipsed by other formations between 1910 and 1950.

For the early history of American and Canadian football, it also helps to know some things about the history of rugby football. The Football Rules Committee that met at Princeton in 1876, predecessor of the NCAA (from which all American football rules ultimately derive), adopted a version of rugby just a year and a half before the Rugby Union altered their laws to require that the ball be put back in play immediately after a tackle. So what's not realized by many observers is how much the difference between rugby and American and Canadian football today was due to a change in rugby.

What if Spartacus had a Piper Cub?

;D ;D

coach jerry campbell on his site is a real historian and has written some very nice summary articles on there.personally i want to read about the future of football.

What if Spartacus would have just traveled across the Rubicon and into Gaul and would not have listened to his buddies to return back down the peninsula and given all their money to pirates? No aviation skills would have been needed.

This is great, and, somehow, even better because I imagine Al Bundy from your avatar -- helmet and all -- being the one delivering this wisdom.

...Though the Davis book's intro does seem a bit of a stretch where he says that football was played in antiquity because a quote from the bible saying "and turn thee and toss him the ball" and then something from Homer's Odysssey, followed by the greek definition of the word "harpaston." Oh well, it's still the best game.

Halas, like Stagg, never dropped the T -- and both were in Chicago for many years. Ralph Jones did particularly well with the T in the early 30's. Shaugnessy only added to the base offense that the Bears were already running when he consulted with and for Halas in the late 30's.

...but they were in a very small minority during that period.

Football books I've found on Google.

books.google.com/books?uid=2571646412515678262

I haven't gone though them all, that's for when I have time.

Yup and the primary objective of it seems to be to facilitate sweeps and pitching to the bunch side....

I particularly like how on 59 he discusses the "50 year battle between offense and defense"....

man I love this game.