131 years of football history

Archive for Thursday, November 30, 2000

November 30, 2000

I was always under the misconception that football started when the "Four Horsemen" rode into the sunset in South Bend, Ind.

Not so.

In digging into the archives, old yearbooks, old newspapers, etc., I found where the first college game was played in 1869 when Rutgers beat Princeton, 6-4.

I'm sure this was a football score and not a baseball score, but they had a strange way of scoring and playing back then.

Get this each team played with 25 players on the field. (Maybe this is what the Kansas City Chiefs need, 25 players on defense).

Here are some more historical facts:

In 1871, they came up with a set of rules that included the size of the field. Would you believe 500x300 feet? The rules were a combination of football and rugby.

In 1880, new rules were set forth by a Yale graduate, Walter Camp, who was considered to be the "father of American football."

One rule lowered the number of players on a team to 11. A few years later, a new rule stated a team had three downs to make five yards. Failure to do this caused a loss of possession.

The first All-America team was selected in 1889 and included players from only three schools, Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Included on the team was legendary coach Amos Alonzo Stagg of Yale.

Around 1900, Harvard dedicated the nation's first "modern" football stadium.

In 1905, President Teddy Roosevelt warned that he would ban the game if the "brutality" did not end.

In response to the threat, a group of 62 colleges held a conference. This was the beginning of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

Early in the century, Saint Louis University became the first team to score on the newly legalized forward pass.

A record that still stands was set in 1916 when Georgia Tech defeated Cumberland, 222-0. The Ramblin' Wreck scored on all of its 32 possessions.

One of the greatest college coaches ever, Knute Rockne, lost his life in a plane crash in Kansas, near Bazaar, in 1931. In 1969, a consensus of 100 coaches, athletic directors and sportswriters named Rockne the greatest coach in the first 100 years of football.

Now we are in a new millennium after 131 years of rule changes. In a sport that has probably seen more drastic rule changes than any other, we now have the Bowl Championship Series (BCS).

Can't you just imagine 50 players on the field with few rules, if any?