FanHouse Football History

Yes, yes, I know. You were all good little students who came to class last week and waited the required 15 minutes for me to show up. You didn't just run off to the stadium and get drunk. I'm touched, really...

Now let's get down to today's lesson, which happens to involve the stadium. Your environment shapes your sports. Think about that concept for a moment. If James Naismith couldn't find any peach baskets, would we be playing basketball today? If Scotland didn't have so many lush green fields, would we be playing golf?

Football is no different. Back in the middle of the 19th century, when the English were writing the rules to their various football games, the fields on which they played shaped their games. Schools that had open fields favored handling and tackling games, while schools that played inside cloisters favored kicking games, because rugby-style games inside cloisters often resulted in heads getting smashed on stone. That's one reason why we ended up with soccer.

The stadium is the environment that shapes the game. In 1903, with college football at the apparent height of its popularity, Harvard built a huge stadium for football. Little did anyone know that this monument to American football would have such a huge impact on the game for which it was built...

All right, class, show of hands: How many people here are familiar with the name Archimedes? Okay, and how many of you have seen the movie Pi multiple times? Ah, same ones. Just as I thought.

Well, for those of you who haven't seen Pi, let me tell you the story of Archimedes, the great mathematician of Syracuse. He was there a couple millennia before Donovan McNabb. So one day the king receives gold as a gift, and he asks Archimedes how he can be sure this gift is actually pure gold. He thinks and thinks on this problem nonstop for weeks, and he can't come up with a solution. So his wife tells him he needs to take a break, because in his single-minded attempt to come up with an answer for the king, he's forgotten to bathe, and thus he's stinking up the bedroom.

So Archimedes goes to take a bath, and he notices the water rising as he steps in the tub. Suddenly, it hits him -- displacement, a way to measure volume and, thus, density, which will tell you if that gold is really gold. The light bulbs go off in his head, the angels start singing, and he gets so excited that he screams, "Eureka!", and he runs naked and dripping wet through the streets to the king's palace to share the solution with him.

Why do I share the story of a Greek mathematician in a football history class? Well, when it comes right down to it, John Heisman discovered the forward pass much the same way...

Good morning, class. You're all looking a bit less than alert today. Some of you look particularly pained. Perhaps another long Friday night with that beer bong didn't treat you so well...

I assure you, though, that none of you experienced the pain that many a college football player suffered in the 1890s. This was also the result of a rule change by Walter Camp, whom we discussed last week. In 1888, Camp recommended a rule change that would once and for all eliminate the last trace of rugby from American football; he recommended allowing tackling below the belt.

Yes, have a good snicker and make your jokes about how you were tackled below the belt last night. Judging from the looks of you lot, I'm stunned that you can recall last night. Think for a minute about the ramifications of this rule, though. Think of all the shoestring tackles you've seen in your lifetime. Without this rule change, that's a penalty. Tackling below the belt made American football very different -- and a lot more dangerous...

Good morning, class. Glad to see most of you decide not to drop this elective after one week. I know your minds are all on today's games, but you'll want to take very good notes today, because this will be on the midterms...

Last week, we learned about the very first intercollegiate football game between Rutgers and Princeton in 1869 and how it more closely resembled soccer than our modern gridiron game. Over the next few years, this form of football slowly but surely started catching on at other schools. In 1873, representatives from Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Rutgers met in New York to write the first official set of rules for college football -- rules that resembled the Football Association's original Laws of the Game, published in England in 1863, but had more than enough unique elements to differentiate themselves from the English game.

Inconspicuous by their absence, though, was Harvard. Yes, those Harvard boys just couldn't stand the thought of a football game where they weren't allowed to run with the ball, and you can't talk about running with the ball without talking about William Webb Ellis.

Who's that, you ask? Just a boy who made running with the ball possible...