JRN 362 - Lecture Two

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
Lecture Two

Review
• Lecture One opened with C.W.
Whitney stating in 1894 that the
nation needed the game, wanted the
game, followed by LSU coach Ed
Orgeron saying that football is the
lifeblood of the county.
• There’s one more piece to this …

Review
• Men and boys took to football early
as a test of manhood in front of other
men.
• But why did people watch it, and the
media cover it with such intensity
early in its development in the 19th
century?

Review
• As Lecture One revealed, in 1960
writer Norman Mailer covered the
presidential campaign between John
F. Kennedy (shown here at an Army-
Navy game) and Richard Nixon for
Esquire
• His article titled “Superman Comes
to the Supermarket” extracted
America’s DNA and examined it

Review
• One part of one paragraph in that
piece defines the nation and reveals
in that passage without explicitly
stating so why a game such as a
football arose to dominate America
across the 19th, 20th and 21st
centuries.

Review
• “Since the First World War
Americans have been leading a
double life, and our history has
moved on two rivers, one visible, the
other underground;

Review
• “there has been the history of politics
which is concrete, factual, practical
and unbelievably dull if not for the
consequences of the actions of some
of these men;

Review
“and there is a subterranean river of
untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic
desires, that concentration of ecstasy
and violence which is the dream life of
the nation.” (Italics added)

Review
• Football represents the dream life of
the nation.
• Think back to Lecture One’s Google
Doodle from 2015 in which the little
“G” dreams of playing football.

Origins
• As the ngram on the next slide
shows, that dream has persisted from
the 19th century to the present.

Origins
• In the 18 and early 19th century, colleges struggled to channel the energies
of their all-male student population. They had banned physical competition
as dangerous.
• As Parke Davis wrote in the first history of football book, “The establishment
of organized contests in skill and brawn further was stimulated by the
presence in the student body of a preponderance of youths from the South
whose racial insistence upon all political subjects of the day called with for
acquiescence or a fight.”

Origins
• Even though the origins of American football are somewhat murky, the
game evolved from that primordial soup bubbling on eastern college
campuses in the mid 19th century.
• At Harvard, for example, contests between freshmen and sophomores
featured the two sides engaged in violent clashes in the Yard as each tried
to drive a ball across a line. They called it football, after the English game.

Origins
• Robert Gould Shaw who would later
lead an all-African-American regiment
in the Civil War and die in battle in
1863, wrote a letter to his mother
about football while a student at
Harvard in 1856.

Origins
• “It was a regular battle, with fifty to seventy men on each side. It resembled
more my idea of the hand-to-hand fighting in the battles of the ancients,
than anything else,” Shaw wrote.

Origins
• The games became so beloved –
and violent - that the Harvard faculty
ordered students to stop playing in
July 1860.
• Students wrote an obituary for the
game and held a mock funeral
afterward. But games would resume
after the Civil War.

Origins
• “The new game was immensely attractive to privileged upper-class youths in
need of some way to demonstrate the manly courage that their fathers and
older brothers had recently proved on the bloody battlefields of the Civil
War,” wrote historian Allen Guttmann in a 2006 study of the early origins of
modern football.

Origins
By the mid 19th century, three more or
less formal rules-based variants of
football existed:

Origins
• Football, a game without firm rules where the ball was kicked across a goal.
• Soccer football, a game with firm rules in which kicking served as the main
force behind ball movement, because the rules banned running with the
ball.
• Rugby football, a game that legalized running with the ball.

Origins
• Princeton, however, adapted an old
English game that allowed players to
hit the ball with their hands.
• When combined with the kicking of
soccer, the game emerged as
something new, serving as the
missing link between football, soccer
football and rugby.

Origins
• At 3:00 p.m. on Nov. 6, 1869, in New
Brunswick, New Jersey, on a field
called the commons between College
Avenue and Sicard Street, Princeton
met Rutgers in this new game.
• Princeton won the toss and took the
ball. Rutgers took the wind.

Origins
• Rutgers, wearing red turbans against
the taller, stronger Princeton team,
won 6-4.
• The two would play again in 1870 but
not in 1871.
• The game had taken root. Princeton
formed a Football Association,
duplicated shortly afterward by Yale.

Origins
• In New Haven, Connecticut, students
played several variants of the game
on the public New Haven Green until
banned by the city in 1858.
• Classes would meet each other in a
spasm of violence that undermined
public order, the police ruled.

Origins
• In 1872, Yale student David Schaff,
class of 1873, resuscitated the game
by challenging the class of 1874 to a
game on the public Green.
• Police broke up the rumble, but
Schaff decided to form the Yale
Football Association and move
games to a private field.

Origins
• In November 1872, Yale played
Columbia in New Haven as 400
watched.
• The field was set at 400 feet long by
250 feet wide.
• The game resembled soccer football
more than anything else. Yet change

Origins
• The first rules were established in
1873 by Yale, Columbia, Rutgers and
Princeton. Harvard declined.
• The Yale-Princeton game in
November 1873 started the longest
rivalry in college football, even
thought the game bore little
resemblance to the one played just a

Origins
• Harvard, meanwhile, set up two
games with McGill University of
Montreal for May 1874.
• The teams played under the Harvard
rules in game one ; in the second,
they played under All-Canada rules.

Origins
• In 1875, Harvard and Yale set aside
their differences over the 1873 rules
and played a game in New Haven
under Harvard’s rugby-based
standards with some modifications,
including the shape of the ball, which
became more egg-shaped than
round. Harvard won, 4-0.

Origins
• A Hopkins high school student in
New Haven named Walter Camp
watched the game along with 1,200
spectators in New Haven.
• Yale wore blue, Harvard crimson.
• That’s the moment when Yale started
to play football, not soccer.

Origins
• Despite that game’s success, this new game struggled to gain standardized
footing.
• Harvard stayed out of the November 1876 meeting among by Yale,
Columbia, Rutgers and Princeton in Springfield, Massachusetts, to formulate
new rules.
• The new rules included this standardization: each team would field 11
players.

Origins
• On Thanksgiving Day 1876, Yale played Princeton in New Jersey under the
new rules, which permitted running and tackling in addition to kicking.

Origins
• By then, Camp had enrolled at Yale
and played several sports. That’s
Camp, third from the left, second row,
in 1876, in Yale’s rugby team photo.

Origins
• Camp, shown again, in 1876, this
time, with his football teammates,
would become the most important
person involved in the
standardization of all rules and the
promotion of the game – and its
staunchest defender – for decades.

Origins
• Ironically, Camp shoveled the ball
forward against Princeton, which
protested successfully against the
move.
• It was the first instance of a forward
pass, which would be banned until
1906.

Origins
• Meanwhile, the game pushed
westward, powered by word-of-mouth
and newspaper accounts.
• Northwestern, for one, sought to form
a football association of its own on its
campus just outside of Chicago.

Origins
• Months before Yale met Princeton in
1876, Northwestern played a football
club in February.
• The game had arrived in the Midwest.
• And it would quickly move beyond
college students to working-class
men.

Origins
• But it would take Camp, who played
halfback and earned varsity letters
throughout his Yale career, to drive
the game to immense popularity
through his formulation of rules that
made it part of America’s dream life
for players and spectators.

Origins
• Camp was driven in large measure
by his commitment (driven by his
father) to “Muscular Christianity,” a
philosophy that emerged in England,
according to historian Clifford Putney,
“as a Christian commitment to health
and manliness.”

Origins
• In 1868, a year before Rutgers met
Princeton, one follower of the
ideology wrote that "there is a
precious discipline in danger... I
consider no man educated who is not
educated to meet danger, grapple
with it, and conquer it. And any
system of gymnastics which leaves
out danger is an emasculated

Origins
• Camp’s devotion to Muscular
Christianity and the sense of
gentlemanliness and fair play began
when he read Tom Brown’s School
Days, which became available in the
U.S. in 1857.

Origins
• Within a year of its publication, Tom
Brown’s Schooldays would sell
225,000 copies in the U.S. Hundreds
of thousands more would be sold
overall in the 19th century in the U.S.
• Theodore Roosevelt was one of the
American boys who read it.

Origins
• In 1873, Camp witnessed the impact
of the book when students of Eton
visited New Haven to introduce Yale
students to English rugby.
• “To an impressionable boy, these
Englishmen were the walking
embodiments of gentlemanly sport,”
Camp recalled.

Origins
• At the time, the gap between Yale
students in New Haven and the locals
was immense. Local firefighters and
Yale undergraduates fought.
• Camp recalled that he thought
organized competition would reduce
tensions in the city.

Origins
• Camp first saw a primitive game of
football in 1875 when Harvard played
Yale in New Haven in a game that
mixed association football – kicking
and dribbling but no tackling – and
the Boston game – tackling
permitted.
• He was among 1,200 who watched.

Origins
• During that period, intercollegiate
competition grew, starting with the
Yale-Harvard regatta in 1852.
• College men in the East, inspired by
Muscular Christianity, transformed
sport into team competition, a test of
strength inspired by the ideology.

Origins
• That meant Camp would adhere to
the concept of athletic amateurism as
expressed at Oxford and Cambridge
in England and popularized in Tom
Brown’s Schooldays.
• He would apply all of that to football.

Origins
• Camp, in fact, would later take an
illustration of the book, apply it to
football and thus invent a way of
celebrating a hero.

Origins
• Camp turned out to be the perfect
person to formulate rules and
industrialize football, as he took his
experience as a player, his ideology
of Muscular Christianity and welded it
to his experience as a factory
manager.
• He had much to fix. The game was a

Origins
• It was possible, for example, for a
team to hold on to the football for an
entire half simply by not risking a
fumble by plunging into the line
without lateraling the ball to a back, a
tactic known as the block game.

Origins
• As the public grew increasingly interested in football by the late 1870s, it
became clear to the football realm that the game needed to change to
become more accessible to more spectators.
• In 1878, for example, Yale and Princeton played to a 0-0 tie with both
squads playing the block game, and a primitive national championship of
sorts was awarded to Yale because it had beaten Harvard earlier in the year.

Origins
• “But the public desired something
more than a political championship,”
football historian Parke Hill Davis
wrote in 1912. “It demanded action,
and a great clamor broke out against
the block game.”

Origins
• In 1880, only eight colleges fielded teams, but that number would grow
explosively over the next two decades, requiring a standardized system of
rules.
• Camp led the effort and is thus considered the force behind American
football.
• The rule changes in 1882 led to the shape of the game we know today.

Origins
• In 1882, the rules committee,
consisting of representatives from all
colleges who played football,
established formally Thanksgiving
Day as a traditional celebration of
football by decreeing that the leading
teams from the past year should play
on Thanksgiving.

Origins
• It also confronted the block game as
fears over the future of football
mounted as spectators lost interest in
a game without scoring – or without
open action.

Origins
• Camp led the way, proposing key rule
changes.
• The most important? The creation of
the of scrimmage, thus establishing
order on the field and controlling the
start and stop of plays.

Origins
• That transformed an unruly scrum
into an environment where players
would have clear roles, or positions,
visible to spectators.

Origins
• Also importantly, Camp and his colleagues eliminated the block game by
approving a rule that required teams that could not advance the ball five
yards after three downs or lost 10 yards after three downs had to give the
ball to the other side at the spot of their last down.
• Teams had to move the ball forward or lose it.
• That opened the game to new tactics and new types of players.

Origins
• As a result, a new different kind of
game evolved, one defined by the
line of scrimmage, down and distance
and position.

Origins
• This division of labor – similar to that
of a factory where workers focused
on specific tasks – gave coaches and
captains the chance to sort players
by size, weight and speed, among
other factors.

Origins
• Quarterback: Brains and grace
• Backs: Must be “well put together”
• End: Good condition
• Tackle: Strength
• Guard: Steady and powerful
• Center: A man of weight and steadiness

Origins
• Camp’s formation of players featured
an exercise in strategic balance:
seven on the line to block, the
quarterback a few yards behind
center, halfbacks spread wide and
the fullback behind the quarterback.

Origins
• These players would do the same on
defense.

Origins
• Play began when the snapback
(center) rolled the ball to the
quarterback. The quarterback would
then toss the ball to either the
halfback (left or right) or the fullback.

Origins
• The back would run to the line,
behind a phalanx of blockers.

Origins
• Defenders could not tackle below the
waist.

Origins
• The back would run to the open area
and down the field if a gap opened in
the defensive line.

Origins
• He would “run to daylight” as it
became known in the mid 20th
century, generating enormous cheers
from crowds as he ran ahead of
defenders.

Origins
In 1883, Camp introduced the point system that, after a reordering to give the
touchdown more value; he originally allocated just two points for it.

Origins
• The first numerical scoring system went like this:
Touchdown = four points
Safety = two points
Goal following touchdown = two points
Field Goal = five points (can’t take the foot out of football)

Origins
• Other changes instituted under
Camp’s leadership included:
• Changing the size of the field to 110
yards by 53 yards.
• Setting the length of a game at 90
minutes, later moved to 60 minutes,
divided by 15-minute quarters.

Origins
• All the rule changes of the early to
mid 1880s opened the game, making
it more visible and easily understood
via clear lines of play and authority.
• And that made it possible to have
distinct players become heroes on
which a body of literature could
emerge.

Origins
• The rule changes of 1882 and others
to follow cracked open the game.
• Now, football could begin to truly
reflect the ecstasy and violence of the
American Dream Life.

JRN 362 - Lecture Two

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JRN 362 - Lecture Two