The foundation of football - Essay Example

With regards to the origination of this sport, the other most important person that needs to be acknowledged is William Ebb Ellis. Mary Bellis-author of “History of American Football” on about.com noted that Ellis was the first person documented for picking up the ball during a soccer game and running with it in 1823. Ellis breached the rules of the game and amidst all of that he created a new game now known as American Football. The invention of this sport saw attempts to write to write the rules in 1867.

He pulled some characteristics from previous sports such as rugby and soccer to create American Football. Some of these changes as reported Bellis include: 1. one side retained undisputed possession of the ball, until that side gives up the ball as a result of its own violations 2. the line of scrimmage 3. 11 on a team instead of 15 4. created the quarter-back and center positions 5. forward pass 6. standardized the scoring system, numerical scoring 7. created the safety, interference, penalties, and the neutral zone American Football In the past, football teams consisted of around 25 players on each side and negligent and neglectful rules made it an excessively violent sport, resulting in serious injuries to players and even the deaths of some.

With reference to waltercamp.org, Camp brought some amount of discipline to the game and served on the rules committee from his college days until 1925 when he died. Later Camp devised some insightful tactics from plays and restricting the game to eleven members per team. This then gave the teams an advantage of utilizing various strategies throughout play to become victors. Camp then made further innovations to the game which includes system of downs and yards-to-go. This idea was preconceived from a game between Princeton and Yale.

Princeton was determined and convinced that within the rules of the game, they could sit on it and not move it for an entire half. The misunderstanding of the Princeton and Yale game influenced the use of the Gridiron System of lines and lavish marks on the field. Despite the myriad of similarities to Rugby, the methods of scoring didn’t work well with American Football. As such Walter Camp devised a scoring sytem which continues to be the basis of the game. Camp continued to contribute to the game he helped create, even contributing to the establishment of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), but the violence of the game continued to bog it down.

In 1905, so many deaths occurred on the field that then President Theodore Roosevelt, a proponent of strenuous exercise, made it known that collegiate football would have to be made safer or it would be outlawed. So in 1906, Camp's American Football Rules Committee adopted several rules that made the game safer – among them, the adoption of the forward pass as an acceptable method of moving the ball down field. While Camp never played for a professional team, without his innovations and continued support of the game it's entirely possible it never would have existed at all, particularly since the National Football League initially used collegiate rules to govern play.

Rules of American Football The rules state that the game has 11 players who can field at any time and the main of the purpose of the game is to move the ball towards the opposition's end zone and ultimately into their end zone (a touchdown). This is achieved by either running with the ball until