Love it or Hate It

 Football is Here to Stay

Welcome to our new look and a great give away drawing. Details at end of blog.

My topic this month is for sports enthusiasts across the land. If you don’t like sports of any kind, you probably won’t care about the history of football.  Every fall a phenomena known as “football fever” takes over a large per cent of the population as evidenced by the thousands who attend or view on television the hundreds of high school, college and professional games available every week from August to February. As the mother of three sons always involved in sports, my husband and I attended high school games every weekend for many years, and we took our boys to college games as often as possible when they were growing up.

However, just as many don’t care a whit about football or any other sports and dread the constant bombardment of sports new on television and radio and in the newspapers. That’s what makes us a great people. Diversity makes the world a more interesting place to live.

For those who are fans, football goes back a lot further than I even imagined. As early as 1820 the boys at Princeton and Harvard played different variations of the game largely based on the game of rugby. Dartmouth joined them in the 1830’s. The games were much more violent and dangerous than today’s games since they were a mob-style, free-for-all games that resulted in serious injury to players. Then in the 1860’s the game was banned at both Yale and Harvard.

From there it evolved into a game even more like rugby and was played by boys in prep schools. The Oneida Football Club was organized in 1862 and believed to be the first formal football club in the United States. In 1873, representatives from Columbia, Rutgers, Princeton, and Yale Universities met in New York City to formulate the first intercollegiate football rules for the increasingly popular game. These four teams established the Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA) and set 15 as the number of players allowed on each team.

Finally, in 1878, Walter Camp from Yale proposed new rules that moved the game closer to what we see today. The IFA’s rules committee, led by Camp, soon cut the number of players from fifteen to eleven, and also instituted the size of the playing field, at one hundred ten yards. In 1882 Camp also introduced the system of downs. After first allowing three attempts to advance the ball five yards, in 1906 the distance was changed to ten yards. The fourth down was added in 1912.

Many still held concerns over the number of injuries in the brutality of the game. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt called on Princeton, Yale and Harvard to come up with new rules that would save the game from demise. From those meetings, the National Collegiate Athletic Association was born. The NCAA is still the major rule making force behind college football. The picture is from a game in 1906.

In 1892 the Allegheny Athletic Association football team defeated the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. The game wasn’t important, but the fact that one of the AAA players was paid $500 to play did become important. With that one act, pro football made its debut. No one had the slightest clue as to what would transpire in the next 100 years with the popularity of the sport.

In 1920, even more history was made when a group of seven men, including the legendary Jim Thorpe, met to organize football into a professional league in Canton, Ohio. From that meeting the American Professional Football Conference was born and is the forerunner of the National Football League. 

Today we have teams from colleges of all sizes playing each week to crowds that range from a few thousands to close to one hundred

thousand. Fans paint their faces and wear their school colors to support their men on the field.

This picture is one of our grandson Seth charging the field before a Baylor game. He and all the freshmen are decked out in their gold to support the Bears. He's the on the left waving his green cap. This is a tradition in which two of our sons and two of our grandsons have participated. 

Professional teams take the field each week with some players earning millions of dollars to play the sport. Whether you love it or hate it, football is a part of our history and a big part of our culture today. 

Do you have a favorite sports team from high school, college or professional?

Be sure to enter the drawing for our big give away. I'm giving away a basket of Sweet Treats from Texas featuring Texas pecans as part of HHH's big renovation giveaway. Included are pralines and chocolate pecan clusters. The drawing will be held at the end of September with a $50 gift certificate as the grand prize. 

Martha Rogers is a free-lance writer and was named Writer of the Year at the Texas Christian Writers Conference in 2009 and writes a weekly devotional for ACFW. Martha and her husband Rex live in Houston where they enjoy spending time with their grandchildren.  A former English and Home Economics teacher, Martha loves to cook and experimenting with recipes and loves scrapbooking when she has time. She has written two series, Winds Across the Prairie and Seasons of the Heart as well as several other novels and novellas. Love Stays True, the first book in her new series, The Homeward Journey, released in May, 2013 and book 2, Love Finds Faith, in February 2014, and book 3, Love Never Fails releases November 4.

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