American football traces its roots to the popularity of rugby in the Northeast in the years after the Civil War. The game grew from a college pastime in the late 19th century to the most popular sport in the United States in the early 21st century. Along the way, football became ingrained in youth sports, high schools and colleges, and was a hugely successful sport in the U.S and Canada, with professional leagues peppered across the globe.
Early Days
Rugby became more popular than soccer in the late 1860s and 1870s on college campuses in the East. The game of football emerged from rugby at places such as Princeton and Rutgers, where college students and coaches modified existing British rules. A landmark event in 1876, known as the Massasoit Convention, helped establish the foundation for modern American football, as representatives from Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and Yale gathered at the Massasoit House in Massachusetts to work out uniform rules for their modified rugby game.
Football Turns Pro
By the 1890s, football games between teams from local athletic clubs such as the YMCA drew crowds and the first professional football players. The man credited as the first athlete to be paid to play football was John "Pudge" Heffelfinger, a former Yale standout, who was given $500 to play for the Allegheny Athletic Association for a game against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club in 1892. During the next 20 years, more teams started adding paid players. Additionally, the point values for touchdowns and field goals changed during this period. In 1909, for example, a field goal went from four to three points and in 1912, a touchdown was increased from five to six points.
The NFL Emerges
By the 1920s, professional football tackled problems such as players jumping from one team to another for money, lack of organized and solvent team owners and other organizational challenges to smooth out the early years of the National Football League. Initially, the league was called the American Professional Football Association. The first APFA game was played in 1920. Throughout the 1920s, teams that would endure the many changes ahead surfaced, such as the Green Bay Packers, the New York Giants, the Chicago Bears and the Chicago Cardinals, who would eventually move to St. Louis and later Phoenix. The NFL adopted its own rule book in 1933, having used the collegiate rules previously.
World War II and the Aftermath
World War II wiped out some rosters as players took off for war, and some teams took a year off from competition because of the war. Players such as the Washington Redskins' Sammy Baugh emerged as heroes, and in the 1950s, football emerged as a popular TV attraction. The 1958 championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants was the first championship game to go to overtime. The game, which the Colts won 23-17, has been called "The Greatest Game Ever Played." After Pete Rozelle became commissioner of the NFL in 1960, the sport exploded in popularity.
Football and American Culture
Also in the 1940s and 1950s, football was established in high schools across the country, and the college game's popularity soared. College bowl games drew huge crowds and large TV audiences. As southern colleges began relaxing rules and policies on black students, many of these schools emerged as perennial football powerhouses. The NFL continued to rake in big ticket revenues at the stadiums and from TV. In 1970, NFL football expanded from Sunday afternoons only to a game every Monday night in a phenomenon that would grab huge ratings year after year. Though the broadcast teams for the Monday Night Football changed from time to time, fans couldn't resist bringing their passion from Sundays to Mondays, too.
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