What Do You Know About Football? Part 2: American Football

Think you know football? Think again…This is a multi-part series explaining the different codes of football, their origins, current state and future. Most football fans follow only one code, and this series aims to expand their knowledge of the different football games out there.

American Football: America's Favorite Game (sorry baseball...)

We begin our alphabetically-ordered journey through football with American football. While many associate America with baseball, American Football (aka Gridiron Football or Pigskin or just “football” in the US) is now considered the national sport. How big has it become? Well american football is the most watched sport in the country, ahead of NASCAR at second place and baseball at third. The most watched sporting event in America is the championship known as the Super bowl. Fantasy football and gambling have brought millions of fans in the US to the game and away from baseball. Not only has the professional game become the biggest sport in America, but college and high school levels game are also huge in all parts of the nation. The game has struggled to gain fans outside of the US however, with only Canada showing interest in the sport because they have a very similar game (Canadian Football). To many outside the US, it may seem strange that Americans show all of this interest in a game that has long been described as “rugby mixed with chess and padding”. But to truly understand the sport and its grip on the American public, we must look at how the game was invented by Walter Camp:  “the father of American football”.

Quick history refresher: Walter Camp and the 1958 NFL Championship

It is obvious even to the casual observer that American football holds many similarities with Rugby Football. That is because it was invented by an American rugby player named Walter Camp. Walter Camp dominated almost every sport at Yale University in the 1870’s, but rugby was his most cherished of sports. Perhaps the only thing he loved more than rugby was chess, and it was this chess-rugby duality of Walter Camp that gave birth to American football. He loved taking the time to setup a strategy and then execute it in a play just like chess players do, but he realized that rugby was a free flowing sport where players relied more on a mixture of raw toughness, improvisation and athleticism than any carefully pre-planned strategies like in chess.  Walter Camp decided to make a new code of football that used the rugby rules but inserted elements of chess such as start-stop plays and tightly specialized positions. Many will tell you that this fits the American psyche perfectly, as many Americans describe the game in terms of coaches as generals, who lead their highly specialized well-armoured soldiers into a battle where strategic planning is paramount. From players like tight-end Killen Winslow saying they’re “a firkin’ soldier” to coaches using war metaphors to describe their plan for the game to "blitz" and “gain territory”, the sport has earned its stripes as America’s favourite metaphor for war. From here on the game began its rise, first being a game of primarily Midwest industrial town but slowly expanding elsewhere. Many attribute its current popularity to the 1958 NFL Championship game which was the first overtime NFL game is history and created the “sudden death” overtime that became so popular nationwide. Journalist Tex Maule said of the contest:  "This, for the first time, was a truly epic game which inflamed the imagination of a national audience." Today “Bowl Games”, a college tradition, get nationwide audience and are boosted by old-standing traditions between colleges.

The basic differences between American football and Rugby football

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