American Football

American Football | The US Trends | American football, known in the United States simply as football, is a competitive team sport known for its physical roughness despite being a highly strategic game. The object of the game is to score points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone, kicking a field goal, or scoring a safety by tackling an opposing team's ball-carrier in his own end zone. The ball can be advanced either by carrying it or by throwing it to a teammate. The winner is the team with the most points when the time expires and the last play ends.

American football descended from rugby football, played in the United Kingdom in the mid-nineteenth century. The first game of college football was played on November 6, 1869 between Rutgers University and Princeton University. The first modernized game was on June 4, 1875 between Harvard University and Tufts University.

Professional football developed in the mill towns of Pennsylvania and the American Midwest in the early twentieth century. The National Football League (NFL) was founded in 1920 in Canton, Ohio, and is now comprised of 32 teams. Today, football is the most popular American sport, with the day of the NFL championship—the Super Bowl—being one of the biggest occasions for social gatherings in the United States.

Outside the United States, the sport is referred to as American football to differentiate it from other football games. In Australia and New Zealand, the game is known as Gridiron, although in America the word "gridiron" refers only to the playing field. Variations of the game include Canadian football and Arena football.

American football dates from the early 1800s when teams in various colleges and secondary schools met. They usually played by kicking or batting at the ball, as in varieties of football played in the United Kingdom. In 1867, the convergence of various developments at Eastern colleges and schools led to the codification of American football. Rutgers University and Princeton University played the first recorded game of American college football on November 6, 1869 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, won by Rutgers 6-4. Today, Rutgers is popularly recognized as the "Birthplace of College Football." However, English Football Association rules were followed in this Princeton/Rutgers contest; participants were only allowed to kick the ball, not handle it; and each side had 25 men. Thus, some see the Princeton-Rutgers meeting of 1869 as the first intercollegiate game of "soccer" in America, but not American football (Smith 1988). In 1870, Rutgers invited Columbia for a game, and the popularity of intercollegiate competition in football would spread throughout the country.

Dartmouth College students played a football-like game now known as "Old Division Football," for which they published rules in 1871. In 1873, Columbia, Rutgers, Princeton, and Yale met to formulate the intercollegiate football rules for the games they played. This meeting is notable for two reasons. First, it is the first attempt at making a single set of rules for all schools to follow. Second, Harvard refused to join the meeting. - The US Trends