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The history of American football can be traced to early versions of rugby football and association football.Both games have their origin in multiple varieties of football played in the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century, in which a football is kicked at a goal or kicked over a line, which in turn were based on the varieties of English public school football games descending from medieval ...
Other codes of football share a common history with American football. Canadian football is a form of the game that evolved parallel to American football, through its adoption of the Burnside rules in 1903. While both games share a common history and basic structure, there are some important differences between the two. [245]
Rugby, like American football, is a sport in which two competing teams vie for control of a ball, which can be kicked through a set of goalposts or run into the opponent's goal area to score points. [11] What is considered to be the first American football game was played on November 6, 1869, between Rutgers and Princeton, two college teams ...
The modern history of American football can be considered to have begun after the 1932 NFL Playoff Game, which was the first American football game to feature hash marks, the legalization of the forward pass anywhere behind the line of scrimmage, and the movement of the goal posts back to the goal line; it was also the first indoor game since 1902.
The history of sports in the United States reveals that American football, baseball, softball, and indoor soccer evolved from older British sports—rugby football, British baseball, rounders, and association football, respectively. Over time, these sports diverged significantly from their European origins, developing into distinctly American ...
Gameplay in American football consists of a series of downs, individual plays of short duration, outside of which the ball is or is not in play. These can be plays from scrimmage – passes, runs, punts or field goal attempts (from either a place kick or a drop kick) – or free kicks such as kickoffs and fair catch kicks.
The National Football League (NFL) made the college rule book its own until 1932, when the league altered a few rules for its own use and appointed its own standing Rules Committee. [93] This shortly created a need for a parallel The National Football League: Professional Football Rules guide, which Spalding issued annually from 1935 to 1940. [94]
The American Football League (AFL) was a major professional American football league that operated for ten seasons from 1960 until 1970, when it merged with the older National Football League (NFL), and became the American Football Conference. The upstart AFL operated in direct competition with the more established NFL throughout its existence.