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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]
For a free-kick down, the neutral zone is 10 yards wide and for a scrimmage down it is as wide as the length of the football. It is established when the ball is marked ready for play. No player may legally be in the neutral zone except for the snapper on scrimmage downs, and no one except the kicker and the holder for free kick downs.
The first American football game was played on November 6, 1869, between two college teams, Rutgers and Princeton, using rules based on the rules of soccer at the time. A set of rule changes drawn up from 1880 onward by Walter Camp , the "Father of American Football", established the snap , the line of scrimmage , eleven-player teams, and the ...
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 ...
The American Bowl games began in 1986 and continued until 2005 at various sites in countries around the world. Then in 1991, the league formed the World League of American Football, later known as NFL Europe and still later as NFL Europa, a developmental league that had teams in Britain, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. The NFL shut down ...
This category is designed to hold historical material about the sport of American football, which forms part of the wider study of sports history. There is a great deal of historical material in general American football articles which are not included here, such as articles about individual teams and competitions.
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.