How did American football originate?

But one of the circumstances of the game did make it a never-to-be-forgotten moment in sports history – one of the AAA players, William (Pudge) Heffelfinger, was ... the 1880s that a great rugby player from Yale, Walter Camp, pioneered rules changes that slowly transformed rugby into the new game of American Football. read more

The history of American football can be traced to early versions of rugby football and association football. Both games have their origin in varieties of football played in Britain 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. read more

American football grew out of several local variants of rugby. However, during about the first dozen or so years, there was no standard set of rules. The person who gets most of the credit for codifying the current game is probably Walter Camp, a student at Yale who tried to promulgate the first standardized set of rules and also attempted to promulgate rules that made the game fairer. read more

However, it wasn't until the 1880s that a great rugby player from Yale, Walter Camp, pioneered rules changes that slowly transformed rugby into the new game of American Football. Meanwhile, athletic clubs that sponsored a great variety of sports teams became a popular phenomenon in the United States in the years immediately after the Civil War. read more