STL All Sports

The new American Intercollegiate Football Association of 1876, with a pioneer membership of 5 colleges-Princeton, Rutgers, Columbia, Harvard and Yale-decided that autumn perhaps was better than the spring for such a rugged game as football, and the schedule was made for games in the fall of 1876. In addition, the members wrote out the first set of rules to govern the then-hybrid game and universal play that year deviated for the first time from the soccer of earlier seasons.

As time went on, the rules makers continually tinkered with the laws and, eventually, the game ceased to be a blend of soccer and rugby and became very definitely a distinct game, hardly related to the fundamental play of either soccer or rugby.

An accurate and amusing description of the evolution of football was given by the late John W. Heisman, a player of a long gone era, later a coach for 36 years and after that an athletic director until his death in 1936. Heisman wrote:

"I played football first in 1886 on a high school team in Western Pennsylvania. I was at Brown University in '87 and '88, and '89, '90 and '91 I played at Penn.

"The length of the field between goal lines in the old days was 110 yards, not 100, as at present. That made longer runs possible. There were no 5-yard stripe lines running across the field. There were no linesmen, and no line sticks. The referee kept track of distance by just dropping a handkerchief where he guessed the ball was last put into play. The players of both sides would slyly try to move that handkerchief, while some team-mate engaged the referee in a discussion of the rules. So we varied action by kicking a handkerchief, as well as a football.