The Evolution of Football’s Chains and Down Boxes

Although football's origin story tells us Rutgers and Princeton played the first football game in 1869, those teams and others played soccer, rugby, folk games, or a mix of the three through most of the 1870s. Football as a distinct game arrived only when teams began playing by rules that violated rugby's core principles. These included allowing interference (now called blocking) in 1879, the controlled scrimmage in 1880, and the 1882 requirement that teams gain five yards in three downs to retain possession of the ball.

The last of those changes had an immediate impact on the football field layout and longer-term effects on the tools used to monitor teams' progress in earning first downs. The rule-makers of 1882 added the requirement to stripe the field every five yards, primarily to assist referees in monitoring whether offenses gained the five yards in a possession. That five-yard ruler was sufficiently accurate for the open play of the 1880s, but the arrival of the closed, mass-and-momentum play of the 1890s meant football became a game of inches, and the five-yard stripes no longer provided the needed precision.

Enter the chain gang, whose equipment and procedures were defined for decades by custom and regional officiating organizations rather than the national rules committee. Football's rule-makers added a third officiating role -the linesman- in 1894 with few instructions for how one performed the role. We know some locations had people on the sideline manning the chains by then -the linesman's flag are mentioned in the rules of an 1894 board game- but it was not until 1898 that the rules committee recommended teams "…provide two light poles about six feet in length and connected at the lower ends by a stout cord or chain exactly five yards long." Two years later, they recommended the home team supply two assistants to operate those chains, at which point the linesman became known as the head linesman. The final significant change for the chains came in 1906 when a new rule required offenses to gain ten yards in three downs, forcing everyone to double the length of their stout cord or chain.

Since then, the chains have witnessed little change. Sure, some placed pennants atop the poles, others added lights or placed roundels atop the slightly taller poles, but today's chains look and function much like the original.

The linesman's assistants hold the chains with pennants atop the poles. In between is the linesman holding a short rod with a pennant. (1914 Lehigh yearbook)