The greatest challenge facing football today is concern about its link to brain injury and CTE. Safety-related concerns are not new to football as the game's leaders have enacted a variety of rules over the years to reduce the number of deaths and injuries. Football aficionados know the most important set of safety-related rules gained approval in 1906, but significant rule changes also occurred in 1903. Unfortunately, these had limited impact on player safety and helped set the stage for more radical reforms three years later.
Football's rule makers of 1903 made three key rule changes to enhance player safety. The first instituted the roughing the punter penalty, which gained approval for reasons that are not obvious and will be discussed in a subsequent post. The second rule change required offenses to have seven men on the line of scrimmage at the snap and the third brought the checkerboard pattern that marked football fields from 1903 to 1909. This post will cover the second and third rules changes, but to understand the need for these rules, we need to step back further in football history.
American football's direct ancestors were centuries-old games played in England in which the population of men from one town attempted to kick an inflated pig's bladder into a neighboring town. The neighboring town's men objected and fought to kick the bladder in the other direction. Those games evolved into a loose confederation of games that split into the Association game (soccer) and rugby in the mid-1800s.
The 1869 Rutgers-Princeton game, considered to be the first American college football game, used rules resembling soccer, but the colleges settled on playing a slightly modified form of rugby in 1876. Those teams had fifteen players per side until Walter Camp and his Yale buddies convinced everyone in 1880 that playing eleven players per side would make the game more open and entertaining.
As the game developed over the next two decades, it became common practice for the eleven offensive players to align in the traditional T formation, which had seven men on the line of scrimmage with little or no spacing between them. The quarterback aligned a step or two behind the center with the other three backs in a straight line four to five yards behind the line. (In an earlier version of the alignment, the backs formed a diamond so the deepest man was the "fullback," the middle backs on either side were the "halfbacks," and the man closest to the line was the "quarterback.")
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