Today’s Tidbit… 1876 IFA Rule #22: Onside

This is #22 in a series covering football’s original 61 rules adopted by the Intercollegiate Football Association in 1876. We review one rule each Friday.

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The concepts of onside and offside are fundamental to gridiron football, rugby, soccer, and Gaelic football that emerged from a stew of nineteenth-century English games. Each grew from one version or another of those games before taking its shape due to preferences and political or geographic separation.

The rugby version of the kicking game and its offspring -Canadian rugby and American football- shared the same or highly similar rule books in the mid-to-late 1870s, including their concept of onside. The IFA version said:

Rule 22: Every player is on side, but is put off side if he enters a scrummage from his opponents' side; or, being in a scrummage, gets in front of the ball, or when that ball has been kicked, touched, or is being run with by one of his own side behind him (i.e., between himself and his goal-line). No player can be off side in his own goal.