Today's Tidbit... Football's Lines of Scrimmage

We often hear about players being offside and violating the line of scrimmage, but many football fans do not realize that American football has two lines of scrimmage or how and when the lines of scrimmage came about. Of course, we'll cover both issues here.

America's first football rules arrived in 1876 when the Intercollegiate Football Association adopted a slightly modified version of the Rugby Union rules. Among the modifications were swapping the term scrimmage for scrummage, as occurred with Rule 11:

A scrimmage (scrummage) takes place when the holder of the ball, being in the field of play, puts it on the ground in front of him, and all who have closed around on the respective sides endeavor to push their opponents back, and by kicking the ball, to drive it in the direction of the opposite goal-line.

Rugby/football at the time was a pushing/kicking game in which a maul or scrum of players in which they advanced the ball by kicking it toward the opponent's goal. Sometimes, the ball leaked out of the group, allowing a player to pick it up and run with it. Four years later, American football adopted the rule of possession and controlled scrimmage in which the team possessing the ball snapped it back using the foot. (The snapper continued having the option to kick the ball forward until 1910, but they took that option only in trick play situations.)

Despite having a controlled scrimmage, there was much less control along the lines than today. As in rugby, the forwards (aka linemen) continued pushing and shoving one another, and players on the defensive side often interfered with the snapper, including knocking the ball away from him. The shoving matches regularly led to retaliatory slugging, leading slugging to be outlawed in 1884, though it did not end there. Football had only one referee and one umpire, and with the opposing forwards standing close to one another, it was difficult to spot punches.