Today's Tidbit... When Football Was A Game Of Millimeters

Pondering yards versus meters (All images are from the Carleton College Archives unless noted)

Since 1912, American football has been played on a field 100 yards long and 160 feet (53 1/3 yards) wide, but in the 1970s, there was a movement to encourage the U.S. to shift to the metric system, culminated by the Metric Conversion Act of 1975. The Act encouraged federal agencies and others to voluntarily switch to the metric system. The movement and the Act had some success, but the American public proved uninterested or unwilling to give an inch in most situations. Today, we need two sets of wrenches and buy Coke in 12-ounce cans and 2-liter bottles, yet the meter as a metric has a limited presence in everyday life.

In the sporting world, Americans once ran on 440-yard tracks and swam in 25-yard pools, while the rest of the world used the metric system, so we converted to their system so we could compare our times. Other countries borrowed baseball and basketball from us, so the bases remain 90 feet apart, and the basket still stands ten feet above the court. Besides Canada, which had its version of football, no one else played American football, so there was little pressure to convert to a metric gridiron.

Neither the NFL nor the NCAA showed any inclination to convert football to a metric game. Yet, some folks, including University of New Orleans chemistry professor Ralph D. Kern, could not leave well enough alone. He argued in 1974 that football's focus on moving the ball in 10-(insert measure of length) increments created an opportunity to educate the public on the beauty and logic of the metric system if only the game underwent a conversion. Kern advocated using a field 100 meters long (about nine yards longer than standard) and 50 meters wide (about two yards wider), with teams gaining ten meters (about eleven yards) for a first down. The coverage of Kern's proposal did not mention the height and width of the goal posts or the size of the ball, so they would presumably be unchanged.