Football Soccer College
From the 1870's to the early 1900's American football was adapted from English rugby. The game first became popular in the elite colleges of the East after Harvard refused to play soccer. Rugby football rules were changed to reflect America's desire for a more scientific, rational game. Football became professionalized after it became the most prominent college sport, based on a felt need for a manly game, but the professional game did not challenge the dominance of college football until the 1960's, when television coverage of the National Football League became popular. By that time African Americans had become prominent in both college and professional football. Professional players formed a labor union and demanded a higher portion of the profits being made by team owners. Colleges continued to be "feeders" for the professional leagues, and college and professional teams prospered, by the close of the twentieth century. As a development of football the Eastern elites Americanized the rugby rules that the rest of the colleges and schools accepted as their own. Walter Camp created the American visual of football. Camp began attending football rules meetings in 1877 as a sophomore and continued for the next 48 years. On November 12, 1892 a rivalry between neighboring Allegheny Athletic Association (AAA) and the Pittsburgh Athletic Club (PAC) spurred the making of the first professional football player. The first professional football player was William Heffelfinger. William, of AAA, received $500 for his efforts against PAC. The signing proved instrumental for AAA as Heffelfinger returned a fumble recovery 35 yards for a touchdown. College football was an American symbol of power before the first identified contest in which players were known to be paid. The professional game has been traced to the payment of Walter Heffelfinger, the greatest college football player of the nineteenth century. Heffelfinger was on the first all-American team in 1889 as well as the following two years. In the fall following his graduation from Yale, he was playing for the Chicago Athletic Club. The Allegheny Athletic Association, located near Pittsburgh, saw an opportunity to defeat the rival Pittsburgh Athletic Club with the help of the outsiders and recruited Heffelfinger to play for them. Heffelfinger received the enormous sum of $500, a workers yearly wage, plus expenses. In a contest with high betting stakes, he picked up a fumble and ran for the games only touchdown. Other amateur teams began paying their players in western Pennsylvania, upper New York, and especially Ohio. Most of the better players were collegians, who at times played on Saturdays for college teams and competed under assumed names for pro teams on Sundays. Some of the players were professional baseball players. In the nineteen hundreds, President T. Roosevelt called Harvard, Princeton, and Yale to help save the sport of football from expiration. Concern over the increasing savagery of the game led to its prohibition by some colleges. Nearly one hundred eighty players had suffered serious injuries, and eighteen deaths had been issued from the vicious plays that had become current in practice. At a meeting involving the schools, improvement was agreed upon, and at a following meeting, attended by more than sixty other schools, the group appointed a seven member Rules Committee and set up what would later became known as the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Although everyone just says NCAA for a shorter saying. Football has quit a few of rules and all have different meanings to them like penalties. There are five-yard penalties, ten-yard penalties and fifteen-yard penalties. Five and fifteen yard penalties are more common than ten-yard penalties. Most common five-yard penalties are defensive holding, false start, offside, illegal formation, and illegal shift and motion. Some of the common fifteen-yard penalties are facemask, roughing the passer, clipping, unsportsmanlike conduct, and fair catch interference. Although there are a lot of penalties in the sport of football, not all of them are used or called in every game. Before you can play football you need to have a few padding on. Most of the pads are required in the sport, although certain equipment is for specific positions. All the equipment in the sport serves for one intention, protection. There are different groups of protection like, leg protection, body protection, and head protection. The helmet, most important piece of equipment on a player, protects a lot of parts of the head. The mouthpiece is usually attached to the facemask of the helmet, although some players rather not. Mouthpieces protect your teeth from taking hits to the head. Reason for not damaging your teeth is they are fitted. You have to put it in boiling water then put it in your mouth and press your teeth down on it so it comes out the form or your teeth. There are different kinds of facemasks according to the player's position. Jaw pads, although everyone calls them or knows them by ear pads, obviously protect your jaw area. The last part of the helmet is a chinstrap. The chinstrap is attached to both sides of the helmet so your helmet doesn't slide off while running or getting hit, although you see one flying off once throughout a game. The most important body protection is the shoulder pads. Shoulder pads are used to tackle so you dont get injured. Some come with shock collars and rib protection attached to them already. More people tent to use cowboy collars rather than the shock collars because cowboy collars make you look bigger that what u really are. Usually the only people that use rib protection are the quarterbacks and sometimes wide receivers because they get hit in the ribs the most. Running backs usually use the shock collars under their shoulder pads so it doesn't hurt as bad when you get hit or hit someone to break a tackle. Lineman gloves or reciever gloves are commonly used as well. Lineman gloves have some padding on the knuckles so it doesnt hurt as bad when they get them stuck between helmets. Reciever gloves are used because they add grip to your hands when catching the ball. Hip pads, tailbone pads, thigh and knee pads are called leg protection. Hip and tailbone pads are made of foam and are held in a girdle so they dont move around on you while running. Thigh and knee pads protect your quad muscle and knees when getting hit or falling. These are also held in place by the girdle. Football cleats are another thing a player has to have. There is a variety of cleats but most of them are screw on tips or non-screw on tips. Screw on tips can be changed when the old ones are warn out or for field conditions. Non screw on tips also known as turf shoes, work the same only you dont change them and the cleats are plastic.
Works Cited http://www.football.com/equipment/index.html http://www.football.com/rulesandinfo.html http://www.essortment.com /americanfootbal_rwff.htm
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