The Birth of American Football

1911 Carlisle team under Pop Warner

This Super Bowl weekend, I found myself listening to an interesting program on National Public Radio's Radiolab about the birth of American Football (January 29, 2020).  Though Rutgers certainly claims credit for the "First Intercollegiate Football Game," we know that the game that Rutgers won over Princeton looked a lot more like rugby than the American Football that we know today.  The program focuses on the evolution of the game, which began at the collegiate level in the late 19th and early 20th century, when it was dominated by the Ivy Leagues (especially Yale and Harvard), and still very much like rugby, but popular because it was thought to help create fully rounded and "manly" men.  The rules changed, though, after the rise of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where Richard Henry Pratt and, later, Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner helped to change the rules so that the faster but lighter Native American players would be better able to compete with the bigger Ivy players.  I had some exposure to the importance of Carlisle from the PBS documentary, Jim Thorpe, The World's Greatest Athlete, which also touches on the way that Carlisle used football for fundraising and recruitment purposes (in ways familiar to us today).  But I really learned a lot from this program, which also talks about the rising awareness of concussions in the sport.
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