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College football (French: football universitaire) is gridiron football that is played by teams of amateur student-athletes at universities and colleges. It was through collegiate competition that gridiron football first gained popularity in the United States .
Sep 8, 2024 · The first college football game was played in 1869 between Rutgers University and the College of New Jersey (now known as Princeton University). The first college football rules were written...
Sep 12, 2023 · American football has become deeply ingrained in U.S. culture, with millions eagerly awaiting kickoff each fall Saturday. However, the sport we know today emerged from humble beginnings in the late 1800s. Tracing the origins and evolution of college football reveals how it grew from an informal pastime to a multi-billion dollar industry.
Jan 24, 2024 · In 1920, the American Professional Football Association (APFA) was founded, which two years later became the National Football League (NFL). The NFL started modestly but quickly began to overshadow college football in terms of popularity.
- Overview
- College football’s golden age
- Birth and early growth of professional football
After World War I had put the game temporarily on hold, college football fully came of age in the 1920s, when it became widely recognized as America’s greatest sporting spectacle (as opposed to baseball, which was the national pastime). The first football stadiums at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were modeled on the ancient Greek stadium and the Rom...
After World War I had put the game temporarily on hold, college football fully came of age in the 1920s, when it became widely recognized as America’s greatest sporting spectacle (as opposed to baseball, which was the national pastime). The first football stadiums at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were modeled on the ancient Greek stadium and the Rom...
As college football thrived, professional football struggled for respectability. The group of teams that became the National Football League (NFL) was organized in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association (changing its name in 1922), with Jim Thorpe as its nominal president. Former (and sometimes current) college stars had played for money since 1892, initially for athletic clubs in western Pennsylvania, then for the openly professional teams that were formed in mostly small towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. In its first season, in 1920, the APFA had 14 teams, including George Halas’s Decatur (Illinois) Staleys, who in 1922 became the Chicago Bears, the NFL’s dominant team for much of its formative period. Joe Carr, an experienced promoter, succeeded Thorpe as president in 1921 and remained in that position until his death in 1939. Over the 1920s and early 1930s, league membership fluctuated between 8 and 22 teams, the majority not in large cities but in towns such as Akron, Canton, Dayton, and Massillon, all in Ohio; Racine, Wisconsin; and Rockford, Illinois. With professionalism widely regarded as the greatest danger to college football, professional football was little more respectable than professional wrestling. Red Granges’s turning professional in 1925 provided a temporary boost to the professional game, but interest in professional football could be sustained only in those communities with franchises.
The NFL took its modern shape in 1933 under Carr’s guidance, when it was reorganized in two five-team divisions of big-city clubs (with Green Bay the lone exception) whose leaders would meet at the end of the season for the NFL title. In the 1930s professional football was predominantly a working-class spectator sport. The preseason College All-Star Game, created by Chicago Tribune sports columnist Arch Ward in 1934 to pit the reigning NFL champion against a team of just-graduated collegians, helped break down the barrier between college and professional football. Over the 1930s and ’40s the professional sport’s popularity grew in NFL cities, particularly those such as New York without a major state university with which to compete for the community’s loyalty. Minor professional leagues such as the American Association, Dixie League, and Pacific Coast Professional Football League had relatively modest local followings. The NFL was also successful enough to attract competitors. The American Football League was formed in 1926 by Grange and his agent, but it lasted just one year. A second (1936–37) and third (1940–41) AFL were also formed. Finally, the All-America Football Conference (1946–1949) seriously challenged the existing league and contributed the Cleveland Browns, San Francisco 49ers, and a first version of the Baltimore Colts to an expanded NFL in 1950. Yet professional football could offer the public nothing comparable to the compelling rivalries, youthful enthusiasm, and colourful pageantry of college football. It was only in the 1950s with the arrival of television that professional football could reach beyond the franchise cities to become a national sport.
- Michael Oriard
The popularity of college football grew as it became the dominant version of the sport in the United States for the first half of the 20th century. Bowl games, a college football tradition, attracted a national audience for college teams.
Mar 28, 2014 · College football, being part of the world, is also not the way it used to be. It's evolved quite a bit since the 19th century, mostly for the better. And as you'll discover below, a band of...
