Why do we call it Football

[Don Otreply]

Being that feet by and large do not come into contact with the ball, on top of that, the league is trying to get rid of the kicking aspect all together, the game is in reality “American Rugby”. Why keep a title/name that has little to nothing to do with the sport as it is played? What would you all do if the league changed the name to reflect the actual game? 

[wagon127]

The same reason Greenland is called Greenland, even tho theres nothing Green about it.

Edited January 26, 2020 by wagon127

[BuffaninATL]

it's already going to be a long off-season ......

[Ridgewaycynic2013]

11 minutes ago, Don Otreply said:

What would you all do if the league changed the name to reflect the actual game? 

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly?  ?

Edited January 26, 2020 by Ridgewaycynic2013
That’s just the officiating...

[Don Otreply]

1 minute ago, wagon127 said:

The same reason Greenland is called Greenland, even tho theres nothing Green about it.

Well, Greenland was given that name to Entice people to settle there ages ago, so I yes you may be correct, it’s a lie.... ?

1 minute ago, Ridgewaycynic2013 said:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly?  ?

Maybe the random rules enforcement league... 

[BuffAlone]

29 minutes ago, Don Otreply said:

Being that feet by and large do not come into contact with the ball, on top of that, the league is trying to get rid of the kicking aspect all together, the game is in reality “American Rugby”. Why keep a title/name that has little to nothing to do with the sport as it is played? What would you all do if the league changed the name to reflect the actual game? 

well, the game begins with a foot making contact with a ball...so there's that?

[shane nelson]

Cause soccer was already taken ?  PS can't really believe I am responding to this 

[Pine Barrens Mafia]

26 minutes ago, Gugny said:

 

This is a great question!  I often find myself wondering about similar things.  Like, why do writers/journalists always use "she" and "her" as pronouns whilst writing about Sarah Huckabee?

 

Talk about an unsolved mystery!

 

Same could be said about Hillary no?

[FishSquisher]

32 minutes ago, Gugny said:

 

This is a great question!  I often find myself wondering about similar things.  Like, why do writers/journalists always use "she" and "her" as pronouns whilst writing about Sarah Huckabee?

 

Talk about an unsolved mystery!

 

5 minutes ago, Joe in Winslow said:

 

Same could be said about Hillary no?

C'mon guys, we're not supposed to make fun of transgender people anymore...

[Matt_In_NH]

I heard it was going to be TBI-ball or "mush-brain" but that scared people away.

Edited January 26, 2020 by mattynh

[2020 Our Year For Sure]

I think it's because the ball is a foot long

[Foxx]

1 minute ago, 2020 Our Year For Sure said:

I think it's because the ball is a foot long

no, thats a hot dog.

[Tenhigh]

My Irish buddy always brings this up. He says it should bee called throwball.  

 

 

I reply that soccer should then be called kickball.  

[\GoBillsInDallas/]

 

[Ridgewaycynic2013]

9 minutes ago, Tenhigh said:

My Irish buddy always brings this up. He says it should bee called throwball.  

 

 

I reply that soccer should then be called kickball.  

No, kickball is baseball with your feet.

[Bronxbomber21]

1 hour ago, wagon127 said:

The same reason Greenland is called Greenland, even tho theres nothing Green about it.

The same reason we Americans call a driveway a driveway even though we park in it and a parkway a parkway and we drive on it..... Because we can 

[Ridgewaycynic2013]

Just now, Bronxbomber21 said:

The same reason we Americans call a driveway a driveway even though we park in it and a parkway a parkway and we drive on it..... Because we can 

That, for all intents and purposes, is your definition of ‘manifest destiny’.

[Bronxbomber21]

15 minutes ago, \GoBillsInDallas/ said:

 

Its nice to see what the game was like before the refs got payed off . i saw a lot of real blind side blocks in this film that weren't called

[Motorin']

2 hours ago, Don Otreply said:

Being that feet by and large do not come into contact with the ball, on top of that, the league is trying to get rid of the kicking aspect all together, the game is in reality “American Rugby”. Why keep a title/name that has little to nothing to do with the sport as it is played? What would you all do if the league changed the name to reflect the actual game? 

 

This is super interesting to my inner nerd. Our football, soccer and rugby were the same game about 150 years ago. Or rather, there were as many iterations and rules of the game as there were colleges. 

 

In the US, as in England, the rules of the game were determined by the home team. One thing that was common was that all fields had soccer goals. In US college football, long before down and distance, and before the Touch Down was invented at McGill University in Montreal, the way a team scored was by running or kicking the ball down field and into the soccer goal. 

 

An oddity of the time was that there were no rules pertaining to how many players could be on the field at a time, and since there was no down or distance it was a free moving game, like soccer and rugby. So the home team was at a decided advantage. They would stash 20-30 defenders in front of the goal to make a human shield and block the net so that even if the opposing team could get the ball down field past their 200-300 man mob, it was virtually impossible to score. This seeming unfair practice resulted in the American football field goal posts that we know today. The posts were placed on the top corners of the soccer goals in order to prevent teams from blocking the goal with men. That's why you'll still see some high schools with soccer goals and field goal posts on top of them to this day. 

 

After 18 players died during the 1904 season, President Theodore Roosevelt threatened to cancel the sport unless rules and safety equipment were put in place. This lead to leather helmets, and down and distance being introduced into the game... 

 

In England, there were similar problems with differing rules. They decided to encode the "Law of Football," and enacted the oldest existing body in sports, the Footbll Association, or FA. The FA decided on rules that became English football or soccer, essentially making it illegal to tackle and stomp people. The schools that preferred the more violent aspects of the game were centered at Rugby school, and encoded the laws of Rugby Football. 

 

The British press, needing to abbreviate the two sports in the newspaper settled on RUG for Rugby football, but couldn't use ASS for Association Football. Instead, they used SOC, which lead to the slang term in England - Soccer. In America, we picked up on the English slang, while they stopped using so long ago that calling it soccer seems foreign to them...

 

In short, when college football began here in the US, there was no forward pass, the ball had to be lateraled or kicked forward, and scoring happened when the ball was kicked into a soccer goal. So it was football, for all intents and purpose. The TD only came into our game after Harvard traveled to McGill in 1874 and liked the rule so much that they incorporated it into their rules back in Cambridge. 

 

Today's soccer, rugby and American football all have common origins prior to each of the games carving out their own unique rules. 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 26, 2020 by Motorin'

[KD in CA]

Easy fix, just add a 'P' in there.

 

NFPL......National Forward Pass League.