By the mid-19th century, the British had refined football into competing versions, one founded at Rugby School, another which came to be known as soccer. But these were intramural sports in Britain. It was on Nov. 6, 1869, that students from Princeton and Rutgers met in New Brunswick, N.J., for what Davis says was "the first intercollegiate football game, not only in America, but in the world."
That game was more like soccer than the sport USC and Texas will play next week. But the college boys who became the Founding Fathers of American football were never satisfied with the rules as they were. Just like the great capitalists who built America's industrial might in that era, they approached their project with entrepreneurial zeal. They kept re-inventing the game to make it a better fit for our national character, sometimes adjusting it to make it safer, but always insisting it demand ingenuity and courage from those who played it.
When Walter Camp of Yale convinced the fledgling intercollegiate rules committee in 1880 to abandon rugby-type continuous play and start individual plays with a center snapping the ball (originally by foot) back to a quarterback, the American game turned its back forever on its European forebears. Since then, there have been a 125 years of unending innovation, ranging from the forward pass to the use of instant replay.
But the ultimate greatness of tackle football is not found in the impact America has had on the game, but in the impact the game has had on America.
A survey by the National Foundation of State High School Associations shows that about 1 million U.S. high school boys played football in 2004. That surely included not only some of the tallest boys and fastest boys -- and the ones who could, in springtime, accurately guide a narrow metal tube into a small, round ball -- but also those destined to be punters, or offensive guards, or only play on special teams.
Football is often cited as a true meritocracy, which it certainly is. But what American boys learn playing our national game is that it doesn't necessarily grant its greatest rewards to those with the greatest natural talent. Victories, they discover, are more often won with creativity, courage and perseverance than size, speed and brute strength.
Just as in our free economy, it is the man who couldn't go to college who sometimes builds the million-dollar business. So, too, in our national game, it is the quarterback who couldn't throw a perfect spiral who sometimes wins the bowl game.