History Of Football Research Paper

History Of Football

Sometime around 1050, Englishmen dug up a skull of a dane and started to kick it around in frustration toward the dane. It became known as "Kicking the dane's head" .The skull began to hurt the boy's feet, so a boy came up with the idea of using an inflated cow bladder to help their feet(Tuttle, 13).

In 1189, King Henry banned the game, because people were too involved in the game to practice archery and fighting for war(Tuttle, 13). During the 1500's the game shifted to Ireland where people invented the Irish rules that made the game tougher. As the game progressed it turned into soccer and rugby(Tuttle, 14).

On November 6, 1869, Princeton and Rutgers played the first college soccer game(Tuttle,...show more content... After passing became effective the game became more enjoyable and attendance greatly increased

Since teams were not getting a fair amount of talent out of college, The NFL Draft was built in 1936(Encarta). This allowed teams to take turns selecting players out of college. The NFL later allowed juniors to enter into the Draft in 1989(Encarta).

As soon as Professional football became more popular, College football began to also. During the 1930's college football created bowl games for the good teams to compete with one another(Lorrimor and Devaney, 35). Among the most popular bowl games are the Rose Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and the Orange Bowl(Lorrimor and Devaney, 141).

Seeing how much success the National Football League was having, The American Football League (AFL) was made in 1960(Lorrimor and Devaney, 11). The AFL started with just 8 teams, and their play was very sloppy and not professional(Lorrimor and Devaney, 11). After a few seasons the AFL became just as good as the NFL.

It got to a point where the American Football League was considered the better league of the two. The competition between the two leagues was driving both of them into bankruptcy, so in 1966 the leagues finally made peace(Lorrimor and Devaney, 12). They decided not to fight over getting players, and at the end of each season they would have a playoff where the winner of both leagues would face one

The NFL was founded on September 17, 1920 and was known as the American Professional Football Association (APFA). It was renamed in 1922 as the National Football League or NFL. In 1920 there were eleven football franchises to form the first professional football league compared to the 32 teams that form the league now. The original teams are: Canton Bulldogs, Cleveland Tigers, Dayton Triangles, Akron Professionals, Rochester (N.Y.) Jeffersons, Rock Island Independents, Muncie Flyers, Decatur Staleys, Chicago Cardinals, and Hammond Pros. Jim Thorpe was elected as the league's first president. In 1970 NFL's rival league AFL merged their schedules and formed two conferences in which the AFL became AFC and NFL became NFC. Revenue...show more content...

A salary cap is designed to keep player salaries from increasing at the rate they were at the time. The salary cap is basically a set amount of money that each of the NFL's 32 teams is allowed to spend on player salaries for any given year. Since salaries have continued to grow at a rate outpacing the salary cap, teams have found ways to get around the cap. One way is signing bonuses, which don't count toward a team's cap for a given year. A player who receives a signing bonus gets more money for that year than his recorded salary, this way it leaves more room in the cap for the other players. The advantage for the player is that all signing bonus money is guaranteed to be paid, whereas an NFL contract is not guaranteed. All players receive a minimum base salary. The base salary is the value according to his contract. The cap value represents the player's calculated signing bonus, plus salary and other bonuses for the season. The 8–year media deals that the NFL did with ABC, CBS, FOX, ESPN, and Direct TV in January 1998 are worth $17.6 billion. It has fewer games than any other professional sport, but takes in the most money by far. To ABC, broadcastingMonday Night Football for eight seasons was worth $4.4 billion ($550 million per year). CBS agreed to pay $4 billion ($500 million per season) for exclusive rights to AFC games. FOX also agreed $4.4 billion for the right of NFC games. ESPN agreed to pay $4.8 billion ($600 million per year) for Sunday night Get