The New Yorker:

By Ian Crouch
November 19, 2015

The young men of the 1879 Yale University varsity football team look like an eager and capable bunch, but they don’t look much like football players, at least not how we know them today. Dressed in button-up tunics and knickers, with leather shoes on their feet and little beanie caps on their heads, they might, were they to take one step onto a modern field, look across the line at their opponents—heavily muscled, helmeted, and armored—and promptly retire to the bar for brandy and cigars, their honor bruised but their bodies still intact. In their day, though, they were a fearsome bunch, among the best and most physically brutish players in the country, and were surely big men on campus—none more so than their captain, a lithe, mustachioed twenty-year-old named Walter Camp, who would enjoy minor glory as a player, but would go on—as an adviser, inventor, coach, sportswriter, rule-maker, and general celebrant and impresario of all things sport—to become regarded as the father of American football.

If Camp, who died in 1925, appeared this fall for a game at the Yale Bowl (to say nothing of watching Alabama or Notre Dame, or an N.F.L. game) he’d likely marvel at the speed, size, and skill of the players; the fervid, costumed crowds; the massive apparatus of television production; the array and cost of products for sale—in short, at all the many parts of the great American football apparatus. But as Julie Des Jardins, a professor of history at Baruch College, demonstrates in her incisive and comprehensive new biography of Camp, the modern game still bears his imprint, both on and off the field. Camp invented the concept of downs, the line of scrimmage, the snap, the basic formations of the offense and defense, and is said to have thrown the first forward pass on record (though he would later campaign, unsuccessfully, against adding it to the sport’s official rules). 

Go to link