link
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_is_American_football_called_%27football%27
for those of you too lazy
Some might say, simply, "because they kick the football." But the real story is deeper. The origin of Gridiron (American football) is in the history of the world's most popular sport: Football (soccer). When soccer -- more universally known as "football" (which of course makes sense because football players use their feet) -- players decided to change their centuries-old game with restrictions such as the no-use-of- hand rules, people who disliked this broke away to create rugby. In the states we have created our own version of the game under the same old name "football" (Gridiron) with more of a rugby style, the whole time forgetting why we call it that. Here are other answers: * Gridiron (American football) is a derivative of rugby football, and while the feet are used more often in rugby than on the gridiron, much of the game is still played by handling the ball. Both variations are still considered football. * North America style Gridiron (American football) didn't used to allow the "forward pass" and much more of the play involved foot work, such as the "drop kick" and the running punt kick. In the first rules, only the " side pass" was allowed, as long as the two players were side by side, with no forward motion of the ball, similar to rugby rules. The Canadian Football League ( CFL ) still allows a drop kick to score a field goal, and also has a thing called a "safety" when the kicker is able to kick the ball through the end zone, so it lands out of play. Both the NFL and the CFL still have the drop-kick available as a weapon - on the point-after-touchdown, or from the field for 3 points. The "safety" is worth a single point here in Canada. The Canadian game also features the ability, on fumbles to kick the ball, but not on incomplete passes. They also feature a 'touch back' which is a tackle in the end-zone, which is worth two points. == Answer == The global name for football is of course football. The global name for american football is Gridiron. Gridiron is a code of handball and not football. Football is a sport where players control the ball with their feet and only football does this. Gridiron is where hands are used to control a ball. Football has been played for many centuries but had no official rules. The British created rules for football in 1848. After that many codes of handball arose including rugger and gridiron, none of which are codes of football. Football, known only in Canada and the USA as soccer (a nickname termed by the English), is the worlds most popular sport. There are many reasons for this. In football you mainly use your feet, chest and head thus making the ball always open and so the game is fast paced and demands intelligence and a vast array of techniques. In football size is not as important as in Basketball, Gridiron or rugby, so anyone with skill can become good at it. Rich and poor alike can play the game as it requires little equipment at a basic level, although at the top level it is the richest sport on earth by some way. Though Gridiron in US is largely made up of people from poor areas as the NFL is predominantly contested by blacks from downtrodden parts, slums, ghettos, given scholarships to play. Baseball too is played by many poor in the likes of Cuba, Dominican Republic. Football is watched and played by more than any other sport globally mainly due to the excitement of hoping to see a goal and the importance each goal scored has on the flow of the match. Its 90 minutes non stop action. Gridiron on the otherhand is constant stop start and spread out up to a 4 hour marathon....in that period the average actual playing time of an NFL Gridiron game is 12 minutes which is one of endless reasons why its never been accepted outside US. Easy scoring is another reason as teams get the entire width of the pitch and also don't even have to touch the ball down...also get multiple attempts to do so. Each year Football becomes more popular than the year before, no other sports have ever been able to achieve this over such a long period of time. Gridiron on the other hand is played almost entirely by Americans as every attempt made to spread the game has largely failed with leagues folding due to zero fan interest..examples being the "World League"..and more recently "NFL Europe" as one report summed it up by stating "not only did most Europeans not know it collapsed, they didn't even know it existed". Or because the ball is about a foot long. == Answer == It's a reflection of American football's origins. The first football type of game that colleges played in North America was almost identical to what became soccer: You scored by kicking a goal. But every school had its own rules. That was true even over in England, before the Football Association was created to establish a standard set of rules. Over here in the USA, we had no such governing body, so the schools took it upon themselves to sit down and draw up their own set of rules that everyone could agree on.
In an age when overseas communications took weeks, if not months, Americans lived in relative isolation from their football counterparts in Europe and thus weren't able to easily keep tabs on how the game was progressing there. So Americans (and Canadians) took it upon themselves to sort things out on their own and draw up a set of rules that appealed to them. Although most schools in North America were playing some variety of soccer, others, including Harvard, preferred a game that was more like rugby. When the schools first met to discuss a set of rules, Harvard pressed to base their common rules on the English rugby code, and they prevailed. From that point on, the American version of football began to develop out of rugby instead of soccer.
The same process of codifying rules had happened in England, too: After the Football Association was formed, some clubs disagreed over which rules to use -- primarily, the rule that governed the use of hands in the game. Those who favored prohibiting the hands formed the Football Association, and those who wanted to use the hands as part of the game eventually went on to form the first Rugby Football Union.
The American game could just as easily have been called American rugby, but since everyone was already calling it "football," the name stuck. Besides, in the early days, the American game was much more kicking-oriented than it is now. When there was no forward pass and kicks could be taken from anywhere on the field, teams would frequently dropkick to try to score, or they'd use a deep punt as a defensive strategy, if their running game was getting bogged down. It was only when the forward pass was legalized and kicks were limited to those taken from behind the line of scrimmage that the feet began to play a less prominent role in the American game. But again, everyone already called the game football, so there was no reason to change it.
Just keep in mind that what we call "rugby" is actually "rugby football," yet rugby players handle the ball as much as they kick it. What most of the world calls simply "football" is technically "association football," from the name of its founding and governing body. When soccer and rugby split, the association game simply adopted "football" as its name, while rugby football focused on the first part of its name. That doesn't mean one game is football while the other isn't. They're still both football games with a shared origin.
What's more, since the soccer/rugby split, other football-related games have evolved to emphasize other parts of the body to propel the ball. In fact, of the world's six major football codes -- soccer, rugby league, rugby union, Australian rules football, American (gridiron) football, and Gaelic football -- soccer is the only one that prohibits use of the hands. And they all employ kicking strategies to a greater or lesser extent.
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