Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football

Abstract

Existing football literature lacks an adequate history of the creation of American football, primarily because it fails to sufficiently examine individual human contributions, especially the circumstances and role of those contributions in achieving the game’s distinctive and appealing features. Walter Camp is the key person in American football’s development, almost a solitary leader in the game’s early years, influential in development of various component features of the game, and inventor of its most important rule, the downs-and-distance rule (today four downs to advance ten yards). Camp was closely involved in American football throughout his life, a generally positive experience until the game encounters a major crisis in the early 1900s, when American football and its rule makers are attacked because of the game’s perceived brutality. Conflict develops over potential solutions, and Camp is partially defeated with the help of President Theodore Roosevelt, effectively forcing inclusion of forward passing in the game.