Obviously, anything happening outside of this boxed area is considered to be out-of-bounds. 9144 meters for you metric folks in length (marked by end lines) and 53.3 yards note Which makes a little more sense when you know that's 160 feet. But let's get the basics down before that, shall we?įootball is played on a rectangular field of 120 yards note A yard is exactly. The rest of the game's rules follow from there, and the finer details can be found on The Other Wiki.

That is, rather than free-floating exchanges of possession (as occurs in soccer), there is a team on 'offense' with the ball, and one on 'defense' without it, with a specific line clearly separating 'onside' from 'offside.' These rules established American football as a distinct sport from rugby by the 1880s, and the introduction of a legal forward pass in 1906 further distinguished it from its ancestor. For reasons that are still a little difficult to understand, while the sport very quickly leaned more towards rugby's rules about carrying the ball with your hands, its players kept calling it football even though kicking the ball is a fairly small (though still critical) part of the game.Ī good way of understanding American football is to think of Soccer and Rugby and then ask 'what if we tried to solve for the offside rule?' The key innovations of American football are the idea of the 'snap', the 'line of scrimmage', and the 'down'. As weird as American football might seem to foreigners, it is firmly within the same tradition as other football variants, and actually originates from a hybrid of Association and Rugby codes, which first made their way to America in the late 1860s.

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