College football

College football is the collegiate form of American football. American football was born in American colleges. The first football game ever played took place played on November 6, 1869, between Rutgers and Princeton, two New Jersey colleges. It is a fall sport, although the college championship games are played in January.

College football has become an extremely popular sport and a lucrative moneymaker for big-time colleges and universities, which promote themselves based on the huge, live crowds and television audiences the games attract as well as on the enthusiasm of alumni boosters. The money associated with the sport has drawn strong criticism in several areas. Nevertheless, individual schools treasure the sport as a way of establishing an identity and developing a following.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) oversees college football. It divides all schools with sports into three groups, called divisions, which are based on how many sports the school offers and how many are offered for men and for women. In addition, Division I and II schools can offer athletic scholarships to students; Division III schools do not. Division I football schools are further divided into Division I-A and Division I-AA.

Origins and History

The early growth of football was relatively slow and marred by charges that it caused serious injuries. Three factors, however, helped its growth. One was the set of rule changes developed and promoted by Walter Camp, a former player at Yale University and the college’s eventual football coach. Camp’s innovations, adopted in the 1880s and 1890s, included teams of eleven players, the position of quarterback, the use of signals to call plays, the use of the line of scrimmage, the need to advance the ball a certain distance in a set number of plays to maintain possession, and the allocation of different point values for different scoring plays. The second factor was the adoption of the forward pass in 1906 as a method for moving the ball, although passing did not become a major strategic element of the game until the 1910s. The third factor was the creation of the NCAA in 1910 to oversee the sport and take steps to rein in the violent play.

Scoring changes took effect in the 1900s and 1910s that set the values of safeties at two points, field goals at three, and touchdowns at six. The game evolved over time, as coaches introduced new innovations. In the 1930s, Clark Shaughnessy of the University of Chicago had his center give the ball directly to the quarterback, a tactic that contributed to the growing importance of the quarterback. In the 1940s, Army’s Red Blaik first began using some players as offensive or defensive specialists; prior to this time, players played both defense and offense. The 1950s saw the wider adoption of plastic helmets and metal face masks as well as rule changes that added the two-point conversion option after a touchdown and moved the goalposts back.

Conferences were in the sport from the beginning, as Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia formed the Intercollegiate Football Association in 1874. The next conference to form was the Western Conference, precursor to the Big Ten; the Western Conference appeared in 1895. Others followed. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the makeup of conferences changed significantly, and the Big Ten—once limited to ten Midwestern schools—numbered fourteen schools, including Penn State, Rutgers, and the University of Maryland. Nevertheless, some conferences remain influential, including the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and the Pacific Conference (Pac-12). Some schools, such as Notre Dame and Brigham Young University, are independents that are not associated with any conference.

Bowl games, which take place after the regular season, have also been part of college football for decades. The first bowl game was played in Pasadena, California, in 1902, although that game did not became an annual contest until 1916, and it was not called the Rose Bowl until the 1920s. Other established bowl games include the Orange Bowl (established in Miami 1935), the Sugar Bowl (New Orleans, 1935), and the Cotton Bowl (begun in 1937 and now played in Arlington, Texas). By the mid-2010s, three dozen bowl games were played annually. Only Division I-A schools are eligible for bowl games.

Rules and Regulations

American football is played between two eleven-person squads on a field one hundred yards long and 53.33 yards wide, with two 10-yard deep end zones at either end. One team, the offense, attempts to move the ball past the goal line at the defensive team’s end of the field. The offensive team can do so when a runner carries the ball over that line or when a player in that end zone catches a pass, which is a ball thrown to him in the air. A player can also score after catching a pass on the open field and then running into the end zone. Achieving this feat, a touchdown, earns six points. The team can then either kick the ball between the goalposts for an additional point or run or pass it across the goal line again for two points. The team with the most points at the end of the fourth quarter or at the end of an overtime period wins the game.

An offense moves the distance down the field in a series of plays. It has four opportunities, called downs, to gain at least ten yards. If it does so, it earns a new first down and is thus given four new chances to move the next ten yards. The offense retains the ball as long as it gains first downs. If it cannot do so, the team on defense gets the ball and becomes the offense, moving in the opposite direction. The offense can also lose possession of the ball through either a fumble (a ball carrier drops the ball and the other team takes possession) or an interception (when a defender catches a forward pass thrown by an offensive player).

The game is divided into four quarters of fifteen minutes each. The clock is controlled by the referee, the head official, and he stops the clock at various times, including at the points when an incomplete pass is thrown, when a player with the ball goes out of bounds, and when possession of the ball changes. Coaches on each team are allowed three time-outs in each half of the game. They can use these time-outs to stop the clock and consider what play to call next.

There are a host of other rules regarding such matters as what players can legally catch a pass, how much time the offense is allowed to begin a new play, and when substitute players can be brought into the game. Certain actions are disallowed and thus penalized. Penalties take the form of moving the ball a certain number of yards against the team whose player had the penalty.

The NCAA also has another host of rules about how many scholarships can be awarded, the minimum grades scholarship athletes must receive to remain eligible to play, and how players conduct themselves on and off the field. College players are strictly forbidden to receive payment for their play, although there are sometimes rumors that such corrupt activity is happening. Schools found guilty of rule infractions can be sanctioned by being banned from participation in bowl games, which cuts into the revenue they can earn. However, in July 2021, the NCAA released a policy that allowed student athletes to receive payment for the use of their name, image, and likeness.

In early 2023, the NCAA Football Rules Committee announced several new rules designed to shorten college football games. Included in these rule changes are no consecutive timeouts; limiting untimed penalties; and allowing the clock to keep running on first downs.

Strategy and Tactics

There are many approaches to football strategy. Some head coaches prefer a more conservative, run- and defense-based scheme. They typically emphasize ball control and look for long drives (a drive is the sequence of plays during a single offensive possession); in this way, they can manage both field position and the clock. Field position refers to the relative position of the ball between the two goal lines. Coaches generally prefer to begin their own drives close to or on the other team’s side of the fifty-yard line, which divides the field in two. These positions mean their team has to advance fewer yards in order to score. On the other hand, they want the other team to begin drives deep in its own territory, or near its defensive end zone. Coaches who play this kind of game are most likely looking for larger, stronger defensive players who are skilled at tackling.

Other coaches prefer a faster game, one that relies more on passing. These coaches look for faster players and a quarterback with a strong, accurate arm. These coaches expect to run more plays in a game, because a high number of passes increases the likelihood of clock stoppages from passes that go incomplete. These kinds of games tend to be high scoring. In recent years, many college coaches have adopted this approach to the game.

Although these are the overall coaching strategies, a coach’s tactics for a given game show how he intends to implement this plan against a given team. As in the professional game, coaches develop a game plan, which is a specific set of plays intended to maximize a team’s own advantages and exploit the opponent’s perceived weaknesses. That game plan is based not only on an analysis of the coach’s own team but also on hours of film study reviewing recordings of the upcoming opponent’s other games. The goal is to spot tendencies in the other coach’s strategy and decision making.

Tactics also come into play during the game, because coaches must react to the game plan of the opposing coach as they see it unfold. Coaches often use the pause in the game that takes place after completion of the first half to review the game to that point and adjust their tactics as needed.

Professional Leagues and Series

College football is, by definition, an amateur sport, although the top players generally receive scholarships to attend the institution of their choice. Some critics of the NCAA argue that the schools make millions of dollars off the efforts of players who risk serious injury and do not receive a serious education in return. Some of these critics urge the NCAA to adopt a system that pays players. That institution, however, has remained adamantly opposed to such a plan.

Although college football is not professional, rivalries are fierce, and bragging rights are highly desired. Beginning in the 1890s, certain teams were declared the national champion for the year, although there was no official way to determine what team had earned that title. For decades, the matter was left to various postseason polls, including those conducted by the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI) as well as by NCAA coaches. These polls often named different teams as the year’s best, the putative national champion. The system generated much heated debate, especially when the NCAA adopted tournaments to determine the national champion in divisions other than Division I-A. Complicating matters was the fact that many conferences had contracts with various bowl games that obligated them to send their top teams to specific bowls, making it less likely that the two top teams would meet to determine on the field the superiority of one or the other.

From 1998 to 2013, the NCAA tried to find an undisputed national champion on the field through a system called the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). Based on polls and a computer-ranking system, ten teams were chosen to play in five different bowls, the last of which was determined to be the championship game between the top-two ranked teams. The coaches’ poll was bound by contract to name the winner of this game the year’s champion. Even this system was criticized, because there were no playoffs to determine who would appear in that final game. However, in its sixteen years of operation, there was only one disputed title when the coaches’ and AP polls delivered different results. In 2014, the NCAA introduced a new system, the College Football Playoff, in which four teams play in two semifinal games and then the winner of those games meet in the national championship game.

In 2023, the Pac-12, one of the oldest conferences in college football, was at risk of disbanding. Five schools announced they were leaving the conference at the end of the 2023–24 season for other conferences, leading the Pac-12 to consider consolidating with another conference.

Popularity

College football remains hugely popular in the United States. During the 2014 season, forty-nine million fans attended NCAA football games, a number that represented something more than a threefold increase since 1954. Eleven schools had a total of more than one million fans attending their games that year. Many fans come to pregame tailgate parties that feature food and beverages. Many alumni return for one or more games, enjoying the chance to revive school spirit, particularly against a noted rival school.

Television audiences are impressive as well. Broadcast and cable networks show as many as twenty games a week, and contests between major rivals or top-rated teams can attract as many as 10 or 11 million viewers. In the 2014 season, ESPN had a total of 185.7 million viewers of all its college football broadcasts. In January 2015, 33.4 million people watched the Ohio State-Alabama contest for the first College Football Playoff championship. The audience for the championship game fell to under 17 million in 2023.

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