Originally posted by timb64 
WPRESTO,I wasn't being entirely serious either!
I did a little research. In the 19th century there were two somewhat similar sports: "rugby football" and "association football." American-style football started in the late 19th century as sort of a mix of these two, but there was nothing like standardization, for example in the first known game between two college teams each placed 25 players on the field. As more colleges picked up the game, the rules changed, the size of the field changed, the number of players changed, etc. It was a very brutal sport resulting in 19 deaths in 1905 when Th. Roosevelt threatened to outlaw the sport unless something were done. So the colleges set new rules, then revised, changed the field dimensions a couple more times, introduced the forward pass so that the American game called football had pretty much it's modern configuration about 1912. Association football was always very close to the game called football outside of North America. It started as an elite sport at English schools such as Cambridge and Oxford. But English schoolboys had (have) a habit of shortening names, calling "rugby football" "rugger" and they began calling "association football" "assoccer" (as in "assoccing the ball').. According to legend, this was shortened to "soccer" by a student at Oxford in 1863 and the name stuck. It was replaced by "football" officially in 1881, because naturally the gentlemen in the oak-lined conference room would not adopt what amounted to school-boys' slang. So ironically, the term used in the USA for the sport so popular everywhere except the USA, namely "soccer," originated on the hallowed grounds of Oxford in England.
Post #42705 by Bud
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