NFL Ncaa Fb Campus

Have you noticed, class, that American football is the only popular form of football in the world where kicking is not an important skill that every player must learn?

Take a look around. In association football, or soccer, kicking the ball is all there is. In Australian football, kicking is a vital part of the game, since any player who catches a clean kick can mark the ball and get a free kick from that mark. Gaelic footballers need to be able to kick the ball accurately down the field and through the uprights from a long distance. Even in rugby, the American game's forefather, kicking the ball forward to a teammate is still a vital means of advancing to the end zone for a try.

Indeed, they still call it a "try" in rugby, even though it now nets more points than a goal. This is a nod to the history of that game. When rugby football was first invented, only goals counted for points, and touching the ball down over the opposing team's goal line was only a means for setting up a goal kick. Otherwise, it didn't really count for anything.

This was also true in the earliest days of American football, but those rules changes very quickly...

Class, we're going to do something different today. We've been focusing entirely on the history of American football, but we all know that's not the only type of football played on our little planet.

The most popular form of football around the world, of course, is Association football, or soccer, which attracts huge crowds in Europe, South America and many parts of Asia. As I've mentioned before, American football is a direct descendent of Rugby football, which became standardized in England a few years after soccer and is still played in many corners of the world.

These are not, however, the only types of football played in the world. There's also Australian Rules Football, which was formulated in the mid-19th century and influenced by two games: Cambridge Rules football, which was drawn up at Cambridge University in England in 1848, and an aboriginal game called Marn Grook, which English settlers first saw in 1841. In that game, one player drop-kicked a stuffed possum-skin ball high into the air, and other players jumped up as high as they could to catch it. Whoever caught it got a free kick.

The Englishmen who saw this game were so fascinated by Marn Grook that it became a staple of both the Cambridge Rules and Aussie Rules games. If you watch any Australian football match, you will notice a lot of high kicks and a lot of players jumping up to catch the ball and claim a mark, which gives them a free kick.

Meanwhile, our friends in Ireland play something called Gaelic Football, a game unique to the country, yet somewhat similar to the Australian game. Gaelic Football was standardized in 1887 by the Gaelic Athletic Association, a group that sought to promote Irish sports and reject the "foreign imports" from England. Gaelic Football involves both carrying and kicking the ball, though you can only run about five steps before you have to kick the ball to yourself (which is called "soloing") or to a teammate. It has a soccer-like goal, but also has goalposts that stretch high above the crossbar. Kicking the ball through the uprights is a point, and kicking it in goal is three points.

Why do I mention all of this today? It's because the Australians and the Irish are about to reach a compromise this weekend...