Dania Rajendra in Dilettante Army:
American football, like all politics, is war by other means. Quite literally, American college students (men) invented the game in 1869, stressed about having “missed out” on serving in the Civil War. It was part of a decades-long freakout about masculinity associated with, variously, the 1879 economic panic, the closing of the frontier and new adventures in off-shore colonialism, the industrial revolution, labor organizing, Reconstruction and the (re)installation of racist terror, waves of immigration, and women’s agitating for rights, including the right to vote, and, of course, ideas of gender and social equality threaded through left-wing organizing and practice gaining momentum through the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.
Amidst all that, American football developed primarily on elite college campuses, causing the kind of player injuries—and deaths—the sport is again known for today. After news reports in 1905 detailed 19 casualties and 138 hospitalizations, Progressive Era reformers sought to ban the sport against the wishes of men who attended elite colleges. The next year, President Theodore Roosevelt struck a compromise between the reformers and the men that included changing the rules to allow players to toss— “pass”—the ball in addition to carrying it.
It took a hundred years—an entire century—for the better strategy to become the default. Why did it take so long to change the playbook?
More here.
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