Admit it. Unless you’re from Ireland — or married to an Irish national, like this friendly drunk I met while watching the AFL Grand Final in an Irish Pub in Raleigh last September — you have no clue what this is, do you?

I didn’t, either, until that fateful day last summer when I looked up the world “football” in Wikipedia. I just figured they played soccer and rugby in Ireland like everyone else in Europe — which they do, but those sports don’t capture the Irish imagination quite like the football game of the Gaelic Athletic Association. Gaelic football and hurling are Ireland’s national obsessions. They first played a football game in Ireland called Caid during medieval times, and Caid was legalized in the Statute of Galway all the way back in 1527. The GAA was formed in 1887 to formalize the rules and build upon that old Irish tradition.

It’s worth noting that Gaelic football may be the only major football code left on the planet that is strictly amateur. These footballers play only for the glory of their home county, though even that tradition may give way to 21st century reality soon.

It’s also worth noting that Gaelic football was a direct response to certain “foreign imports” from the United Kingdom…

(More after the jump.)

When soccer and rugby started floating over to the Republic of Ireland in the 1870s, all the cool kids started dropping boring old Caid and flocking to those games instead. In particular, Trinity College in Dublin became rugby central, which helped build Ireland’s successful national rugby team.

One County Clare man, a teacher named Michael Cusack, was rather disheartened by this development. These new football games were just horrible “foreign imports,” and the old Irish traditions would be lost if these games were accepted. With that in mind, he teamed up with Archbishop Thomas Croke to create an organization that was designed to:

1. foster and promote the native Irish pastimes,
2. open athletics to all social classes, and
3. aid in the establishment of hurling and football clubs which would organise matches between counties.

Thus, Gaelic football was born as a way to reject those English imports and create a game that was uniquely Irish. The game itself is fairly simple to follow. Two teams of 15 face off on a rectangular pitch with a spherical ball, and the object is to kick the ball into the opponent’s goal (3 points) or through the opponent’s uprights. (1 point) Interestingly enough, goals are counted separately from points on the scoreboard, so you have to know that a score of 3-7 is 16 points, which beats a score of 2-9, or 15 points. Understanding Gaelic football scores requires some basic math skills. Gaelic footballers’ Wonderlic scores would probably be pretty high.

Players can only run forward with the ball for four steps before they have to bounce it off the turf or kick it, and you can’t bounce the ball twice in a row, but you can kick the ball to yourself if you want. That’s called “soloing.” Contact between players is limited, though if you’re going for the ball, you can get away with a little more contact than you can in soccer.

There are actually lots of similarities between Gaelic football and Australian football, which has sparked many a bar brawl over whether Irishmen created Aussie Rules or Aussies created Gaelic football. Up until last year, the Australians and the Irish would meet up to play something called International Rules Football, which was a hybrid of the two games. After last November’s fracas on the pitch, though, the future of the International Rules series is in doubt — which is a shame, because the hybrid game has the potential to be highly entertaining.

Regardless, the GAA marches on, and Gaelic football lovers eagerly line up to watch “their boys,” who all have day jobs and are well-known in their counties, square off in Dublin’s fantastic Croke Park, the largest sports stadium in Ireland and the home of the Gaelic Games. The All-Ireland Football Final, for all practical purposes, has become the Irish Super Bowl, and the fans there are even more fanatical about their teams, in part because those are their friends and neighbors playing out there for the glory of their home county.

Will that change if the Gaelic Players Assocation turns Gaelic football into a professional sport? Hard to say. Tradition dies hard in Ireland. The GAA spent years preventing the FA of Ireland and the Ireland Rugby Football Union from playing in Croke Park, claiming that they didn’t want “foreign competitors” on the pitch their game built. That changed in 2006, when the GAA allowed limited use of the Croker for 6 Nations rugby and Irish national football club matches through 2008. That has some asking what else might change in the coming decades.

One thing that probably won’t change, though, is the fanaticism that descends on Croke Park every September. Gaelic football may never gain a true foothold outside of Ireland, but it’s still their national football game, and just like other football fans around the world, they do love it so.

I know exactly what you’re thinking.

Why does Canadian football get its own post? Isn’t football in Canada, like everything else in Canada, pretty much the same as it is in America, but just different enough that it can call itself “Canadian?”

Perhaps. It takes a few minutes to get accustomed to the 12-on-12, 110-yard, three-down football they play in Canada, especially with all the pre-snap motion of the wide receivers and the end zones bigger than Jerry Jones’ ego. Ultimately, though, Canadian football and American football share a lot of similarities, and as a result, a lot of American players who can’t make the NFL end up in the CFL. Some would argue that this the reason Canada is one of the few countries on our lonely little planet where football is not the number one sport. I think it has more to do with all that ice, but that’s just me.

We should give a little credit to Canada, though, because Canadians had a much bigger influence on football in America than most people realize…

(More after the jump.)

It was a group of footballers from McGill University in Montreal that introduced rugby to the boys at Harvard University in 1874. Harvard was playing its own football game at the time, having practically isolated itself from the full-contact soccer riot that other schools were playing at the time, so when McGill challenged Harvard to a series of football matches, Harvard was all like, “Bring it, bitches!”

And bring it, they did — the “it” being rugby. McGill brought rugby to Harvard, which took rugby to other colleges, who eventually agreed on the gridiron variant we see today. So if you want to know why football in the U.S. is so different from the rest of the world… well, blame Canada. After all, if McGill doesn’t bring rugby to Harvard, who knows what American football looks like today? Maybe we just adopt Association Football at the turn of the 20th century and move on.

As the 20th century began, though, Canada began to adopt some of the ideas Walter Camp brought to the American game, thanks in part to Thrift Burnside, the captain of the University of Toronto football club. He created the Burnside Rules, which at the time was a radical departure from the traditional rugby union rules in Canada. The Burnside Rules ruled the number of players per team on the field from 15 to 12 and introduced the down-and-distance rules to the game. Burnside said from the start, though, that teams should have to gain ten yards on three downs. Camp’s original rule was five yards on three downs, and it didn’t become ten yards on four downs in America until 1912. Canada didn’t follow along on that one.

Other interesting things about Canadian football:

• They still called it the Canadian Rugby Football Union until about 1967, even though the Burnside Rules pretty much made the game… well, not rugby.
• The forward pass wasn’t widely adopted in Canada until about 1931. They already had the wider field Walter Camp originally wanted, so they didn’t really think they needed it at the time. Of course, they eventually realized the forward pass was awesome, and that was that.
• The CFL tried expanding into the U.S. in the mid-1990s. Like most attempts to create other football leagues in America, that didn’t work out so well.

The CFL is strictly Canadian now, and it has experienced a resurgence in popularity this decade. Average attendance for CFL games last season was just under 30,000 per game, and the Grey Cup Final in Winnipeg brought out 44,786 paying customers. It may be foolishness to suggest that football will ever replace hockey as the #1 sport in Canada, but hey, stranger things have happened.

Get the latest CFL odds at the Internet’s most trusted sportsbook.

Just how popular is football in America?

Consider this: The most-watched sporting event on U.S. television for the second weekend in February was… wait for it… the Pro Bowl. Yes, the National Football League’s all-star game, which players consistently disrespect and pundits loathe more and more every year, outdrew every basketball game, every car race and every other televised sport that weekend.

Why? Because it was football, kid.

That’s not the only sign that football — or “gridiron,” as some folks outside of America call it — has long since replaced baseball as America’s #1 sport. The NFL has set records for paid attendance four years in a row. NBC is paying the NFL $650 million a year for its Sunday Night Football package, and ESPN is paying the NFL $1.1 billion per year for the TV rights to Monday Night Football. Fantasy football is a multi-million-dollar business that only widens the NFL fan base. We won’t even talk about all that gambling revenue.

That’s just for pro football, too. This doesn’t begin to touch upon college football, a huge business in itself, and high school football, which many small-town Americans take far too seriously.

All of this is for a variation on rugby that barely draws any interest outside of North America. When sports fans from other continents watch American football, they complain that it has too many stops and starts and too many strange formations. In rugby, players just line up on their sides and go. They don’t need 25 seconds to set up a play.

Well, to understand why American football is the way it is, you have to understand something about Walter Camp, the man who literally built the gridiron more than 12 decades ago…

(More after the jump.)

Walter Camp was never just some popular jock. Sure, he dominated every sport he played at Yale back in the 1870s, and he loved playing rugby the most. There was one game, though, that he loved more than rugby — chess. He loved setting up strategies and defenses and executing them against his opponents, and somewhere along the way, he realized he couldn’t do that in rugby. Players would just line up and go, winning games more often with pure athletic skills than intellectual skills.

Somewhere along the way, Camp thought, “Gee, I bet it be great if I could somehow combine chess and rugby into one game.” Luckily for Camp, he had more presence in a room than Jim Brown, and he used that power and influence to create his ideal football game — one that valued intelligence and strategic thinking just as much as athletic ability…

That kind of game falls right in line with the American psyche, which looks upon the gridiron as a theater of war, where coaches are generals leading well-armored soldiers into battle. Of course, sometimes we take that metaphor a little too far — Kellen Winslow Jr., holla! — but consciously or otherwise, many of us imagine of the American game of football as controlled warfare in an enclosed space, and we all want to watch the battle.

This idea also harks back to the medieval period, when football was literally one city against another, and entire villages became gigantic scrums every year during Mardi Gras. You think football is a rough game now? Picture two mobs of hundreds squaring off, with the whole town was the playing field. Enough men were severely injured and enough property was damaged during these contests that kings spent centuries trying to ban football.

That’s not to say American football hasn’t seen it’s share of death and destruction. After Camp created the down-and-distance rules we know so well today, coaches began using mass formation plays to advance the ball, and those plays tended to main and kill football players. By 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt literally stepped in and told schools to clean up the game or face its prohibition. The forward pass was legalized in response of this, and it opened up Camp’s game and made it fairly unique among other codes of football at the time.

Camp? Man, he hated the forward pass. He thought John Heisman was a crank for even suggesting it. Camp wanted to widen the field to open up the game and prevent so many injuries, but there were roadblocks in his plan, and he grudgingly accepted the forward pass and moved on. Now it’s almost impossible to imagine football in America without it.

But is it possible to imagine the gridiron game outside of America? Maybe. Response to the first regular-season NFL game to be played in England has been overwhelming, NFL Europa remains popular in Germany, and there’s even going to be an American Football World Cup in Japan this July. This strange rugby variant that Walter Camp created may yet prove to be just as big as rugby itself.

Japan actually has almost 400 high school, college and company-sponsored pro teams playing American football. Maybe Roger Goodell should set up a developmental league over there next…

Somewhere in the Land Down Under, there are people in high places who want you to believe that Association Football is “the only true football” — and how could that be if you can’t kick a guy in the shins, hmm? — and therefore it’s the only form of football that should be promoted on the continent. A couple of good runs in the World Cup will give you just this sort of ego.

The soccerroo onslaught, however, hasn’t even put a dent in the audience for Aussie Rules. In fact, as of last year, the Australian Football League has the highest per capita attendance of any sports league on the planet, and most indicators suggest that these attendance figures are stilll growing.

In America, though, Aussie Rules is still thought of as some bizarre afterthought that used to be shown on ESPN in the early 80s. That’s patently unfair. Once you figure out what’s actually happening on that oval pitch, you realize that Aussie Rules is really fun to watch. It’s a high-action, high-scoring, high-contact game that doesn’t get nearly enough respect here in the Northern Hemisphere, because nobody here really understands the rules.

So what are those rules, anyway?

(More after the jump.)

For all you confused Northern Hemisphere residents, here are the basics:

You start with a large oval pitch that’s almost twice the size of an American football field. At either end of the pitch are four goal posts. (Pictured above.) The object is to kick the ball through the center goal posts; that’s a goal, and that’s 6 points. If you kick the ball between the side goal posts or hit the center uprights, that’s a behind, which is only 1 point. A behind is also called a “miss” by the announcers; kicking accuracy is kind of important in this game.

Two teams of 18 players go at it on the pitch, and there’s no offside rule, so players can go pretty much anywhere on the pitch. The game starts with a “center bounce,” which is kind of like a tip-off in basketball, except the ref bounces the ball in the center square, and two big guys called ruckmen fight to tip the ball to their teammates.

Once a guy gets the ball, he has four options:

1. He can run with the ball, but he has to bounce it off the turf every 10 meters or so.
2. He can kick the ball to a teammate or through the goal.
3. He can “handpass” the ball, which is an underhand punch of the ball. (It’s gotta be punched, too. Laterals are for rugby, punk.)
4. He can stand there and get his ass tackled.

Of course, he can only get tackled between the shoulders and thighs. If a player goes for the head or knees, that’s a penalty and a free kick for his opponent.

There’s a basic concept in Aussie Rules called the mark. If a player makes a clean catch of another player’s kick, he can take a mark, back up from the spot of the catch and make a free kick. He only has about 5 seconds to make that kick, though, before the ref shouts, “Play on!” And if a player gets a mark within 50 meters of the goalposts — sort of an end zone, if you will — that player gets a free kick for goal. That’s when most of the points are scored.

The concept of marking the ball was swiped taken from an aboriginal Australian game called Marn Grook. English settlers watched in wonder as one aboriginal kicked a stuffed possum skin high into the air, and others jumped up to catch it. Whoever caught it got to kick it next. The settlers liked that idea and tried to spread the idea to their own football games, starting with the Cambridge Rules code of 1848. It never really caught on in England, but the Aussies loved it and ran with it, forming the first Aussie rules code in 1859 — a full four years before the Football Association formed in London.

Why this game never caught on anywhere else remains a mystery to me, really. Despite a small group of devoted followers in America, Aussie Rules remains a primarily Australian obsession. Perhaps it’s because of the name; by its nature, “Aussie Rules” implies it may not be suitable for non-Australians. That’s a shame, too, since the growing AFL audience down under ought to be able to spread this game around a bit more. I mean, if the EPL can find an audience on American cable TV, surely the AFL could, too, right? Not too many sporting events in 2006 were more exciting than those matches between the Sydney Swans and the West Coast Eagles — especially in the Finals Series last September.

Somebody get the boys at Versus on the horn. I think I have a programming idea for them — one that will hopefully let me watch the games legally. My ISP frowns upon all that BitTorrent usage…

(For the record, I’ve thrown my hat in with the Eagles, because the Swans’ fight song uses the same melody as the Notre Dame fight song. Notre Dame waitlisted me, and thus, singing that melody is unacceptable — even though I think Barry Hall is badass.)

I’ll be honest with you. Rugby is probably my least favorite form of football to watch.

Perhaps it’s because I don’t get all the nuances and subtleties of a good rugby match. Perhaps it’s because I grew up with American football, and when I watch rugby, I start thinking that guys like Walter Camp and John Heisman had the right idea.

Of course, what Americans like me might think is largely irrelevant here, as rugby is arguably the second most popular football code on the planet. It plays second fiddle to soccer in Europe, but it still has a strong following there, not to mention a huge fan base in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. National teams compete in Six Nations and Tri-Nations competitions every year, and there’s even a Rugby World Cup coming up in September, though I doubt ESPN will pimp that as much as they did the FIFA World Cup last summer.

So how did rugby manage to separate itself from the Football Association? Well, if you believe the legend, it starts with a brat named William Webb Ellis…

(More after the jump.)

Historians have generally proven this legend to be bunk, but the story goes like this: William Webb Ellis attended the Rugby School in the 1820s, and he had Lester Hayes-like reputation for being a bit of a rule-bender. (That part is actually true.) One day in 1823, young Mr. Ellis finally grew frustrated with having to back up and kick the ball after every catch, so he simply took off running down the field with the ball in his arms and touched the ball down inside his opponents goal — a move which prompted most of his classmates to say, “Bloody hell, what is that stupid git doing now?” (That part may not be quite so true.)

Footballers, though, kinda liked that whole run-with-the-ball thing — good metaphor, that. So by the 1840s, running with the ball was a staple of the Rugby School’s football game, and by 1860, dozens of rugby football clubs sprouted up all over England. The rugby players then decided to break away from the Football Association and formed the Rugby Football Union in 1871, where they formalized the rules of the game and spread those rules around the world. Rugby clubs began forming in far away places like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada.

Unfortunately for the sport, not everyone agreed with the RFU’s rules, and by 1895, a schism broke the game in two. We now have rugby union and rugby league, which are essentially two slightly different games. The difference is bound to confuse potential new fans to the game.

There’s also the fact that guys like Walter Camp and Thrift Burnside took rugby and made something very different and, in my opinion (and the opinion of many football fans in North America) much more interesting. That’s just one opinion, though, and rugby proves there’s always another opinion.

We’ll talk about Camp and Burnside later in the week. In the meantime, I encourage all you rugby football fans out there to use the comments to argue which is superior: rugby union or rugby league. Try to keep it more civil than an Irish maul, okay?

I have a confession to make.

Not too long ago, I used to believe that Association Football — or “soccer,” as the American kids like to call it — was evil. I even wrote as much on this very blog. I had always looked beyond the game itself, choosing to tie it directly to all the violence and hooliganism that happened around it. Those nutters in Italy and France could have given me more ammo for that viewpoint in the last few months, too.

The truth, though, is that I’ve been horribly biased for a very long time, and it’s time I came to terms with that bias. You see, I took a corner kick in the crotch when I was 13.

(More after the jump.)

It was my own fault, too, really, because I confused one form of football with another. I approached the corner kick like it was a field goal in American football, and I honestly thought it was my job to run to that corner, stretch out and “block that kick.” So of course, when the kick hit me square in the nuts at full blast, I just knew I was going to hate this game for the rest of my life.

The worst thing about that incident, though? Nobody on the pitch that day had a video camera. Bob Saget could have paid half my college tuition if someone had just caught that on tape…

Something changed in me in the last year or so, though. Perhaps I finally understood why I hated soccer all these years, accepted it and moved on. Now that I have some sense of the history of this particular football game, I can actually enjoy a well-played English Premier League match.

What’s the history, you ask? Well, the short version is something like this:

When mob football died out in England around the Industrial Revolution, headmasters in English public school took the game, civilized it a bit and made it an organized team sport, allowing their boys to let out some aggression on the field. However, not every school actually had a field. Some schools — Rugby School, in particular — had open spaces where kids could run with the ball and tackle each other, but other schools had to play football within cloisters, and most sideline tackles resulted in broken bones and cracked skulls.

So in order to save the constant embarrassment of telling mothers that their sons brains had seen the light of day, headmasters created football games that removed running and tackling and instead emphasized finesse and ball-handling skills.

This eventually led to the formation of The Football Association in London in 1863, which spent a few days arguing over rules and eventually decided on adopting something called “The Simplest Game,” which eventually eliminated the use of hands all together. This game became known as “Association Football.” (That’s what the FA in FIFA stands for, by the way.)

It’s worth noting, though, that the FA’s earliest attempts at a unified code included some very non-soccer-like rules. For example, the ability to make a fair catch and get a free kick from the spot of the catch was part of the earliest FA rules. They got rid of that rule, but it remains a staple of Australian Football. (More about that later in the week.) Oh, and the gentleman from Blackheath stormed out of the FA in a huff, declaring that it wasn’t “true football” unless you could kick the ball carrier in the shins. Seriously.

At some point along the way, the kids took the “soc” out of “Association” and formed the word “soccer,” but people only call it soccer in places where another form of football is more dominant — meaning not too many places, really. The U.S., Canada, Australia, and sometimes Ireland call it soccer.

Everywhere else, though, it’s the most popular form of football, in no small part because it is the simplest game. All you need is a ball, two goals and a patch of dirt about so big, and you can play this Association Football game. Some of the fans may be unhinged, but the game itself? It’s not so evil after all, is it?

Just don’t run up to block those corner kicks. Trust me on that one.