Dave’s Football Blog

Part 4 in a series on how our playing fields shaped our football games.

If you’re looking for a reason why Aussie Rules may never truly catch on in America, look no further than Subiaco Oval.

This cavernous arena in Perth is the home of two AFL teams — the West Coast Eagles and the Fremantle Dockers. It’s also the largest playing field in all the AFL, with a playing surface 176 meters long and 122 meters wide. By comparison, the ovals at Melbourne Cricket Ground, Telstra Dome and Telstra Stadium are only 160 meters long, and the Sydney Cricket Ground oval is a mere 149 meters long. (Before West Coast won the Grand Final last year, some pundits speculated that the Eagles’ huge home field had something to do with their inability to win a title in the smaller MCG.)

Now, name one major American stadium that could hold a playing field as big as the Sydney Cricket Ground. We’re talking 163 yards by 149 yards. I’ll give you a minute to go Googling…

You can’t find one, can you?

You can thank blame the game of cricket for this. Cricket was it in Australia back in the 19th century, way before football showed up. All of the major AFL stadia are used for cricket as well as Aussie Rules. In fact, the first Australian football club, the Melbourne Football Club, was an offshoot of the Melbourne Cricket Club, and its members determined that football should be used to help cricketers stay in shape during the winter months. As a result, they wrote a football code that allowed them to use cricket ovals as the field of play, thus allowing for continued use of said ovals throughout the year.

Cricket ovals, like baseball fields, can vary widely in shape and size, which is how you get such huge discrepancies between Subiaco Oval and Sydney Cricket Ground. You won’t find this sort of variation in gridiron-based games or in rugby league. Association football allows for some variation in pitch size, as does Gaelic football on a lesser scale, but rarely does pitch size variation give teams a home field advantage in those games as it does in Aussie Rules.

Regardless, the required size of the playing field makes it nigh-impossible for the AFL to export its unique brand of football to the rest of the world, because neither Wembley nor Rose Bowl could fit an official AFL game. And it’s all because of cricket, a sport far more baffling and thus, far less awesome to an ignorant yank like me. It just doesn’t seem right, I tell ya…

Part 3 of The Playing Fields, a series on how where we played football shaped the rules of our games.

Remember when Harvard was one of the dominant college football programs in America? Yeah, me neither. In fact, you’d have to be about 100 years old to remember when Harvard had a major impact on college football in America. Harvard Stadium, however, may have had more impact on football than any playing field in history.

This reinforced concrete bunker was built in 1903 for about $310,000, which is about $7.3 million in 2006 dollars, and at the time, it was the the largest reinforced concrete structure in America and the only permanent stadium college sports. So naturally, two years after it was built, college football went through a massive upheaval. 18 football players died on the field in 1905, and 159 more were seriously injured. President Teddy Roosevelt stepped in and told college football leaders that they had to clean up their otherwise awesome game or have it permanently banned.

Walter Camp, a Yale man (of course), suggested to the rules committee that they widen the playing field by about 40 feet to spread out the game and reduce the chances of serious injury. The boys from Harvard were having none of that. I mean, you try moving reinforced concrete out twenty feet on either side. It’s hard enough to do with 2007 technology. Try doing it with 1905 tech…

So they looked around for ways to open up the game of football to keep players from getting maimed without having to spend another $7.3 mil to fix their concrete cathedral to football. They found an ally in John Heisman, who saw an inadvertent forward pass in a game in 1895 and had been trying for the better part of a decade to convince Camp that it would do wonders for football as a spectator sport. Naturally, Camp thought Heisman was a crank who was trying to ruin Camp’s unique gridiron creation, and he spent years giving Heisman the cold shoulder.

Then some Harvard representatives made Camp an offer he couldn’t refuse: legalize the forward pass, or build Harvard a replacement stadium. By himself. By hand. At gunpoint.*

Camp relented, the forward pass was adopted, football in America was changed forever, and we named an over-hyped trophy after Heisman. Would any of this have happened if Harvard hadn’t built a giant concrete shrine to the game? We’ll never really know, but American football would sure seem a lot more boring without a quarterback dropping back to pass, wouldn’t it?

I wrote similar articles about these points in football history here and here. Go check ‘em out when you have a minute.

(* – None of that is true, but the dramatic embellishments are cool, aren’t they?)

Part 1: We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Pitch
Part 2: At Play in the Stone Hallows of the Lord

Part 2 of The Playing Fields, a series on how where we played football shaped the rules of our games.

As we all know, two of our major football codes were formed in England in the 19th century — Association football and Rugby football. The former was a finesse game that involved kicking and dribbling, while the latter was a physical game involving running, tackling, mauling and rucking. But have you ever wondered what made these football games so divergent?

Simply put, they’re products of their environments. The Rugby School had wide open fields where boys could run around and tackle each other, and other public schools in England that had similar fields promoted similar games. Some public schools, though, such as Westminster and Charterhouse, didn’t have wide open fields, so they had to play football inside the only space they had — inside the cloisters.

Here’s a picture of the Charterhouse School cloisters:

You try playing rugby in there. Half the kids would end up like Chris Simms, and back then, life without a spleen wasn’t nearly as easy…

The headmasters of these schools recognized this and decided they had to create a football game that fit the playing field and didn’t get their boys maimed on a regular basis. The result was a game that involved kicking and dribbling the ball with minimal contact between players. To make things interesting, they told the boys that they couldn’t use their hands. After all, this was football. You should move the ball around with your feet, right?

Somehow, this concept managed to catch on elsewhere, and other schools started playing this simple kick-and-dribble game on open fields, too. Before you knew it, the representatives from Westminster and Charterhouse had weight to throw around at the first Football Association meetings, which resulted in the soccer game we see today. The folks at Westminster seem awfully proud of that, too.

Part 1: We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Pitch

So the other day I was looking around the interwebs for some info about the new Wembley Stadium, and I came across something that made me do a double-take. According to Wikipedia:

The pitch size is 105 metres long and 68 metres wide, slightly narrower than the old Wembley.

Really? Isn’t Wembley hosting an NFL game next season? Because last I checked, 105 meters was only about 114 yards. A regulation football field is at least 120 yards long — 100 yards from goal line to goal line, plus ten yards for each end zone. Will the gridiron fit in here?

Of course, then I looked at this photo of the new Wembley:

Looks like there’s about 5 meters of give on either side of that pitch. That makes it about 115 meters across, which is 125 yards — a tight fit, but doable.

Yes, yes, I’m sure everyone thought of this before the NFL agreed to throw the Giants-Dolphins game over the pond and into Wembley next season. Still, when you look at those pitch dimensions, it makes you think a bit. After all, Wembley is going to host a hell of a lot more association football matches than American football games in the next ten years. A stadium like this has to be suited to its primary task first.

In fact, many of the big Premiership stadiums in England couldn’t host an American football game. Emirates Stadium’s field length is only 113 meters long, which is 123 yards, which would offer no give at the end of either end zone. Old Trafford in Manchester is only 116 yards across, and Anfield in Liverpool is only 110 yards from end to end.

Funny how the football games we play shape the stadiums we build for them, isn’t it? Once upon a time, it was the other way around. Our environs shaped the rules of our football games. Let’s make that our theme for this week. We’ll tag this one The Playing Fields, as it’s all about how the fields of play determined the rules of the game being played. It’s just one reason why all our football games have evolved into what we see today…