WI: More Conservative Gridiron Football

Guildencrantz

Guildencrantz

As it stands IOTL, gridiron football is one of the most innovative sports. Instant replay was adopted very quickly, the coach headset was accepted early on, and most importantly, a lot of modern football equipment would be unrecognizable to a player around the turn of the last century. Compared to say, baseball or soccer, which have had innovations but most everything else has remained laregely unchanged. A baseball player from 1900 is going to know how to use a modern bat, and an association footballer would be able to recognize a modern day soccer ball fairly easily.

So, what would need to be changed culturally in order for gridiron football to be more conservative?

Some ground rules for this scenario: Relatively minor innovations such as different materials used for the jersey may be allowed. Also, the the POD must be after 1905, when TR and a bunch of coaches set standardized rules. But it must remain fairly recognizable as football, and called football by North Americans. So no cheating and just importing rugby :p

955px-Ohio_State_Football_Team_1890.jpg
 

jahenders

Banned
They could stick to their guns and resist rule changes, new equipment, etc, but they'd likely doom themselves to small-time status. There were (and are) enough voices for making football (relatively) safe that if they refused all such efforts, some colleges might stop fielding (official) teams and we might never get anything akin to the NFL. Instead, you might just have some regional organizations with funding and following akin to minor league baseball.

Likely, you'd have the staunch "conservative" clubs supplanted by a more modern/safety-oriented new league (AFL, USFL, WLAF, etc).
 

Dathi THorfinnsson

jahenders said:
They could stick to their guns and resist rule changes, new equipment, etc, but they'd likely doom themselves to small-time status. There were (and are) enough voices for making football (relatively) safe that if they refused all such efforts, some colleges might stop fielding (official) teams and we might never get anything akin to the NFL. Instead, you might just have some regional organizations with funding and following akin to minor league baseball.

Likely, you'd have the staunch "conservative" clubs supplanted by a more modern/safety-oriented new league (AFL, USFL, WLAF, etc).
Click to expand...

US Gridiron was originally a variant of Rugby. If they had resisted rule changes, they could still be part of the rugby world, instead of their own independent game.

If they did THAT, they wouldn't need to uparmour they way they have.
 

steve_wilson

The most obvious conservative version was outlined by Turtledove - continuing the ban on the forward pass. That might require a pre-1905 pod, as would keeping the team size at 15.

Better might be the banning of all the armour, keeping it leather or none at all, the way real men play football :)
 

fastmongrel

If the North American Football games had followed Britains lead and the Rugby and Association codes became the games to play then the USA with all its resources would now be world champions at all the football codes.

It would probably require lots of American students to visit British Universities around the mid 19th C when the football codes were being written down
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_Rules
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_rules
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_football
and to carry the rules/laws back to there US universities with maybe British teams regulary touring North America playing Internationals. Not sure how practical that would have been in the mid 19thC.
 

Kalvan

Except that the "Flying Wedge" style front line that prompted the first round of safety changes was merely a natural extension of the sort of shoulder locked scrummage that had become standard in the game in Britain and Australia, even in League Rugby.

Either the rules would have changed for safety purposes, or American football would have been toast everywhere except Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona.
 
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