Old division football

Old division football was a mob football game played from the 1820s to around 1890 by students at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA.

An old division football match being played on the Green at Dartmouth College in 1874

The game was first played before the rules for association football and rugby football were standardized in England, and it continued to rely on its own local rules for some time after students learned of the newer imports. Dartmouth students published the rules of what is now called Old Division Football in 1871.

The game involved unlimited sides made up variously of the members of the two literary societies on campus: the United Fraternity versus the Social Friends ("Fraters v. Socials"); the even-numbered class years versus the odd-numbered years ("Old Division" or "Whole Division") and sometimes "New Hampshire v. the World". Every year a special match sometimes called the Usual Game of Foot Ball occurred early in the fall in which the sophomores took on the freshmen. The game was more about bragging rights, and by the late nineteenth century involved little more than a mob fight over possession of the round ball. The event became known as the 'Usual Football Rush' and then simply the 'Football Rush', lasting until 1948.

Part of the American football series on
History of American football
Origins of American football
Close relations to other codes
Topics
  • American football Portal

Rules (1871)
  1. Five umpires, one from each class in the Academical, and one from the Scientific Department, shall be elected annually by the college. The senior umpire present shall settle all disputes which arise concerning the game.
  2. The ball shall be warned from the second base of the college grounds and towards the buildings. No warn shall be valid until both parties are ready.
  3. Until the ball is kicked the warning party shall stand behind the ball and their opponents in front; the latter at a distance of at least two rods. These positions, and the warn as well, shall be changed each game.
  4. No player shall kick, trip, strike, or hold another for any cause during the game.
  5. It shall be considered foul when the ball is caught on the bound, or fly, or picked from the ground; when it passes the fence at the north or south end of the common, or at either corner, or when knocked past the east or west fence.
  6. In case of a foul the ball shall be tossed up by the umpire at the place where the foul occurs, unless it be within two rods of either fence, in which case the ball shall be brought directly in a distance of two rods before umpiring.
  7. The game shall be won when the ball is kicked past the east or west fence.

Sources
gollark: Unlike Nim's, they have to manage accursed lifetime apiology, and actually have threadpools and good schedulers.
gollark: Also some indirection since there are multiple async runtimes.
gollark: Nim has some sort of thousand-line event loop thing at most, Rust has VAST convolutions of streams and stuff.
gollark: They are very big and complex.
gollark: Also the entire mess of Rust async runtimes.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.