Football in the United States

That was interesting. Thanks, it's good to hear something that doesn't involve the professional game being killed off, and instead something with the collegiate rules changing.

Well, that was really more establishing the biggest point of potential divergence, in which association football could have taken root as dominant. All which I posted was as it happened in OTL, but it basically highlights just how close America might have come to playing association-like rules as its standard game, if not outright playing the same football as the rest of the world.

I should note, however, that using this as a divergence pretty much short circuits the established development of professional American football, as it's directly traced to the game's explosion in universities outside of the Northeastern "core" in the 1890s and 1900s (as that's when it root in the Midwest, where so much of the initial professional development took place). In fact, the possibility exists that the diversion might sideline BOTH tracks of football development in the favor of the already well-established baseball (though I wouldn't put it out of mind that the industrial Midwest could pick up on rugby later on).

I've got to ask, though, wasn't it true that the English game (at least the incarnation of football which led directly to its modern form) in the late 18th - early 19th century stemmed directly from the upper-class itself? It started off as a mob game in the universities, for sure, but its participants mainly stemmed from the nobility. It wasn't as if anyone else could afford to go there. It was this group of post-university students who eventually spread the game and the amateurism of the sport to different sections of England. Eventually a single set of rules were drawn up, and this led to the creation of the modern Football Association in the mid-19th century. From there the game continued to spread to middle and working-class England, and professionalism took root, etc., etc....here we are today.

Pretty much, yeah. My off-hand mention of the earlier mob games was to avoid giving the impression that football was invented in the universities and public schools from whole cloth. Indeed, the movement to codify and organize the games does come primarily from the upper-class institutions in England (and likewise the parallel development in the United States).
 
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