1: What position does a player labeled as the "Mike" traditionally play?
In the early days of American football there was no clear understanding of what the game was or what it entailed. In the early days, colleges and little leagues all had their own way of doing things and thus, the fields were of all shapes and sizes. Some universities placed their goal posts so far apart that the kickers actually found it easier to score than they expected, while others made them pretty close, so that it was difficult to make a field goal.
Though the standard width of today’s goalposts is 18 feet 6 inches, something that is practically ingrained in the minds of every fan, the goalposts of the past were often whatever goalposts could be created with whatever materials were available in the local area.
These discrepancies did not end with the goalposts themselves. The lengths and widths of fields could be quite arbitrary, and at times it looked like people had just drawn up some lines on the ground to create a field. Teams from industrial towns may have painted white lines on any available space on a piece of ground, resulting in pathetically small fields that were fitted into some city block. Its rural counterparts, however, just took over some wide open farmland and marked a rough rectangle with some sticks before a game. Each league wanted to be the one to say they were the true champions of the most real way to play the game, but no one knew what rules they were supposed to be using.
The experimentation extended to the fundamentals of the sport, including the forward pass and the point system. There were some areas of the country where the forward pass was not allowed, where the purveyors of the game said that the forward pass was taking the guts out of real football. Some regional authorities even made attempts to prohibit it, arguing that real football should be based on running and force. Such bans were not very long lived, however they show a strong example of the initial splitting that occurred within a game which was still trying to find out what its identity was. Other schemes included proposals that called for different point values being given for a score depending on how far the ball was kicked and others that sought to do away with the extra point kick and instead go for more dramatic conversions.
The various factions of American football standards gradually converged to one standard set of rules in its growing popularity over time. The past chaos of the field layouts of local fields and the attempted tweaks that were once commonplace finally subsided. Nevertheless, the stories are still told, and fans enjoy the fact that the football field’s scoring lines and famous end zone goalposts were not carved in stone. They are a testament to the game’s original messy birth, where every region had a different vision for scoring, defining the field, and even the forward pass.
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