Hendon Hooker's perseverance leading revival of Tennessee football as family proudly watches on

The International Rugby Football Board was founded in 1886, but rifts were beginning to emerge in the code. Professionalism had already begun to creep into the various codes of football. In 1855, the U.S. inventor Charles Goodyear – who had patented vulcanised rubber – exhibited a spherical football, with an exterior of vulcanised rubber panels, at the Paris Exhibition Universelle.

There are a number of references to traditional, ancient, or prehistoric ball games, played by indigenous peoples in many different parts of the world. For example, in 1586, men from a ship commanded by an English explorer named John Davis, went ashore to play a form of football with Inuit in Greenland. There are later accounts of an Inuit game played on ice, called Aqsaqtuk. Each match began with two teams facing each other in parallel lines, before attempting to kick the ball through each other team's line and then at a goal.

Football Stats and History The complete source for current and historical NFL, AFL, and AAFC players, teams, scores and leaders. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers began preparations for Sunday's game against the Atlanta Falcons without Tom Brady and coach Todd Bowles on the practice field. Brady did not participate Wednesday after taking a hard hit on his throwing shoulder when he was sacked by Kansas City cornerback L'Jarius Sneed and fumbled during last Sunday night's loss to the Chiefs. Bowles missed practice for a personal reason and is expected back on Thursday. In 1903, Burnside rules were introduced to Ontario Rugby Football Union, which transformed Canadian football from a rugby-style game to the gridiron-style game. Flag football – non-contact variant in which a flag attached to a player is removed to indicate a tackle.

It soon adopted cricket fields and an oval ball, used specialised goal and behind posts, and featured bouncing the ball while running and spectacular high marking. The game spread quickly to other Australian colonies. FOOTBALL was adopted by a number of public schools as a way of encouraging competitiveness and keeping youths fit. Each school drafted its own rules, which varied widely between different schools and were changed over time with each new intake of pupils.

Wedderburn refers to what has been translated into modern English as "keeping goal" and makes an allusion to passing the ball ("strike it here"). There is a reference to "get hold of the ball", suggesting that some handling was allowed. It is clear that the tackles allowed included the charging and holding of opposing players ("drive that man back").

During the latter half of the 1870s, colleges playing association football switched to the Rugby code. In Canada, the first documented football match was a practice game played on 9 November 1861, at University College, University of Toronto (approximately 400 yards west of Queen's Park). One of the participants in the game involving University of Toronto students was William Mulock, later Chancellor of the school. In 1864, at Trinity College, Toronto, F. Barlow Cumberland, Frederick A. Bethune, and Christopher Gwynn, one of the founders of Milton, Massachusetts, devised rules based on rugby football. A "running game", resembling rugby football, was then taken up by the Montreal Football Club in Canada in 1868.