I assume American football finds its origins in rugby, and the south, but how did become what it is today?

My. God.

I was going to save this and come back tomorrow, but I really do need to write an answer now or itll bother me all night. Not to attack you but because the story is so much more interesting than that.

But first ill let a Jedi Master lay down a response to your original question. Take it away Luke.

So now that we have established that, where does Gridiron Football come from?

The answer begin in dear old England where there are centuries old traditions of various ball games involving kicking or carrying a ball played on foot. Many localities, and especially schools each had their own variation and house rules. This is the same common athletic tradition that would spawn Rugby, Association Football, and Gridiron Football among others.

And this practice carried over to early American higher education institutes. But more often than not it was simply a thin pretext to haze and beat the shit out of each new class of freshmen by the upperclassmen during a game. Often schools like Harvard and Yale would have to ban 'ball' games for years at a time.

So while many places played an exceedingly rough 'game' not everyone did. And with the expansion of access to higher education flowing the Civil War, in part thanks to the Land Grant Acts, and the rise of Muscular Christianity, there was more interest than ever before in keeping the young men on campus fit and their energies applied either constructively or at least used up on the least destructive options possible.

So thats the background, but what is considered the first football game in the US?

Well that comes in 1869 when the boys of Old Rutgers invited their neighbors at Princeton to ride the train over for a little Garden State rivalry. Intercollegiate competition was not unheard of at that point if not very common, in particular drawing on English tradition many of the New England schools held rowing and sailing regattas to fight it out. So make all the jokes you want but New Jersey gave us football, or at least started us down the road. The rules were nothing like today, being half Rutgers house rules and half an early version of the Football Association ruleset that was then being formed in London, it involved 25 men per side and all kicking into each others goal in 10 rounds with 1 point per round at stake. So after a morning of pool, lunch, and friendly cigars the teams got down to business. And after a 6-4 Rutgers victory the Princeton team beat a quick retreat home as the home team and about 100 fans began to get a little rowdy. A game in Princeton was also agreed to which was a win for the Tigers, and thus the first season of college football was complete. With the two squads playing again the next year, and also bringing nearby Columbia into the mix too.

1874 then would bring us two very important updates from the small regional growth in the new sport. 1 was the first game between schools not in the Mid Atlantic when VMI and Washington and Lee played a game on their adjoining campuses in Lexington VA. And more importantly Harvard invited the boys from McGill in Canada down for some games, in part because their version of the rules allowed carrying the ball which was then still not allowed in the collective variants played by most other schools and so far agreed in a meeting between several teams the year before. One game was played using Harvard's rules, and the other under an early version of Rugby code that the Crimson instantly took a liking too, including its scoring system based around Tries and also things like the scrum and an oblong ball.

Harvard quickly was able to get other schools to agree to a new rule-set that moved more in the direction of Rugby than Soccer but not completely. So while it took inspiration at a crucial moment it was very much a concurrent development and not a derivative. Nor was it based on the Rugby code in use today as the game was being played in 1874.

It is also from the North Eastern and Mid Atlantic schools that spawned the game that many of the early powers arose, Harvard, Princeton and Yale fill the record books of football due to this. Princeton and Yale for instance have more titles than anyone else including say Alabama, Notre Dame, USC, and Michigan among other more modern winners of multiple titles. Then you had a second tier of schools like Columbia, Cornell, Army, Penn, and Rutgers among others. And it was from these associations that more formal ties resulting in the Ivy League as we know it would form between many of the schools.

And with an annual rules and competition conference in NYC the game had the support to spread like wildfire. Though it was still dominated by the East, especially when former Yale player and coach Walter Camp dominated much of the its evolution. He brought changes like the Down and Distance rules(initially 3 plays to gain 5 yards) between plays, and snap of the ball, number of players along with new scoring rules, and even the naming of an All-America team of the best players at first in conjunction with Harper's Weekly.

We also see in the 1880's and 90's the Midwest becoming the first region to really get itself organized and begin to compete with the Eastern powers. Schools including Chicago, Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin agreed to regular scheduling, sharing of gate proceeds, mutual settling of disputes, eligibility rules, etc, among themselves and the sport thrived drawing 10's of thousands to the big games just like back East., from this group the modern Big 10 Conference would emerge. With cross sectional games slowly popping up on the schedule and respect starting to be earned. While similar loose but growing closer associations also emerged in the South and West in the 1890's too.

The game might have died there though as the number of injuries and deaths on the field across the nation was becoming a real issue. And several schools, including Harvard were moving to ban the game outright, but in 1904-05 a series of major reforms occurred. In part these were pushed along by president Teddy Roosevelt who had played for Harvard and loved the game, he called many of the top coaches and luminaries to the White House and pressured them to keep the game with sufficient reforms and to make it nationwide. The next year a more formal meeting of colleges occurred and from this would eventually spawn the NCAA as we know it today. Another major reform was the legalization of the forward pass! Until then the game would have been both very fast paced and like watching Army-Navy play in the rain for all the passing you would have seen. But this didnt create the West Coast Offense overnight, early rules were still restrictive amd even penalized or gave possession to the other team for incomplete passes!

But it along with other reforms in rules saved the game and ushered in another round of growth. We also see now additional teams seeing success and in unconventional ways. Pop Warner led the Carlisle Indian School to several notable victories including over Harvard and most emotionally over Army in part thanks to his near super human Half-Back, Jim Thorpe. While Vanderbilt also scored an early respect win for the South in 1906 by beating the Indians. While John Heisman was seemingly creating college football wholesale in the South with stops at Auburn, Clemson, and Georgia Tech in his career. While other Southern teams also began to show that they could play real football. Notably in 2013 the College Football Hall of Fame voted the 1899 Sewanee Tigers the most dominant single team in college football history. They went 12-0 and outscored the other team 322-10 with 11 shutouts, including 5 games in 6 days on a road trip vs LSU, Ole Miss, Texas, Texas A&M, and Tulane.

However the South was still considered at best a region with a handful of good teams and a lot of mediocrity. In many ways it was not until 1926 that the South began to get its due nationally for its quality teams. That year the Alabama Crimson Tide were invited to the Rose Bowl in their first ever bowl trip and defeat the Washington Huskies 20-19.

For a great introductory read on the birth of football I would recommend 'The Opening Kickoff' by Dave Revdine of the Big 10 Network. But if there are more specific aspects you are interested in I can point you elsewhere too!