Rulers of Football

12" Wooden Ruler made in U.S.A. of American-grown basswood. The first American football game was played on November 6, 1869, when Rutgers defeated Princeton (at that time still called New Jersey) by a score of 6 to 4. To us, however, that game would have looked more like soccer than what we know as football today. It wasn’t until 1880 that rule changes established the snap, the line of scrimmage and the concept of downs. It took even longer for the forward pass to become legal. The American Professional Football Association, the forerunner of the National Football League, was formed in 1920, and James Francis “Jim” Thorpe, the first name listed on our ruler, was playing football at the time. He was already an Olympic champion, having won gold in both the pentathlon and the decathlon at the at the Stockholm Summer Olympics of 1912, the first Native American to win gold for the United States. Thorpe played baseball for the New York Giants in 1912 and 1913, and also briefly played profes