Football

With its roots in soccer and rugby, football has been played on the college level since 1869 when the historic first game took place between Princeton and Rutgers.

Acknowledged rules for the sport began to be codified in 1880 by Walter Camp, who is considered the “Father of American Football”.

For the next 40 years football remained almost exclusively the domain of college level competition until 1920 with the formation of the American Professional Football Association, which, two years later, changed its name to the National Football League – today’s NFL. A rags to riches story where we now see that league posting a revenue of 18.6 billion dollars in 2022. In those early years pro football was, for the most part, centered in the coal region of upstate Pennsylvania and a loosely organized entity referred to as the Anthracite League.

In 1925 the Pottsville Maroons , a dominant team of the period, was poised to win the NFL championship but, was disqualified and suspended due to
a breach of the league’s territorial regulations with, coincidently, the Frankford Yellow Jackets. Though the team was reinstated the next year, they never regained their former glory, and, three years later, after being sold to a group in Boston, retreated to the annals of football history. Mementos of that short lived, but once great team are housed in our museum.