Why are there eleven players on an American football team?

Answer 1

Originally there were 12 players. A Canadian team showed up to play a college team and they were only able to bring 11 players. So the Americans agreed to play with only 11 so that it was an even game. The Canadians went back and went back to 12, but the Americans just kept playing with 11. In the early days of football, players gathered around the ball in a huge scrum after every tackle, and someone would attempt to kick the ball out of the scrum to give his teammate a chance to recover it. This method of play bogged down the game, especially when there was no forward pass. Walter Camp wanted to make the game more dynamic and strategic, so over the course of several years, he pushed for a number of rule changes to take these stagnant clusters of inactivity out of the game. One of his changes was the establishment of a line of scrimmage, to eliminate the scrum. Another was to reduce the number of players on the field, so there would be less of a chance that the ball would get tangled up and trapped in a mass of players.

When the first American colleges played football, there were sometimes as many as 25 players per side. In scrums, the ball would get hopelessly clogged up within a pile of bodies. When the colleges agreed to model their game after the English Rugby code, the number of players dropped to 15, which is how many still appear on a rugby union team to this day.

But Camp wanted to open up the field of play even more, and he pushed to reduce the number of players from 15 to 11. He thought that having fewer players would create more dynamic play. (Rugby league, incidentally, had the same idea in mind when its rulemakers decided to drop the number of players on its clubs from 15 to 13.)

Why 11? I've never seen an answer to that. But there's a good possibility that he followed soccer's lead. Rugby and soccer weren't so different from each other in the early days, but Camp could well have seen how having only 11 men per side in soccer helped open up that game. Incidentally, Canadian footballers followed Camp's lead on this and many other innovations. The "Burnside Rules" included reducing the number of players on Canadian teams from 15 to 12.

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