Quote:
Originally Posted by Ref Ump Welsch
FED may have moved the goal posts to the end line when they started writing the rules. I have an old book, that has some pictures from some high school games from the early years in Nebraska, and in a couple of those pictures, you can see the goal posts were clearly on the goal line.
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But I'm pretty sure the Federation did not even exist at that time. If they existed, they didn't write their own football rules. Fed is as its name implies an organization that came about by the federation of existing state high school athletic ***'ns. Some of those HS ***'ns may have had their own rules for football (NCAA's with amendments), but in general everybody was using NCAA's rules for football when Fed organized. And although the NCAA was organized by & for colleges, before Fed existed NCAA had become conscious of the use of its rules by high schools and had someone reporting to their football rules committee with the interest of HS in mind.
I'd be interested in finding out whether any state HS athletic ***'ns or any local HS leagues either kept the goals on the goal lines for some number of seasons after NCAA moved them or made their positioning optional. After NCAA widened the goals to 23'4", many HS played, theoretically by Fed rules, on fields shared with colleges, and so were technically nonregulation, until about 15 yrs. later Fed allowed those goals as regulation in such circumstances. A few years later Fed made the wider goals the regulation ones. And then NCAA went and narrowed them again! I don't know if Fed followed a similar path on the re-narrowing to 18'6".
Robert