NCAA rulebook

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by With_Two_Flakes

Good move dvasques! It brings you into line with the rest of the World - NCAA Rules are the standard outside of North America.

Might as well add a historic note: the NCAA football rules have the longest continuity in the hands of a single organiz'n. NCAA was organized to take over intercollegiate football from a student-faculty-alumni committee that'd developed a set of rules which they'd gotten published annually by Spalding and was understood as standard. (Not universal, however: twice in the 19th Century, there had been regional breakaways from the Football Rules Committee.) Of course, had it been up to the students, they wouldn't've involved faculty at all. Inviting faculty onto the committee was a compromise they made to keep from having to go underground as unacceptable student activity, especially on campus. Later, control by the NCAA (which had no student represent'n at all) was again seen as necessary to keep football socially acceptable or even legally tolerated.

The other major codes of football in the USA -- those of Fed & NFL -- were both derived from NCAA's rules, and both the Federation and the NFL used NCAA rules for some years before amending them for their own purposes.

NCAA & Fed have also deliberately cooperated over the years re football and picked up much from each other's football rules. I would say that at least initially NCAA was the beneficiary, because early in their development of their own rules, Fed undertook a project of several years, being a rewrite that was implemented practically all at once when it was finished. That and a later rewrite very much clarified and condensed the rule book, and NCAA was at least inspired by Fed's editing job to eventually do better themselves. By contrast NFL's rules writing has been an accretion of details with little editing and reconciliation.

Robert