Today’s Tidbit… 1876 IFA Rule #22: Onside

The concepts of onside and offside are fundamental to gridiron football, rugby, soccer, Australian rules, and Gaelic football that emerged from a stew of nineteenth-century English games. Each grew from one version or another of those games before taking its shape due to preferences and political or geographic separation.

The rugby version of the kicking game and its offspring -Canadian rugby and American football- shared the same or highly similar rule books in the mid-to-late 1870s, including t...