Baseball’s magical 90 feet and other great sports measurements and dimensions

2. Football’s 100-yard field

SHARON ELLMAN/AP/FILE
n this Oct. 23, 2011, file photo, fans cheer as the St. Louis Rams and Dallas Cowboys play in an NFL football game at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas.

The field’s length seems so logical today that it’s hard to imagine it was ever any different, but it was. In its early days, when the game resembled rugby, the field size – as in rugby up this day – varies somewhat. It wasn’t until 1881, according to ESPN, that the field’s length was standardized at 110 yards, which is roughly equivalent to 100 meters, and may have been influenced by rugby and a couple of games Harvard played against Montreal’s McGill University.

By 1912, the rule makers decided to add 10-yard-deep end zones to either end of the field, which would have made for a 130-yard-long field in toto. The problem was a number of colleges had built stadiums that wouldn’t accommodate that length, so the distance between the goal lines was shortened to 100 yards. The modern Canadian field is 110 yards goal line to goal line, probably a carryover from football’s early metric/rugby influence.

Standardizing the American field at 100 yards is ideal for several reasons. One is simply that 100 is a magical number. Second, it makes for easy sectioning into 10-yard increments that provide teams and spectators a quick reference for gauging progress up and down the field. And, of course, 10-yard thinking is woven into football’s mindset because that is the distance that must be gained for a first down.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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