Dear Sports Fan,
I was surprised to learn that there are field goals in basketball as well as football. What’s up with that? Who had the term “field goal” first, basketball or football?
Thanks,
Ivan
Dear Ivan,
The term field goal refers to one way of scoring in both football and basketball. As we covered in our How does scoring work across sports post, in football, a field goal is when a team kicks the ball between the uprights not directly after a touchdown. In basketball, it’s a more general term that covers the majority of shot attempts. The only way to score in basketball that doesn’t count as a field goal is the free throw, an undefended shot awarded to a team that has been fouled in particular circumstances. As for which sport had the term first, there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer to that question but the smart money is on football as having had it first.
Basketball has a very distinct creation story. The sport was invented by James Naismith, a gym teacher at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1891. His 13 rules of basketball are become a treasured document in the sports history. Nowhere in those rules does the term field goal show up, but he uses the word field to refer to the area of play and goals to refer to made baskets. The leap to using the term field goal to refer to a subset of the goals is not a big one, particularly because he did carve out goals that would be awarded in a different way. In the original rules of basketball, a team that was on the receiving end of three straight fouls from the other team would be awarded on goal.
Football is an older sport and came about in a more evolutionary way than basketball. I don’t know exactly when there were first more than one way to score in football but by 1883, safely eight years before basketball was invented, one of the pioneer rule makers, Walter Camp, was already tinkering with how much different types of scoring should be worth, including the field goal. He settled on “four points for a touchdown, two points for kicks after touchdowns, two points for safeties, and five for field goals.”
The only article I could find explicitly addressing your question was this one by Mark Lieberman on the University of Pennsylvania’s Language Log blog. The article is well worth reading, as is the discussion in the comments section.
In terms of why the distinction matters in basketball, one main reason that it helps generate the commonly used statistic of field goal percentage. Field goal percentage is roughly the number of shots made divided by the number of shots attempted. This stat is a traditional one used to express how efficiently a player scores. Free throws (which are not counted as field goals) are excluded from this calculation. On one hand, this makes the statistic more useful because it isolates one skill (shooting within the flow of the game) from another (converting free throws.) On the other hand, points from free throws are worth just as much as points from other shots, and a possession that ends with a player being fouled is usually thought of as an offensive success, but in terms of field goal percentage would not show up at all. This type of gap between statistic and reality is why we have had so many new statistics invented in the past ten years.
Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer