Why bother to kickoff at all?

Football, rugby, and soccer were all derived from one common sport called football.  The meaning of the term "football" is that the game is played on one's "feet," rather than riding on a horse, sled, toboggan, etc.  The games of rugby and soccer were not really created until 1863, when the two sports created rules to differentiate themselves from one another.  Soccer's original official name was "Association Football."  From AsSOCiation Football, the term SOCCER evolved in England.  The sport did not begin to really take off until almost a decade later.  In America, a third set of rules began to be evolve beginning in 1869.  In Canada a fourth set of rules began to develop in 1903 largely based on the American rules at the time.  Australian Rules Football predates all other forms of football and was developed in 1859.  America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand all play versions of football and rightly call soccer "soccer."

The NFL, which was largely an afterthought for several years, remaining in baseball's shadow, started to get very popular at the end of the 1950s, growing even more popular with the creation of the Super Bowl in 1967.  The term football and soccer were still both concurrently in use in England until the late 1960s.  This coincides with the time of the first Super Bowl.  It also coincides with the time that America and Canada jointly started the North American Soccer League, which had rules that were modified rules from the original English game.  England, largely being made up of a bunch of pretentious wankers decided that they needed to differentiate themselves from American soccer and started to exclusively call their sport "football" as a genius marketing ploy.  Then uneducated dolts in British pubs could yell at American tourists talking about American football and British tourists in American bars could do the same to the townies that made the unfortunate mistake of remaining within earshot.