First Intercollegiate Football Game
On November 6, 1869, students from Rutgers College and the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, met on a field in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in what is generally regarded as the first intercollegiate football game in the United States. Rutgers won, 6 goals to 4. The match looked very little like modern American football, but it began a tradition of college competition that would eventually produce one of the country's most popular and lucrative sports.
The game grew out of older folk football, a loosely organized pastime in which players kicked or batted a ball toward a goal. Versions had long been played at American schools, including hazing-style contests at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. In the 1860s, football was also being codified in England, where the split between association football (soccer) and rugby was taking shape. The Rutgers and Princeton students were not following a single national standard. They arranged the match through challenges between the two student bodies, and a return game was planned for the following week.
The 1869 contest was played under rules closer to soccer than to today's gridiron game. Each side fielded twenty-five players, and the ball was round. Players could advance it by kicking or batting it with their feet, hands, heads, or sides, but they were not allowed to pick it up and run or throw it. Scoring a goal counted as one game point, and the first team to reach ten was to be declared the winner. Accounts of the day describe a lively, disorderly affair with a crowd of onlookers and plenty of tumbling and shouting. Rutgers is often credited with introducing the use of a flying wedge-like defensive coordination, but details of tactics from that day are thin, and such claims should be treated cautiously.
Princeton won the return match under its own rules, and a planned third game was cancelled by college authorities, who worried about its effect on academics. Even so, the sport spread among Northeastern colleges. Harvard preferred a rugby-style game that allowed carrying the ball, and a series of matches with McGill University of Canada in 1874 helped move American play in that direction. In 1876, representatives of several colleges formed the Intercollegiate Football Association and adopted rules based largely on rugby.
The decisive changes came in the following decade, led by Walter Camp of Yale, who helped introduce the line of scrimmage and the system of downs. These innovations turned the game into something distinctly American. Football went on to dominate college campuses, give rise to professional leagues in the twentieth century, and become a major part of national culture. The muddy field in New Brunswick, with its round ball and crowds of students, was the modest starting point.