History of College Football

Modern American football has its origins in various games, all known as "football", played at public schools in England in the mid-19th century. By the 1840s, students at Rugby School in England were playing a game in which players were able to pick up the ball and run with it, a sport later known as Rugby union (or rugby). The game was taken to Canada by British soldiers stationed there and was soon being played at Canadian colleges.

The first game played between teams representing American colleges was played under rules more similar to the 1863 rules of the English Football Association, the basis of the modern form of soccer. The game, between teams from Rutgers College (now Rutgers University) and the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), took place on November 6, 1869, at College Field (now the site of the College Avenue Gymnasium) in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Rutgers won, by a score of 6 "runs" to 4. Other colleges followed suit, and for a short time soccer became the dominant code of "football" at U.S. colleges. Rutgers and Princeton, along with Columbia and Yale, met on October 18, 1873, to establish rules governing their athletic competition and specifically to codify rules for the emerging sport of football.

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