ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL?
THE BASICS
It’s a Scrimmage, Not a Scrum
Rutgers Athletics
The origin of American football reaches back to both English soccer and rugby. The American college
boys who took up football in the mid-1800s started with the kicking game (soccer), switched to the
running game (rugby) and gradually transformed it into American football, a game completely
different from its predecessors.
Football began its American run at the elite universities of the Northeast. The first American
intercollegiate game (above) was between Princeton and Rutgers on Nov. 6, 1869, in New Brunswick,
N.J., using British “football” rules.
At Harvard, the students competed in a football-type game on the first Monday of each school year.
These games were so brutal including broken bones and bloody body parts that this event came to be
known as Bloody Monday. Harvard students preferred a rougher, rugby-style approach. And in 1875,
Harvard persuaded Yale to incorporate much of its game into the rules for the first football contest
between the two schools. It turned out that the spectators liked Harvard’s approach better. So did
Yale’s players. Soon, an intercollegiate league was formed based on a mixture of these rules. Walter
Camp, a Yale halfback and the team’s captain, joined the league’s rules committee. He was so
influential on making solid rules that he became known as the “Father of American Football.”