On May 15, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, students from Harvard and McGill Universities battled in America’s first game of intercollegiate football. Some readers may be surprised at the preceding sentence: Didn’t Rutgers and Princeton play as far back as 1869? Traditionally, it is true, the two New Jersey schools have been awarded priority in college football. But it would be more accurate to call their 1869 match America’s first game of college soccer. Under the rules in force for that contest, carrying and passing were not allowed (although the ball could be batted with the hands), so it was almost entirely a kicking game.
The New Jersey-style game expanded slowly, with Columbia fielding a team in 1870 and Yale in 1872. Meanwhile, in Cambridge, the sport was developing along a different path. Football of a sort had been a Harvard tradition since the 1820s, when the freshman and sophomore classes began competing in an annual free-for-all under loosely defined rules. By the 1850s it had degenerated into an excuse for the sophomores and freshmen to kick one another instead of the ball, and in 1860 the tradition was scrapped. Then in 1871 football was revived at Harvard, this time as a genuine sport, not an excuse for hazing. The rules were a hybrid of soccer and the English game of rugby, with players allowed to hold the ball and run with it if pursued.
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