On Friday, October 25, the University of Southern California football team will host Rutgers under the lights at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The game will be the first gridiron match ever between the two, as well as the first ever for Rutgers in the City of Angels.
Both the Trojans and the Scarlet Knights are now members of the Big Ten (which for $ome broadca$t rea$on now ha$ 18 team$). Since becoming New To Las Vegas, I have learned that USC has a big following hereabouts. As for Rutgers, from which I have two degrees, I sometimes have to tell local folks what and where it is. For the record: New Jersey’s state university, the country’s eight oldest college, never a member of the Ivy League, located in the distant New York City suburb of New Brunswick, N.J.
Rutgers was founded in 1766 as a tiny church-related institution named Queens College with a charter signed by Ben Franklin’s illegitimate son. The institution is nearly twice as old as USC, co-founded in 1890 by a family harboring racist thoughts. (But to be fair, I should note that Henry Rutgers, for whom the school was renamed in 1824 after making a big gift, was a slave owner.) Both schools have grown into major academic institutions.
However, I digress. Whenever Rutgers plays a new team in football, the scribes covering the opposition like to play up the role of Rutgers in what has been called the first college football game, against Princeton in New Brunswick on November 6, 1869. This is especially likely this week since the game otherwise is shaping up rankings-wise as a real yawner. Rutgers is 1-3 in the Big Ten (but 4-3 overall), while USC is 1-4 in the conference (and 3-4 overall). Both team are coming off losses this past weekend, but–since I am in Las Vegas–the early betting line has home-team USC as a 13.5 point favorite.
Still, using today’s political vocabulary, this ancient football history is simply fake news. I’m here to tell you that first contest way back when was not a football game as the term is now understood in the U.S. It was a soccer match.
That didn’t stop Rutgers from running for decades a bogus and ultimately unsuccessful campaign that college football started on the campus and that it should be the home of the College Football Home of Fame. Given the financial improprieties that plagued the hall’s official owner, the National Football Foundation, Rutgers probably ducked a bullet. The hall of fame has moved around–like, one might say, a football–and is now in Atlanta.
As someone who refereed weekend youth soccer for 20 years, I might fairly be accused of having a bias here. But I think it a slight against the great sport of soccer for the athletic community not to acknowledge that the famous Rutgers-Princeton encounter in 1869 had absolutely nothing to do with tackle football. Hell, that sport would not even be invented for years thereafter.
So here’s my take on the back story, which I’ve described before. Some of the material is drawn from OFFSIDE: A Mystery, a novel I wrote a decade ago.
As an athletic endeavor, the sport of kicking a ball with one’s foot goes back to at least the 1700s (BC), when the Aztecs and Mayas in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula figured out a way of making balls with natural latex. Greece, Rome, China, Japan all had their versions centuries before England, considered the birthplace of modern soccer. The first written mention there of “a game of ball”–penned by a monk who had witnessed the murder of cleric Thomas Becket by henchmen of King Henry II–was in 1175 (AD).
Pilgrims arriving in Massachusetts in 1620 found native Americans on beaches already playing a game called “pasuckquakkohowog.” This translated roughly as “They gather to play football.”
Over the next two centuries soccer grew in popularity, not only in England but in America, particularly on elite college campuses. But perhaps due to transportation difficulties, the early matches were intramural–club teams at a given school against other club teams–rather than interscholastic, college versus college. Some administrations were not pleased. At various times Columbia and Harvard banned the sport.
The Rutgers-Princeton match in 1869 came about six years after rival athletic factions met in a London pub and during a series of meetings hashed out formal rules for soccer under the umbrella of the newly formed Football Association. (Soccer, in case you wonder, is an abbreviated corruption derived from the term “asSOCiation footballER.”) The set of rules, or laws as they were called, was an amazingly brief six pages long and finalized just 19 days after the world’s most famous amazingly brief speech, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1863.
The laws greatly restricted the use of hands. Those who objected to the new rules went off and developed their own sport: rugby.
The end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865 was a catalyst for all kinds of change in America. In the fall of 1869 student leaders at Rutgers and Princeton–just 18 miles apart via the handy Pennsylvania Railroad–hashed out plans for a three-game series. The first would be on the Rutgers campus adjoining the New Brunswick train station on a Saturday afternoon starting at 3 p.m.
The rules, chosen by Rutgers as the home team, definitely were British FA, meaning soccer. Players could not run with the ball, which could be advanced through kicking or heading, although it was legal (as it was then in British soccer) to catch the ball with the hands and put it on the ground to be kicked. The goals were 25 feet wide, and the idea was to propel the ball between the uprights (whether there was a crossbar remains unclear).
Teams consisted of a massive 25 players each. The first to score six goals would be declared the winner.
The venue was a stony, empty 100-yard-wide lot along New Brunswick’s College Avenue five blocks from the train station surrounded by a low wooden fence that spectators sat on top of, like pigeons on a clothesline. There couldn’t have been more than 100 spectators watching. But as the game’s legend grew over the decades, so did the number of people claiming to be in attendance. (Exactly 103 years later to the very day on the very same spot, Rutgers played Princeton in what was billed as the first interscholastic Ultimate Frisbee match. I wrote up the contest for The New York Times. Rutgers also won that one, 29-27, before a crowd estimated at 1,000.)
Everyone played in street clothes. Since neither team had uniforms, the Rutgers players all wore purple scarves or handkerchiefs–remember the school mascot later became the Scarlet Knight–wrapped around their heads. This added a bizarre Middle Eastern cant to this most quintessentially historic of American cultural occasions.
Not all actions were directed toward the ball. There was a fair amount of violence to go with the fact that players wore no shin guards. “You men will come to no Christian end!” one elderly Rutgers professor screamed. A New Brunswick newspaper account called it a “lively but rough game.” That was a considerably kinder characterization than the one published in a newspaper several counties away: a “jackass performance.”
Even though an unidentified Rutgers player accidentally kicked the ball toward his own goal, leading to a Princeton score, the Rutgers ragheads won, 6-4. At the rematch a week later in Princeton, using more rugby-like rules, the home team prevailed, 8-0. The third match was canceled after professors from both schools complained students were neglecting their studies.
But within a few years, the Eastern collegiate establishment, and especially Harvard, decided that British-style soccer was not “manly” enough. They endorsed Walter Camp’s vision of a set-play, carry-the-ball, head-thumping tackle sport. Thus, the first college football game was probably a match between Harvard and Yale in New Haven, Conn., on November 13, 1875. That single contest essentially relegated soccer to an inferior position–especially after the development of baseball and basketball–in the U.S. athletic scheme of things, from which it has not fully recovered.
After that 1869 win, Rutgers lost the next 33 matches with Princeton, not winning again in the football sport that developed for 69 years until 1938. The two football teams haven’t met since 1980, after the Scarlet Knights beat the Tigers a mere five years in a row.
The famous heroic expression “I’d die for dear old Rutgers” was supposedly uttered by Rutgers football player Frank (Pop) Grant as he was being carried off the field after breaking his leg in the 1892 game against Princeton, which won, 30-0. However, there is authority–even cited by Rutgers itself–that what Grant really said was, “I’ll die if somebody doesn’t give me a cigarette.” You gotta watch that old sports history.
UPDATE ON OCTOBER 25, 2024
USC defeated Rutgers tonight, 42-20, beating the Vegas spread.
Rutgers-Princeton in 1869 resembled soccer as it was then played. Match had no official sanction, so calling it the first “college football game” is a stretch. I think the Rutgers administration knew that for decades.
An interesting analysis, Bill. Historians of the game have acknowledged that the Rutgers-Princeton match of 1869 bore little resemblance to today’s games. But it appears to have resembled rugby more than soccer, don’t you think? Also, if today’s game evolved out of either soccer or rugby, would it not be fair to consider the 1869 game at least an ancestor and thus it’s not all that off-base to call it the first? See https://www.ncaa.com/news/football/article/2017-11-06/college-football-history-heres-when-1st-game-was-played#:~:text=Rutgers%20and%20New%20Jersey%20(later,Rutgers%20won%206%2D4.