November 2, 2025

- Rutgers University official account

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159 years

It's college football season, and you might wonder just how long we've been doing this.

Intercollegiate sports in America started with rowing: Harvard and Yale raced on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire in 1852.

Baseball followed in 1859 -- that seems early, but it checks out -- when Amherst played Williams in Massachusetts. By the mid-1860s, college baseball teams were playing regular schedules up and down the East Coast.

One game of note in particular had far-reaching effects: In 1866, when Princeton's baseball team traveled to Rutgers and utterly demolished them 40-2. I guess they didn't have a mercy rule.

The Rutgers students were humiliated, and the loss festered for three full years until they challenged Princeton to a rematch. Only this time, instead of base-ball, they suggested another game, with rules borrowed from the London Football Association.

The invitation went out, framed in what one Princeton graduate later called "the punctilious form of that period," and Princeton accepted immediately. They'd play a series of three games—first at Rutgers, then at Princeton, then back at Rutgers again.

On the morning of November 6, 1869, the Princeton team arrived in New Brunswick by train.

The Rutgers students met their rivals at the station and spent the day showing them around town, playing billiards, and having lunch together. Despite the rivalry, there was genuine hospitality between the schools.

At 3 p.m., about 100 spectators gathered on a vacant lot on campus. The captains met to make sure everyone agreed on the rules.

Each team would field 25 players. The ball could only be advanced by kicking—no throwing, no running with it in your hands. Each score would count as a completed "game," and the first team to six would win.

The Rutgers players donned scarlet turbans and handkerchiefs to distinguish themselves from Princeton, who showed up in a mix of street clothes and rough athletic wear. Nobody wore any protective gear.

At the kickoff, what the Rutgers newspaper would later describe as "headlong running, wild shouting, and frantic kicking" erupted across the field.

The game looked nothing like modern football -- maybe more like soccer mixed with rugby, with a healthy dose of organized chaos. Players crashed through fences, and the ball kept flying into neighboring yards, causing delays while they retrieved it and restarted play.

Princeton kicked off poorly, and the ball glanced to one side. Rutgers scored the first goal in college football history within five minutes.

Princeton had a clear advantage in that their players were taller and heavier. Captain William Gummere ordered his star player, Jacob Edwin Michael—known as "Big Mike," a towering figure at six feet and 215 pounds—to break up Rutgers' formations.

"Time and again Michael charged into Rutgers' primitive mass play and scattered the players like a burst bundle of sticks," a witness named Parke Davis later wrote. Princeton began scoring.

The teams traded goals. By the ninth "game" the score was tied 4-4.

Rutgers captain William Leggett called time and huddled with his team. He'd noticed that Princeton's height advantage only worked when the ball was in the air. If Rutgers could keep it on the ground, Princeton's advantage would disappear.

He gave his players simple instructions: "Keep your kicks short and low."

The strategy worked. Rutgers scored the final two goals and won 6-4.

After the match, both teams sat down together for dinner. They ate roasted game birds from the Jersey marshes, sang songs, and made speeches. The Daily Targum newspaper reported that Princeton left "in good high spirits, but thirsting to beat us next time, if they can."

They got their revenge the following Saturday. Playing on their home field under Princeton rules—which allowed free kicks for catching the ball on the fly—they shut out Rutgers 8-0.

A planned third game never happened. School officials at both institutions complained that students were paying more attention to football than to their studies.

But the seed had been planted, and sports historians now regard this chaotic contest as the first intercollegiate football game.

As a Princeton historian put it later: "In 1869 and for many years later an unaffected, old-fashioned hospitality was observed among the colleges towards one another to a degree that is almost unbelievable."

The rules evolved and the game changed, but by the early 1900s, football had become a phenomenon.

Just two decades later it was filling massive stadiums; by the end of the century, it had become woven into American culture.

Today, more than 100 million people watch college football games every fall weekend. The sport generates billions of dollars, entire towns shut down on game days, and rivalries span generations.

It became part of American life because those first players were willing to try something new for the simple joy of competition.

So to answer my own initial question: 159 years. That's how long we've been doing this.

7 other things to know this week ...

• Sunday, November 2: "I did miss having a shower, particularly to clean my hair up. But otherwise what we did onboard was certainly very workable." — William Shepherd, ISS Expedition 1 commander. On this date in 2000, Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev arrived at the International Space Station, becoming its first long-duration crew.
• Monday, November 3: "See the USA in your Chevrolet, America is asking you to call." — From the early advertising jingle that would make the brand famous; on this date in 1911, Swiss race car driver Louis Chevrolet and ousted General Motors founder William C. Durant incorporated the Chevrolet Motor Car Company in Detroit.
• Tuesday, November 4: "Yes, wonderful things!" — British archaeologist Howard Carter's response when his financial backer, Lord Carnarvon, asked if he could see anything as Carter peered into King Tutankhamun's tomb for the first time. Carter discovered the tomb's entrance on this date in 1922, in Egypt's Valley of the Kings—the most intact pharaoh's burial chamber ever found.
• Wednesday, November 5: "Remember, remember the fifth of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot." — Traditional English rhyme commemorating the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot. On this date in 1605, conspirator Guy Fawkes was discovered guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder beneath the House of Lords, preventing the assassination of King James I.
• Thursday, November 6: "A blunt-speaking, down-to-earth television news reporter—and I'm proud of it." — Martha Rountree, journalist and co-creator of Meet the Press. The program debuted on NBC television on this date in 1947, becoming the longest-running show in television history.
• Friday, November 7: "I believe that it not only enriches the spiritual life, but that it makes one more sane and sympathetic, more observant and understanding, regardless of whatever age it springs from, whatever subjects it represents." — Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, co-founder of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Opened this date in 1929, the MoMA would become one of the most influential modern art museums in the world, now housing approximately 200,000 works.
• Saturday, November 8: "I did not think; I investigated." — German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, describing his methodical approach after discovering X-rays on this date in 1895. When he noticed a fluorescent screen glowing inexplicably in his darkened laboratory at the University of Würzburg, Röntgen spent seven weeks studying the phenomenon before announcing his discovery to the world.