When Was the First College Football Game? A Look at the Start of a Fall Institution

Anyone who's taken Latin (or Latin-adjacent subjects like philosophy and logic) in an American college in the past 156 years knows that ex nihilo nihil fit—nothing comes from nothing.

Fans watching college football's titanic early-season clashes this year—Texas-Ohio State! Notre Dame-Miami! Alabama-Florida State!—may find it hard to draw a through-line between today's game and the leather-helmet era, which recedes further into history every fall. Modern college football (a thoroughly professional endeavor) is televised, analyzed, streamed and beamed into homes across North American and the world.

But it had to start somewhere. College football has a Big Bang, a Genesis, a primordial soup. In fact, both of the participants in college football's first game are still playing today—even if they've taken radically different paths.

Here, ahead of another season of Saturdays, is the story of the very first college football game.

What did 'football' look like before college football?

Ballgames are as old as the human story, and England repeatedly moved to ban games of "mass football" throughout medieval and early modern times. These games lacked codification, the key development that would set American football (and its more popular cousin soccer) on the road to world domination. It was every man for himself, mirroring the desperation of life before indoor plumbing, air conditioning, and the Bahamas Bowl.

In the 19th century, "mass football" began to pop up at American universities—only to meet with crackdowns like at Harvard in 1860. However, across the pond, English players were establishing rules for (and, in doing so, marginally civilizing in the eyes of the authorities) association football. The stage was set for American students to tweak the future game of soccer into something completely different.

When was the first college football game, and who played?

Rutgers College was an ancient college affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church, located in the city of New Brunswick, N.J. The College of New Jersey was a similarly archaic institution in the city of Princeton with some historic ties to the Presbyterian church. They had some enmity in the sports of the day, having played baseball against each other in 1866 (Princeton won 40–2).

During the 1869-70 academic year, a contingent from Rutgers—apparently remembering the events of three years prior—challenged a contingent from Princeton a football game on Nov. 6, to be governed by specific rules similar to England's rules of soccer. In these circumstances in New Brunswick, the first ever game of American football began.

Who won the first ever college football game?

If you ever find yourself thinking during an endless replay review that the rules of college football are too complex, here are the regulations Rutgers and Princeton contended with in 1869.

Each side had 25 men. The field was 120 yards long and 75 yards wide. Points were scored via "goals;" the institution of the touchdown was still seven years away. The game was played until 10 goals were scored, and whichever team made more goals would walk away with the victory.

Princeton, the story goes, had the size—Jacob Edward Michael, a six-foot, 215-pound undergrad who later became an obstetrician, entered history as the best player in football's first game. This proto-Patrick Mahomes, however, was no match for Rutgers's quickness, and two late goals sealed a 6–4 victory for the future Scarlet Knights.

In 1933, aged Rutgers player John Warne Herbert Jr. recalled a pious professor walking by the playing field, seeing the proceedings, and shaking his umbrella in fury.

"You will come to no Christian end!" he yelled, a warning that has seemingly gone unheeded for a century and a half since.

What was the legacy of the first college football game?

Almost nothing in the short term; College Football Reference records that two years after the first game no college football was played anywhere (Princeton, beginning a college football tradition, dubiously claimed national championships in '69 and '70). Slowly, however, codification stuck. More credible games were played in the mid-1870s, and soon Yale coaching maestro Walter Camp was on the scene. We were off.

For football's first century, Rutgers and Princeton saw their respective football fortunes head in opposite directions. The Scarlet Knights didn't win 10 games until 1976, and didn't win a bowl game until 2006, when they spent time ranked No. 7 in the country in an 11-2 dream season. The Tigers, on the other hand, are credited with 28 national championships from major selectors—the most in the history of the game, still. Alabama would need to win five national championships to break it.

In a nod to the game's capacity for irony, however, Rutgers is playing major college football in the Big Ten, while Princeton is down in the lower-tier FCS.

The two teams played in 1969 to celebrate football's centennial—the Scarlet Knights won 29–0—but did not for football's sesquicentennial in 2019. Rutgers will open 2025 on Aug. 28 against Ohio, while the Tigers will follow suit against San Diego on Sept. 20. And so we beat on, boats against the current, much to that professor's chagrin...