Don't be using facts to pummel Rutgers into reality!
Princeton:
en.wikipedia.org
860–423–50
Rutgers:
en.wikipedia.org
679–702–42
Both teams went 1-1 in 1869, sharing the NC, though Princeton would win the tie-breaker if the tie-breaker rules were in effect based on points scored by each team. Parke Davis named the two as co-champions decades after the fact.
en.wikipedia.org
The game in 1869 might have been the first intercollegiate athletic event but it was not a football game.
They had 30 players playing in both teams.
They used a soccer ball.
There were no goal lines and you scored by getting the ball into a soccer goal.
You could not pick the ball up and run. The ball was advanced by kicking it or hitting it with your arm or hand.
It was a weird type of soccer where hand balls were legal. But that was what was done in those days.
When McGill came to play American colleges in 1874, they insisted in playing rugby instead. They brought played with oblong ball and players could advance the ball by holding it and running. There was tackling and punting. I still wouldn’t call it football, but rugby is a lot closer to American football than soccer is.
They were still playing essentially with rugby rules when Princeton and Yale played a huge game in 1881. Both were undefeated and the game would determine the unofficial national champion for that season.
But neither team tried to score. The game draw a big crowd of people who paid to watch and they were disgusted by this strategy. In those days, you could possess the ball indefinitely and the schools just burned clock, happy to get a tie and a share of a championship. There were no downs, there was no line of scrimmage, there was no break between plays to call a new play.
It still was rugby; not football.
This game was such a farce, it caused some rule changes to happen. Walter Camp, who had just finished his career at Yale as a player, proposed a series of changes that really differentiated American football from rugby. The whole concept of a line of scrimmage, which separated teams, lining up before each play, 3 downs to make 5 yards or you must punt…all that stuff was put in for the 1882 season to make the game more interesting.
I don’t know what the first college game played in 1882 was, but I would argue this is when college football really began.
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