College Football's Origins: Northeastern Beginnings

North Carolina State vs. Clemson, 1932

College football has its origins in the Northeastern United States. Although there is debate over when and where the first college football game occurred, it is generally accepted to have been in 1869 between Princeton and Rutgers. In the 1870s the game continued to be played by these two colleges and was also adopted at schools such as Yale, Harvard, Pennsylvania, and Columbia. As the historian Michael Oriard has shown, by the 1890s Northeastern college football games drew crowds of tens of thousands of people and received extensive coverage in New York’s popular press.

College football gradually grew in popularity in the South during the 1870s and 1880s. It began with informal matches sporadically organized among students and evolved to include games between nearby colleges. By the late 1880s, Southern colleges were beginning to become familiar with and adopt rules used by Northern colleges. A few Southern schools even began to take trips to the North to compete against Northern teams, although they usually lost by large margins. As the historian Patrick B. Miller has observed, “no one denied that the game was imported from the North.” Colleges routinely looked to professors, students, or coaches who were from the North or had spent time there to introduce or improve the game on their campuses. Even as football grew in popularity and became a major institution throughout the South, many schools continued to draw on players and coaches from the North to strengthen their teams. In fact, according to the historian Andrew Doyle “until the 1930s, virtually every Southern college employed Northern coaches.”