Coach Baltzegar

Nov 6, 1869: Rutgers played Princeton in the first college football game. It looked a lot more like soccer. The game was played in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on a field near the Rutgers campus. Each team had 25 players. Nobody could pick up the ball and run with it. Players kicked it or batted it forward with their hands, heads, or feet, and they scored by sending it between two goalposts. There were no helmets, no pads, and no forward passes. Around 100 people watched, many of them sitting along a fence. Some of the Rutgers players wore scarlet scarves wrapped around their heads like turbans, which may be where the school's color came from. Rutgers won 6 goals to 4. A week later the teams played again at Princeton, and Princeton won 8-0. A third game was planned, but the schools called it off, reportedly because faculty worried football was distracting students from their studies. Over the next 20 years, the game changed dramatically, especially after a Yale player named Walter Camp introduced the line of scrimmage and the system of downs. The sport Rutgers and Princeton played that day would be almost unrecognizable today. Rutgers still calls itself the birthplace of college football.