Princeton and Rutgers are talking about scheduling a football game in 2019 to mark the 150th anniversary of America’s first college-football game, played between these two schools in 1869. This is a bad idea for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the 1869 match (which Rutgers won) was not really the first college-football game.
The linked article says “Princeton officials seem lukewarm with the idea,” and understandably so. Princeton plays in the Ivy League, a middling conference in the FCS division (formerly I-AA), while Rutgers has just joined the Big 10, a decidedly major conference in the big-time FBS division (formerly I-A). So the game, if it happens, could easily be not just one-sided but dangerous for Princeton’s undersized players.
But the more important reason not to schedule the matchup is that the first college-football contest was not played in 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton, but in 1874 between McGill and Harvard. The game the two New Jersey schools played was something close to soccer, with players (25 per side) allowed to kick the ball or bat it with their hands, and points scored by kicking the ball into the opponents’ goal. This game spread to a handful of other northeastern colleges in the next few years, under varying rules.
Meanwhile, Harvard played a different, more rugbyish game that allowed the ball to be carried and thrown. In 1874 it agreed to a two-game series in Cambridge with McGill, which also played a rugby-type game. The first game, played on May 14 under Harvard’s rules, was an easy victory for the home team. The next day they played under McGill’s rules, which permitted more ball handling, used an oval ball (unlike Harvard’s round one), and scored points with a “try,” similar to the modern touchdown. The contest ended in a scoreless tie, but Harvard’s players decided they liked McGill’s rules better than their own.
The “Boston game” soon became more popular than the kicking-oriented variety, and when representatives from four American colleges met in November 1876 to standardize football rules, they largely adopted the McGill/Harvard version. So while the 1874 game was quite different from today’s football, it is at least recognizable as an ancestor, whereas the game Rutgers and Princeton played in 1869 was an evolutionary dead end.