It all started on the 6th of November 1869. What started? The birth of intercollegiate football and the start of intercollegiate sport.
The game was played by the College of New Jersey. Who is the College of New Jersey? That is Princeton University as it now called. They played at a surprising opponents home field.
Many would assume the game would be against one of the other Ivy League Schools such as Yale University, Brown University, Columbia University or even Harvard. This was not the case. The first ever collegiate football game was played between the College of New Jersey (Princeton University) and Rutgers University. The game was held on College Field at Rutgers University in New Jersey with the home team taking the win 6 runs – 4 runs. Back then scores were more like soccer and not as they are today. While this was not the first intercollegiate sport, the first intercollegiate sport was held in 1852, this event prompted the first steps to creating what intercollegiate sport is today.
An elite group would later meet on the 19th of October 1873 in a Fifth Avenue Hotel in Manhattan. The four schools included Yale University, Columbia University, Rutgers University and Princeton University. Harvard University was invited to join but representatives chose not to attend. The agenda of the meeting was to establish a set of rules to govern their intercollegiate competition and to set out rules and regulations for the newly introduced game of football.
These rules would be what governed the four schools and the intercollegiate games. Intercollegiate sport would then grow to schools located across the Northeast. By the 1900’s colleges across the United States began to participate. This lead to the formation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS) on the 31st of March 1906. Their name was then changed to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which still governs intercollegiate sport to this day.