The First Intercollegiate Football Game: Rutgers and Princeton, 1869

By 4Football Staff · September 23, 2026 · 10 min read

On November 6, 1869, two New Jersey colleges played a game now counted as the first of college football. Here is what it looked like, what it was not, and why it still matters.

If you search for the first college football game, one date comes up again and again: November 6, 1869. On that Saturday afternoon, students from Rutgers College and the College of New Jersey, which is now Princeton University, met on a field in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and played a game that both schools, and most historians, count as the beginning of intercollegiate football.

Anyone expecting to recognize the sport would be disappointed. There was no snap, no huddle, no down and no touchdown. The ball was round. The teams had twenty-five players each. The score was counted in goals, and the first side to reach six won. If you had been in the crowd, you would probably have called what you saw soccer, with some wrestling thrown in.

That mismatch is exactly why the game is worth understanding. It is a starting point, not a prototype, and knowing the difference helps you read the many "firsts" that get attached to early football. This article covers the setting, how the game was played, what happened a week later, and how historians decide what counts as "first."

Two small colleges, less than twenty miles apart

In 1869 neither school looked like the institutions of today. Rutgers College, in New Brunswick, was a small college with a few hundred students at most. Princeton was officially the College of New Jersey; it did not take the name Princeton University until 1896. The two schools were close enough to each other that students could travel between them in a day, and they already knew each other as athletic rivals. They had played baseball against each other, and the football challenge was made in that competitive spirit.

Student games were common on both campuses. Princeton students had a long-standing campus game that moved a ball by kicking or batting it. At colleges across the Northeast, students played informal, local versions that differed from one place to the next. What was missing was an agreement on a common set of rules, which is what made a game between two colleges something new. To play each other, the two sides had to settle on which rules to use for the afternoon.

The usual account says that Rutgers students issued the challenge and that the teams agreed to follow a set of rules based on the London Football Association code, adapted for the circumstances of the match. That is why historians describe the first game as being played under association football influence, not under rugby-like rules. The best evidence for the details comes from student recollections and contemporary reports, which means you should treat small details as approximate.

How the 1869 game was played

Here is the picture most accounts give.

• Twenty-five players per side. Not eleven, and not fifteen. A bigger crowd of players on a field of uncertain size meant the game was loose, with players spread across a wide area.
• A round ball. The ball was round, like the ball used in association football, not the egg shape of a modern football.
• Moving the ball. Players advanced the ball by kicking it, and by batting it with their hands, feet, head or body. Picking the ball up and running with it was not allowed, and throwing it was not part of the game. That makes it very different from modern football.
• Scoring in goals. A goal was scored by getting the ball past the opponent's goal line, between two upright posts. The game was won by the first team to six goals. The score was counted as goals, not points.
• One goal at a time. Because every goal counted the same and the winner was the first to six, the afternoon worked as a series of short contests, each one ending when someone put the ball through.
• No uniforms as we know them. There were no helmets and no pads. According to the commonly told account, the Rutgers players wore scarlet scarves or turbans to tell themselves apart from their opponents, which is one reason scarlet became associated with the school. That detail is widely repeated, but like many stories of the period, it comes from later retelling.

The following table puts the 1869 game next to the game you watch today.

If a time traveler walked from that field to a modern stadium, the part that would feel familiar would be the crowd and the rivalry, not the sport.

What the afternoon felt like

Because the game had no standard field, no clock and no trained officials, much of what happened depended on the two groups of students and on what they were willing to accept. Both sides supplied people to settle disputes, and the contest ran until one side reached six goals. In practice that meant a long afternoon with a lot of running, kicking and crowding around the ball.

The crowd was close to the action. There were no stands built for football, and spectators mostly stood around the edges of the field and cheered. Cheering itself was part of campus culture, and students at the time were already inventing yells for their colleges. When you hear that school spirit, mascots and chants are part of the college game, this is where the habit started: with students who had no stadium and no band, only a loud interest in seeing their classmates win.

It also helps to remember that football was not the only organized game on campus. Baseball had grown quickly in the 1860s, and college baseball matches had trained students to think of athletic contests between schools as natural. Football borrowed that habit. A school wrote a challenge, another accepted, the teams set a date, and a crowd came. The new element was the ball and the rules, not the idea of playing another college.

The result and the rematch

Rutgers won the first game, six goals to four. The game was played in New Brunswick, on the Rutgers campus. The size of the crowd is described in different ways, but all accounts agree that it was small by later standards, with a few dozen to perhaps a hundred spectators, many of them students.

A week later, on November 13, the teams met again, this time at Princeton. Princeton won, eight goals to none. The second game was played under a somewhat different rule set, and the usual explanation is that Princeton wanted to use its own rules, which allowed more physical play, though the details of the differences are reported inconsistently. Many histories agree that the second match was more physical than the first.

So the first two intercollegiate football games ended with each school having won one. A third game was planned, but it was cancelled. The common explanation is that faculty members at the colleges objected, concerned that the games were distracting students from their studies. That story is told with some variation, but the broad outline, that the faculties put a stop to the series for that year, is widely accepted.

Notice how this fits a pattern. A student-run activity became popular quickly, and the people who ran the institutions responded by trying to stop it. That tension, between enthusiastic students and cautious adults, would return again and again in the sport's history, most dramatically in 1905, which is covered in the article on the 1905 crisis.

Why do we call it the first?

The label "first college football game" needs unpacking, because it depends on how you define the words.

Intercollegiate, not first ever

Students had played ball games on campuses before 1869, as the origins article explains. What was new in 1869 was a game between two different colleges, with each side representing its institution and following an agreed set of rules. That is what "intercollegiate" means. Earlier games between classes or between a college and a local club do not count in this definition.

Football, but not the football you know

The second issue is the word football itself. In 1869 it meant a game in which a ball was moved with the feet and hands, and it had not yet come to refer to the sport we now call American football. Historians who emphasize this point sometimes say the game was a form of soccer, and that is a fair description of the rules used on November 6.

Others stress continuity. The same colleges, the same type of student teams and the same pattern of annual challenges led directly to what became American football within a decade. Both views are reasonable. A sensible compromise is to say that the 1869 game is the first step on the path, not the first example of the finished sport.

First by whose count?

Different institutions and writers make slightly different claims about what counts as first. Some point to earlier student matches or club games. Some emphasize rule sets. Rutgers and Princeton have both commemorated the 1869 match, and in the sports record it stands as the date most people cite. If you see a claim that another game was "really" first, it is worth asking what definition the writer is using. Most disagreements dissolve once the definition is clear.

What happened after 1869

The 1869 games started a pattern of colleges challenging one another.

1. More colleges joined. Other schools in the Northeast began playing intercollegiate games in the following years, including Columbia and Yale. The exact first-game dates for each school vary by source, so check a school's own athletics history if you need one.
2. The rules question became urgent. Each college had its own preferences, and a match between two schools meant negotiating. The more colleges played, the more obvious it became that a shared rule book would save time and arguments.
3. A convention in 1873. Representatives of several colleges met in New York in the fall of 1873 to try to settle rules. Not every college joined in; Harvard stayed out and preferred a game closer to rugby.
4. The rugby turn. In the mid-1870s, Harvard's contact with Canadian rugby players, and a set of rules adopted in 1876, pushed the American game toward carrying and tackling. From there, a series of reforms produced the sport described in the article on Walter Camp and the modern rules.

In other words, 1869 was a spark more than a blueprint. It showed that students from different schools could organize a contest, that crowds would watch, and that the question of which rules to use was going to be a recurring problem.

What a fan can learn from the game

Even if the 1869 game bears little resemblance to the sport on your television, it carries several lessons that still apply.

• Rules are agreements. The first intercollegiate game began with an agreement about how to play. Many of the football debates you hear today, about overtime, targeting or whether a play should be reviewed, are modern versions of the same process.
• Rivalry drove the sport. The Rutgers and Princeton game was a rivalry game from the start. Rivalries remain the heart of the college calendar, and our college page lists the teams that carry on that tradition.
• Students built the sport. For its first decades, American football was run mostly by students. Administrators, governing bodies and professional coaches came later.
• Disagreement about rules was normal. The fact that Rutgers and Princeton used different rules a week apart is a reminder that standardization took years.

Reading claims about "firsts"

Because the early history is so thinly documented, many statements about it are repeated without much checking. Here is a short guide to being a careful reader.

• Prefer sources that tell you where the story comes from, such as a student diary, a school newspaper or an institutional history.
• Be cautious with exact numbers for crowds, goals in specific stretches of the game and the names of individual players, which vary between accounts.
• Treat colorful details, such as clothing or chants, as folklore unless a source says otherwise.
• When two sources disagree, say so. The 1869 game is a case where the broad story is solid and the small details are not.

Following the sport today

Today the two colleges are very different. Rutgers plays at the highest level of college football and Princeton competes in the FCS, which has its own structure and a conference that does not offer athletic scholarships. You can follow current results on the scores page, see where teams sit on the rankings page and browse the college programs in the college section.

The anniversary of the first game is a small piece of the sport's calendar. When a game is billed as part of a tradition, remember that the tradition began with two groups of students and a round ball.

The short version

• The first intercollegiate football game was played on November 6, 1869, in New Brunswick, New Jersey; Rutgers beat the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) six goals to four.
• The game used twenty-five players per side, a round ball, no carrying and a first-to-six-goals format. It looked more like soccer than the modern game.
• A week later, on November 13, Princeton won the rematch eight to none.
• A third game was cancelled, with faculty concerns commonly given as the reason.
• "First" depends on the definition: it was the first intercollegiate game, not the first football played on a campus and not the first American football as we know it.
• The story of 1869 is well established in outline, but many small details come from later retelling and should be treated carefully.