The Oldest Rivalries in College Football

By 4Football Staff · October 14, 2026 · 10 min read

Which college football rivalry is the oldest depends on how you count. Here are the strongest claims by first meeting, number of games and trophy, and the stories behind them.

Ask a room of college football fans which rivalry is the oldest and you will get a different answer from nearly every person in it. Someone will say Harvard and Yale. Someone from the Midwest will name a game that began before the state's grandparents were born. A Pennsylvania fan will claim a small-college series nobody outside the region has heard of, and, strangely enough, will have a good case.

The reason there is no single answer is that "oldest" can mean four different things, and each points to a different pair of schools. This article sorts them out, introduces the rivalries with the best claims, and explains how a handful of them survived wars, disputes and conference shake-ups to remain on the calendar. It focuses on what is well documented and flags where the record is contested.

None of this is about who is winning now. The standings and the college rankings cover that. This is about how long people have been getting angry at the same opponent every fall.

Four ways to be "the oldest"

Before looking at the schools, it helps to define the terms.

1. Oldest first meeting. The two schools played each other earlier than any other pair did. This is the simplest claim, but the game may have been played once and then dropped for years.
2. Most meetings. The two teams have played each other more times than any other pair. This favors rivals that played every year, and sometimes more than once a year in the early days.
3. Longest unbroken run. The teams have met every year without a missed season. This is hard to sustain across wars, epidemics and disputes.
4. Oldest trophy. The two schools play for a physical prize that dates back the furthest. Trophies can be much younger than the rivalry.

An honest answer therefore sounds like this: one pair holds the title on first meeting, another on the number of games, and a third on the trophy. Keep that in mind as we go through the list.

The very first games

Football between colleges began in 1869, with a game between Rutgers and Princeton that looked more like a soccer match than modern football. It is described in our piece on the first intercollegiate football game. Rutgers and Princeton did not become a lasting annual rivalry, though, and the two schools no longer meet every year.

The rivalry that holds the best early claim on first meetings among teams that stuck with it is the one between Princeton and Yale. They first played in the early 1870s, in the years when the sport was still being defined, and the two schools have continued to meet as members of the same league. Harvard and Yale followed with their first meeting in 1875, in what both schools still call simply The Game.

The Harvard–Yale series is the standard example of how rivalry and rule-making grew together. Both schools helped push the sport away from its soccer-like origins toward a form closer to rugby, and later toward the version Walter Camp shaped, as described in Walter Camp and the Birth of the Modern Rules. The series was also interrupted for a short time in the 1890s. After a particularly violent game in 1894, relations between the schools were strained enough that they did not play for two seasons, a reminder that early football was dangerous and that rivalry could turn sour.

The most-played rivalry of all

If you count meetings, the title goes to a pair of small schools in Pennsylvania. Lehigh and Lafayette first played in 1884 and have met in a very large number of games since, well over 150 by the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. This is widely cited as the most-played series in college football at any level. It is not a game that gets national attention, but it is a rivalry that has survived because the schools are close, the competition is genuinely local, and the tradition has been passed down through alumni for generations.

At the top level of the sport, the title for most meetings is usually given to Minnesota and Wisconsin, who first met in 1890. Their game is called the Border Battle, and the winner takes home a trophy shaped like an axe, named after the mythical lumberjack Paul Bunyan, which has been exchanged since the late 1940s. The long history of the series has made it a fixture of the Midwest sports calendar, and it persists despite years in which neither team was at the top of the standings.

The service academies

Army and Navy first played in 1890, and the game has been a national event ever since. It stands apart from other rivalries because the two teams are not just local competitors but representatives of the nation's military academies, and the game is attended by cadets, midshipmen, veterans and officials. The series has been interrupted from time to time by disputes between the schools, but it is now one of the most reliable dates on the calendar.

We discuss the programs in more detail in The Service Academies: Army, Navy and Air Force Football, but one point belongs here: the Army–Navy game is an example of a rivalry that has outlasted nearly every other tradition of its era because it is grounded in something beyond sports.

The Midwest, the South and the West

The decades from the 1880s through the 1890s were the period when most of the sport's great rivalries began, as colleges across the country fielded teams and looked for opponents. Here are the best-known ones from that period, grouped by region.

Midwest

• Michigan and Notre Dame first met in 1887, which was also Notre Dame's first football game. The series has had long pauses, but the date of the first meeting stands as one of the oldest among major programs.
• Michigan and Minnesota began in 1892. The game is played for the Little Brown Jug, a trophy that dates to the early 1900s and is often cited as one of the oldest trophies in major-college football. According to the traditional account, Michigan's team left a jug behind after a game in Minneapolis, and Minnesota kept it as the prize.
• Indiana and Purdue first played in 1891, and since 1925 they have competed for the Old Oaken Bucket, a wooden bucket that carries chain links marking the scores.
• Michigan and Ohio State first met in 1897. The game has become so central to both schools that it is simply called The Game in the region, which sometimes confuses fans of the Ivy League series that uses the same name.

South

• Georgia and Auburn first met in 1892 in Atlanta, and the series is often called the oldest rivalry in the Deep South.
• Alabama and Auburn began in 1893, but their story has a long gap. After a dispute early in the next century, the two schools stopped playing and did not resume until the late 1940s. The game, known as the Iron Bowl, has been played annually since, but those lost decades are the reason it cannot claim the longest unbroken run.
• Texas and Texas A&M first played in 1894. For long stretches of the twentieth century the game was played around Thanksgiving. The rivalry was paused when the schools ended up in different conferences, and it has since returned, a good example of how conference realignment can disrupt a tradition.

West

• California and Stanford have played what they call the Big Game since 1892, and the winner takes home the Stanford Axe, a trophy with its own colorful history of thefts and recoveries.
• Oregon and Oregon State first played in 1894 in a series called the Civil War, which is a good example of an in-state rivalry that has lasted for well over a century.

Why so many began in the 1880s and 1890s

The cluster of start dates in the table is not a coincidence. In those decades, football spread from a handful of eastern campuses to colleges across the country, and each new team needed opponents it could reach. Railroads made it possible for a team to travel a few hundred miles for a Saturday game, but long trips were still expensive and slow, so schedules were built around neighbors. The first game against the school across the state line often became an annual event simply because it was the easiest one to arrange.

Student culture did the rest. Campuses already had debating societies, literary clubs and other forms of competition, and football gave students a way to express loyalty in public. The games drew crowds from the town as well as the campus, and local newspapers covered them with a seriousness that fed the feeling that something important was at stake. Within a few years, a rivalry had a name, songs and stories. By the time the sport was reformed in the early 1900s, as described in our history of the NCAA's beginnings, many of these series were too deeply rooted to disappear.

A reference table

First-meeting dates and trophy details come from the schools' own histories, and some sources count the early years differently, so if you need a precise citation, check the schools' media guides.

How trophies enter the story

Trophies are usually later than the rivalry itself. The oldest series started as ordinary games, and the trophy arrived when someone had the idea to give the winner something to carry home. Some trophies grew out of accidents, like the Little Brown Jug. Some came from bets, and a famous example is the pig known as Floyd of Rosedale, which the governors of Minnesota and Iowa wagered on a game in 1935 after a rough contest the previous year. A bronze statue of the pig is now the trophy. Others, like the Old Oaken Bucket, were planned by alumni groups who wanted a symbol of the series.

We explain the broader role of these prizes in Rivalry Games and Trophies: Why They Matter. The short version: a trophy gives fans and players something concrete to fight for, and it gives the series a way to remember itself.

What keeps a rivalry alive

An old rivalry is not automatically a lasting one. Several things have to line up.

• Geography. Schools that are close to each other are easier to schedule and easier to care about. Most of the oldest rivalries involve neighbors.
• Conference membership. Being in the same conference makes the game automatic. When one school leaves, the series can disappear. The long pause in the Texas series is one example, and we discuss the larger pattern in Conference Realignment: Why Schools Switch Leagues.
• A date the schools protect. Many of the oldest rivalries are played on a fixed weekend, often at the end of the regular season, which gives the series a place on the calendar that does not depend on negotiation.
• Alumni and local pride. Rivalries survive because generations of fans pass them down. A game that matters to a family is hard for a school to cancel.
• Disputes and their repair. Some series ended over arguments about eligibility, money or sportsmanship, and some of those arguments took decades to resolve. When they did, the return was usually celebrated.

Common mistakes when talking about "the oldest"

Confusing first meeting with continuous play. A series that started in 1890 but skipped many years is not older, in the sense of unbroken tradition, than one that started later and never missed a season.

Treating the first intercollegiate game as the first rivalry. The 1869 game is a landmark, but a single game is not a rivalry.

Overlooking lower divisions. The most-played series is played by schools that rarely appear on national television. Small-college football has its own long traditions, as in our articles on the FCS playoffs and the Group of Five.

Believing every statistic you read. Meeting counts differ depending on whether a source includes games from the earliest years, ties, forfeits and vacated results. If a number matters to you, check the schools' own records.

Following the rivalries today

If you want to see which of these games are on the schedule in a given year, the college section and the schedule page list upcoming games, and most of the rivalries above are played on predictable weekends late in the season. Check your own favorite team's schedule, because realignment and scheduling changes can add or remove a rivalry game.

The short version

• "Oldest" can mean first meeting, most meetings, longest unbroken run or oldest trophy, and each points to a different rivalry.
• Princeton–Yale and Harvard–Yale are among the earliest lasting rivalries, with Harvard–Yale's first game in 1875.
• Lehigh–Lafayette, first played in 1884, is widely cited as the most-played series; Minnesota–Wisconsin holds that title at the top level.
• Army–Navy, Michigan–Minnesota, Georgia–Auburn, California–Stanford and many others all began in the early 1890s.
• Trophies usually came later, often through accidents or bets, and some are among the oldest traditions in the sport.
• Disputes and conference realignment have interrupted some series, such as Alabama–Auburn for decades and Texas–Texas A&M more recently.
• Check the schools' own records for exact first-meeting dates and totals, because sources count differently.