Modern Football Begun at Harvard and Princeton

Crimson Get Modern Form

In Rugby Game With McGill

Modern football, American style, owes its form to Harvard and its frills to Princeton.

When football was first played on this side of the Atlantic, it was actually the soccer we know today. It was played at Harvard and Yale as far back as the 1820's, but only as a means to haze freshmen.

The "freshies" in both schools were forced to play a game with the sophomores. They were supposed to kick the ball. But the sophomores had a habit of missing the ball on their kicks, and booted the "freshies" instead. This angered the "freshies" who started to kick back.

Both schools decided that too many people were getting hurt, and banned the games. Football then disappeared, at least from the records, until November 6, 1869, when Princeton met Rutgers for the first intercollegiate game in the country's history.

The game was played according to soccer rules, and Princeton went down, 6 to 4. Tiger players mapped a strategy for the game. When they lined up for the play, they let out a blood-souring yell that the Confederates had used during the civil war. It was called a "scarer," and probably took more out of Princeton than Rutgers. Princeton players used up so much wind yelling that they hadn't enough left to run on.

So they scheduled a rematch for the following week, and drafted their fellow students to come to the game and do the yelling. It worked, Princeton won 8 to 0, and the cheering section was born.

Football Isn't Football

But football was still soccer until Harvard decided to turn its hand to the game again. In 1874, it organized a team, but couldn't find any opponents. The four schools with teams--Princeton, Columbia, Rutgers, and Yale--had full schedules playing each other and couldn't fit Harvard in.

So it invited the McGill College team down from Montreal. The McGills arrived in Cambridge and proceeded with their practice, while the Harvards looked on in amazement. Not only were the McGills kicking the ball as in soccer, but they were picking it up and running with it whenever they pleased.

The Harvard captain politely asked the McGill captain what the devil they were playing.

"Rugby," answered the McGill man. "That's our game."

"Never heard of it," mumbled the Harvard captain. "Soccer is our game; kicking the ball around and nothing else. Rules bar running."

But the McGills were guests, and the Harvards were gentlemen.

"We'll play it your way," said the Harvard captain, "but you'll have to teach us the rules."

The McGill captain described the rules, but, not to be outdone in manners, proposed that one half of the game be played by rugby rules, the other by soccer rules. So it began, but Harvard took such a liking to rugby that it was played most of the time and the game ended in a 0 to 0 tie.

In 1876, when Yale finally agreed to meet Harvard, the latter imposed some of its new found rugby rules. Yale agreed, and Harvard, with its McGill experience, won the first Harvard-Yale match, 4 to 0.

Get Your Kicks

Kicking was still the most important part of the game, however, which gave it its name of football. A touchdown counted only one point, but a field goal, four.

Both Harvard and Yale liked the rugby-soccer combination, and called Columbia, Rutgers, and Princeton to a meeting to change the existing soccer rules. After days of arguing, the others were broken down, and football was born. But the old scoring system was kept. As time went on, the rules changed even more until football as we know it today emerged.

Football of the 1880's was a rough game with the stress on brawn. A team was built around its line, and Yale and Harvard vied for the nation's giants. In 1893, Harvard came out with the greatest sensation since the game had been invented -- the flying wedge. It was promptly copied by every team in the country.

Instead of a kickoff, in those days, the ball was fake-kicked. The center would touch it with his shoe, and toss it back to a teammate who ran while the rest of the team gave interference.

In the flying wedge, nine of the players drew back about 20 yards from mid-field, and at a signal, these nine, in two lanes, would converge on a point marked by the ball. By the time they arrived there, they had gathered such mass momentum that the runner was protected by a brick wall that was frightening to face and suicidal to stop.

One of the greatest drawbacks of the game then was also solved by a Harvard man--1903 captain Bert Walters. Before this time there was no neutral zone between the teams, only an imaginary scrimmage line. The lines of both teams constantly crowded this line and the referee went mad trying to spot offside offenders and keep the teams straight. To help the situation, Walters suggested today's neutral zone.

But football was to face another crisis before it became firmly rooted in American colleges. In 1905, Penn was slated to meet Swarthmore. The latter's team was built around 250-pound Bob Maxwell, a strong, hard man in a contest. Penn knew it could win only if Maxwell were put out of the way early.

The word was passed to get Maxwell, and eleven Penn men made a game try, aiming at the Swarthmore gargantua each play, and battering him in between times. But Maxwell stuck it out. When he left the field, his head was bloody but unbowed. A photographer snapped him, and soon the picture got into the hands of President Theodore Roosevelt. The rough-and-ready leader was so enraged he threatened to ban football forever if this kind of playing was not stopped.

There are still giants in the game, but the giants who used to play 45 minute, nonstop halves, and never be allowed a rest unless they had a broken bone, are part of football history. The two schools that shaped early football have conceded to the two-platoon system, but not to the commercial football idea. Perhaps they remember that the game was their baby, and don't want it to be their Frankenstein