Fifty years ago this month the first intercollegiate football game in this country was played at New Brunswick, N. J., between Rutgers and Princeton.

The press of Princeton and Rutgers, founders of football, accorded the event only an incidental line or two, and then passed on to more customary news. The players, however, elated by the fun in their venture, arranged another game two weeks later, and in the following year another series, and so unconsciously became the fathers of that mighty institution of American sport, intercollegiate football.

Football Oldest Organized Sport

Football is the oldest of our organized games. The first we know of it is that it was played by the Spartans, and their style of play amazes us by its similarity to the game of today. Football, too, was a sport common to all village greens in in America following the Revolutionary War. The traditions of the older colleges of America are laden with stories of campus football.

The sport here, however, was without organization, without elaborate rules, and without formal competition, until William S. Gummere of Princeton and William J. Leggett of Rutgers arranged the Princeton-Rutgers game of 1869, and drafted a special set of rules to govern its play. Those rules, either unconsciously or by design, followed the "association" style of play, for soccer, even in these early days, was an established institution.

In 1870 Princeton and Rutgers were joined by Columbia, but in 1871 intercollegiate football temporarily lapsed. At Yale in the fall of 1872 were a number of young football players with a capacity for constructive leadership, and these men, with their associates, organized themselves into the Yale Football Association. Having drafted a code of playing, they challenged Columbia, and the latter accepted.

Grant '73 Establishes "Harvard Football Association."

While these basic events in football history were being enacted at Yale, similar activity characterized undergraduate life at Harvard. Stimulated by the leadership of Robert R. Grant '73, the football leaders in 1872 established the Harvard Football Club. The code of rules drawn up by these pioneers at Cambridge combined both the Association and Rugby codes, thus preventing the University's advent as an intercollegiate competitor for two more years, limiting their games in the interim to class and club contests.

At Princeton the game was rapidly progressing, and in 1873 they assembled an intercollegiate conference between Columbia, Princeton, Rutgers, and Yale. Harvard also was invited to attend this conference but declined. This original football committee drafted a common code of playing rules, still clinging to the principles of "Association" play.

These rules were short-lived, but they served the purpose of making possible the original Princeton-Yale game, the oldest of all present-day football classics. This game was played at New Haven November 15, 1873, and Princeton won.

McGill Introduces Rugby Game.

The year 1874 is a memorable, one, for in it occurred the event which led directly to the establishment of the present type of intercollegiate football. This event was an invasion of the United States by the Rugby football fifteen of McGill University of Montreal. The ambitious young Canadians played only one game at their style of play, but that was at Harvard. The complex, brilliant features of Rugby instantly captured the imagination, and Harvard abandoned its curious code and adopted that of the visitors.

The second step, a challenge to Yale, followed in 1875, and Yale accepted. The game was played at New Haven with Harvard the victor. The result of this game was the assembling of a second convention, attended by Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia, in 1876, which formed the Intercollegiate Football Association, and adopted with a few modifications the Rugby Union rules. They also arranged a mutual schedule of games.

The association thus formed was destined to endure amid stress and storm for two decades. The rules there adopted, although annually amended and extended, are nevertheless basically the rules that regulate play today, and the three great series of football contests thus founded--Harvard-Princeton, Princeton-Yale, and Harvard-Yale--today are the classic centres around which a hundred others thrive.

Kicks Field Goals on the Run.