COLLEGE FOOTBALL: ITS BEGINNINGS

At the same time, a group of students at Princeton began playing what was then known as ‘ballown’. First using their fists to advance the ball, and then their feet, this game consisted mainly of one goal: to advance the ball past the opposing team. There were no hard and fast rules applied to this earliest attempt at the game we now call football.

At Harvard, the freshman and sophomore classes competed in a football-type game, played on the first Monday of each school year; this event came to be known as ‘Bloody Monday’ because of the roughness of the game. Pick up games, similar in style to that played on ‘Bloody Monday’, soon became popular on the Boston Common, catching on in popularity around eighteen sixty.

Soon after the end of the American Civil War, around eighteen sixty five, colleges began organizing football games. In eighteen sixty seven, Princeton led the way in establishing some rudimentary rules of the game. Also in that year, the football itself was patented for the very first time.

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