On November 6, 1869, Rutgers beats Princeton, 6-4, in the first college football game. The game, played with a soccer ball before roughly 100 fans in New Brunswick, New Jersey, resembles rugby instead of today's football.
Even off the playing fields, the rivalry between the New Jersey schools, located 20 miles apart, was heated. At the time, Princeton was known as the College of New Jersey.
"For years each had striven for possession of an old Revolutionary cannon, making night forays and lugging it back and forth time and again," recalled Rutgers' John W. Herbert, who played in the first game, in a 1930 newspaper feature. "Not long before the first football game, the canny Princetonians had settled this competition in their own favor by ignominiously sinking the gun in several feet of concrete."
