FanHouse

Good morning, class. Glad to see most of you decide not to drop this elective after one week. I know your minds are all on today's games, but you'll want to take very good notes today, because this will be on the midterms...

Last week, we learned about the very first intercollegiate football game between Rutgers and Princeton in 1869 and how it more closely resembled soccer than our modern gridiron game. Over the next few years, this form of football slowly but surely started catching on at other schools. In 1873, representatives from Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Rutgers met in New York to write the first official set of rules for college football -- rules that resembled the Football Association's original Laws of the Game, published in England in 1863, but had more than enough unique elements to differentiate themselves from the English game.

Inconspicuous by their absence, though, was Harvard. Yes, those Harvard boys just couldn't stand the thought of a football game where they weren't allowed to run with the ball, and you can't talk about running with the ball without talking about William Webb Ellis.

Who's that, you ask? Just a boy who made running with the ball possible...
The only known portrait of William Webb Ellis,
circa 1857, from the Illustrated London News.
(Courtesy of Wikipedia.)

William Webb Ellis attended the Rugby School in Warwickshire, England, in the 1820s, and he had Lester Hayes-like reputation for being a bit of a rule-bender. Legend has it that one day in 1823, young Mr. Ellis finally grew frustrated with having to back up and kick the ball after every catch, so he simply took off running down the field with the ball in his arms and touched the ball down inside his opponents goal -- a move which prompted most of his classmates to say, "Bloody hell, what is that stupid git doing now?"

Someone kinda liked that whole run-with-the-ball thing, though. By the 1840s, running with the ball was a staple of the Rugby School's football game, and by 1860, dozens of rugby football clubs sprouted up all over England. Having broken away from the Football Association and its silly insistence on not touching the ball with your hands, rugby clubs formed the Rugby Football Union in 1871, where they formalized the rules of the game and spread those rules around the world. Rugby clubs began forming in far away places like Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

So where does Harvard come in? Well, after their notorious absence from those 1873 college football meetings in New York, Harvard had practically isolated itself from other schools in terms of football. So in 1874, when rugby players at McGill University in Montreal challenged the Harvard men to a football duel, the boys in Crimson were just happy for the competition. However, McGill insisted on two games: one by Harvard's rules, and one by the Rugby Union rules -- which prompted the Harvard men to say, "What's a rugby?"

They found out in a hurry. On May 15, 1874, Harvard and McGill played the first rugby game on American soil, and those Harvard boys were so smitten, they acted like they had all met their first wives that day. Whatever football game they had been playing was immediately lost to history, and they raced back to Montreal the following fall to play more rugby.

They couldn't keep this fantastic football game to themselves, though; they wanted to share it with other colleges. In November of 1875, Harvard challenged Yale to a rugby match, offering a few concessionary rules -- things like touchdowns not counting toward the score but giving teams the right to try for a goal -- but mainly playing the Rugby Union game. Yale footballers enjoyed it so much that they, too, adopted rugby as their official football game. Then Princeton students saw this game and returned to school singing rugby's praises, and before long, other forms of football fell by the wayside in favor of rugby.

In 1876, representatives from several schools met at Massasoit House in Springfield, Massachusetts -- a meeting which came to be known as the Massasoit Convention -- to adopt the Rugby Union rules as their official game, with a few slight alterations. Touchdowns, for example, were only worth one point, and a field goal was worth four touchdowns. (Imagine that scoring system today...) The biggest schools in America, though, all chose to play rugby football -- which might not have happened had one precocious English schoolboy not decided to run with the ball six decades earlier. Amazing how that works out, isn't it?

As America celebrated its 100th birthday, though, Anglophobia kicked in, and people began to wonder why a country that declared its independence from Great Britain a century ago was so enthralled with a British game. The movement was on to Americanize football -- a movement that would be led, appropriately enough, by a Yale student named Walter Camp...

But I can see you're all anxious to go get drunk at the tailgate party, so we'll talk about Walter Camp next time. Class dismissed. Enjoy the games, everyone, and as you're watching them, think about how your football game might look today if it weren't for William Webb Ellis. There's a lesson there for all of us.