From September to November, every Saturday afternoon is football time in the United States. In thousands of stadiums all over the country, millions of people gather to watch schools and colleges play. In fact, football is the country’s leading college sport.

Yet, the game as we know it, is less than 100 years old. The first game of football in the United States was played on November 6, 1869 at New Brunswick, New Jersey, between teams representing Princeton and Rutgers Universities. The game spread first among the older eastern universities, such as Yale, Harvard, and Columbia, and was later adopted by the whole nation.

Amazingly enough, a game of “football” existed as far back as the times of the Spartans and Romans. They played a type of football to condition their soldiers for warfare! When the Romans invaded England, they brought the game with them. It developed gradually, and by the eleventh century a type of kicking game was quite popular among the British. In fact, it became so popular that King Richard II abolished the sport because the players were taking too much time from archery practice!

The game of football, as it is now known, was actually invented by accident one day in 1823. Up to that time the game that the English played was a kicking game, something like the modern game of soccer. One of the players on this particular day was William Webb Ellis, a student at Rugby.

In the middle of the game, instead of kicking the ball back as the rules required, he caught the ball and ran up the field with it! This breaking of the rules brought a great deal of criticism upon Ellis, and his captain had to apologize to the opposing captain. But that illegal maneuver marked the birth of modern football!

The old-style game has since developed into soccer. The “Ellis version” of the game became the British game of rugby. The rugby version of the game in the United States is called “football.”