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...
