Rutgers may have to cede historical cachet to Canada

Before the program's recent rise, Rutgers' only claim to fame on the gridiron had been that the school invented the game. Damian Strohmeyer/SI

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Sure, this wasn't quite the year that Rutgers, a consensus preseason Top 20 team, was planning on: Five losses and the consolation prize of the second-year International Bowl in Toronto Jan. 5 against a MAC team, a matchup that might not exactly cause seven-hour delays at Canadian customs.

Still, Toronto's hospitality should be spectacular, even if none of the people on the bowl committee who will be greeting Scarlet Knights so warmly actually believe that institution invented college football.

The mother's milk of the Rutgers football program, the nugget that kept everyone going through the years when Rutgers decided there was no reason to play Lehigh when it could be fodder for bigger programs, is the school played the first intercollegiate football game, defeating Princeton, 6-4, on Nov. 6, 1869. (As a Rutgers alumnus, I can rattle off that date as easily as my wedding anniversary.) This is our story and we Scarlet Knights people have always stuck to it, a tale that is now folk history and is swallowed whole by the college football establishment.

Except, alas, in Canada.

McGill University, in Montreal, claims it played the first college football game, May 14, 1874, at Harvard. (Yes, 1869 comes before 1874 -- even we state university graduates can figure that much out. Still, keep reading.) Of course, Harvard doesn't make too much noise on the subject of being No. 1, at least chronologically, probably because it's been preoccupied with turning out geniuses and future leaders and all; but McGill can be a little pushy on the subject. McGill and Montreal take being first a little more seriously, not surprising given the past. A McGill man, James A. Naismith, invented college basketball at a YMCA in Springfield, Mass., and there is much, although not incontrovertible, evidence that hockey was first played in Montreal -- a contention that will get you high-sticked in Windsor, Dartmouth and Halifax, Nova Scotia, and maybe even Kingston, Ontario. In the sports business, being able to claim a piece of three of the Big Four isn't too shabby.

The McGill people don't dispute that Rutgers and Princeton played something in 1869; the question is just what they played. There is a strong probability those New Jersey schools played 25-per-side soccer in New Brunswick, which has not yet taken to calling itself the birthplace of college soccer. Indeed PFRA Research has come to that very conclusion.

McGill and the McGill of the South, as some of true believers think of Harvard, were not playing soccer but the so-called Boston Game. Unlike Rutgers and Columbia and others that fielded teams that played kicking-only games in the early 1870s, the Harvard rules allowed players to pick up the ball and run with it as long as they were being pursued. McGill was accustomed to playing something almost identical to modern rugby, but it gave the Boston Game a shot in the first of a two-game series in Cambridge.

Harvard won, 3-0, in a game called after 22 minutes. (The actual playing time was about six minutes, what with the clock stopping to move the chains after every first down and commercials for buckboards. On the College Game Day show, Lee Corso wore a crimson stovepipe hat.) The teams played to a scoreless tie the next day using McGill's rules, which the Harvard players liked so much they quickly abandoned the Boston Game. The second McGill-Harvard game reflected the true origin of college football, at least more than anything that had gone before.

Is this one more loss for Rutgers this season?