On August 28, Washington State University will open its football season with the annual “Seattle Game,” the one home match the Cougars play each year 300 miles from their base in Pullman. (Probably for the last time, too.) The opponent in CenturyLink Field this time is Rutgers, New Jersey’s state university.
The game will be the first for Rutgers as a member of the Big Ten (which for $ome rea$on now ha$ 14 team$). You’ll probably hear a lot about the long storied history of Rutgers. Founded in 1766 with a charter signed by Ben Franklin’s illegitimate son, Rutgers is exactly twice as old as Wazzu (started in 1890), and for that matter 95 years older than Seattle’s University of Washington.
You might even hear about the participation of Rutgers in what it and many sports enthusiasts call the first college football game, against Princeton in New Brunswick, N.J., on November 6, 1869. But as the holder of two Rutgers degrees (as well as two tickets I bought for the Seattle Game), I’m here to tell you that contest was not a football game as the term is now understood in the U.S.
It was a soccer match.
That didn’t stop Rutgers from running for decades a bogus and ultimately unsuccessful campaign that college football started on the campus and that it should be the home of the College Football Home of Fame. Given the financial improprieties that plagued the hall’s official owner, the National Football Foundation, Rutgers probably ducked a bullet. The hall of fame has moved around–like, one might say, a football–and just relocated again, from South Bend, Ind., to Atlanta. In fact, the grand re-opening is scheduled for this weekend.
As a weekend referee of youth soccer for 17 years, I might fairly be accused of having a bias here. But I think it a slight against the great sport of soccer for the athletic community not to acknowledge that the famous Rutgers-Princeton encounter in 1869 had little to do with tackle football, which would not even be invented for several years thereafter.
What follows is my New To Seattle take on the back story, which–plug plug–is liberally borrowed from a novel I’ve written, entitled OFFSIDE: A Mystery–scheduled for publication this fall. Continue reading →
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