TIMELINE of YALE FOOTBALL Updated As of February 2018
TIMELINE OF YALE FOOTBALL Updated as of February 2018 Oct. 31, 1872 David Schley Schaff, Elliot S. Miller, Samuel Elder and other members of the class of 1873 call a meeting of the Yale student body. From it emerges the Yale Football Association, the first formal entity to govern the game at Yale. Schaff is elected president and team captain. Nov. 16, 1872 With faculty approval, Yale meets Columbia, the nearest football-playing college, at Hamilton Park in New Haven. The game is essentially soccer with 20-man sides, played on a field 400 by 250 feet. Yale wins 3-0, Tommy Sherman scoring the first goal and Lew Irwin the other two. Nov. 15, 1873 Yale and Princeton inaugurate what will become Yale’s longest rivalry. Princeton wins 3 goals to 0. Nov. 13, 1875 Yale and Harvard meet for the first time at Hamilton Park. The game is played under the so-called “concessionary rules”—15 players on a side and running with the ball permitted as in rugby, a round ball and only goals counting as in soccer. A crowd of 2,000 pays 50 cents a head—twice the normal price for a Yale game—to watch Harvard win 4-0. 1880 Walter Camp, in his third year as Yale’s delegate at the Intercollegiate Football Association rules convention, persuades the meeting to accept 11-man, rather than 15-man, sides. He also replaces rugby’s scrum with the scrimmage, which “takes place when the holder of the ball…puts it down on the ground in front of him and puts it in play by snapping it back with his foot.” Nov.
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