USC is joining the Big Ten and helping to create an 18-school superconference with the other West Coast schools leaving the Pac-12. The Trojans will participate in Big Ten media days next week in Indianapolis. The newness of their surroundings and the freshness of their situation will become apparent when they join a media extravaganza with Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, and other schools from the Midwest. As we get to know USC’s new Big Ten neighbors, let’s consider the greatest football moment in the history of Rutgers University.
It’s an old memory, literally the oldest college football memory we have.
College football began more than 150 years ago. The first recorded game was on Nov. 6, 1869. Rutgers won.
Events leading up to the game were described by John W. Herbert, Rutgers ’72, who was one of the players: “To appreciate this game to the full you must know something of its background,” Herbert wrote in 1933. “The two colleges were, and still are, of course, about 20 miles apart. The rivalry between them was intense. For years each had striven for possession of an old Revolutionary cannon, making night forays and lugging it back and forth time and again. Not long before the first football game, the canny Princetonians had settled this competition in their own favor by ignominiously sinking the gun in several feet of concrete. In addition to this, I regret to report, Princeton had beaten Rutgers in baseball by the harrowing score of 40-2. Rutgers longed for a chance to square things.”
A challenge for the game was issued by Rutgers. Three games were to be played that year. The first played at New Brunswick and won by Rutgers. Princeton won the second game, but cries of “over-emphasis” prevented the third game in football’s first year when faculties of both institutions protested on the grounds that the games were interfering with student studies.
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