The first college football game took place on Nov. 6, 1869. Rutgers and Princeton faced off in New Brunswick, N.J., just four years and 211 days removed from the end of the Civil War about 400 miles to the southwest in Appomattox, Va. The sport has grown with the country in the more than 150 years since, and the modern game barely resembles that which the Tigers and Queensmen contested—or even the popular game throughout the nation in the 1940s, when Notre Dame and the service academies dominated the landscape, or the 1960s and ’70s, when many of the powerhouses we know today cemented their footholds in the sport.
For decades, the sport was primarily played on the ground—and while some programs still seem to be warming up to the downfield pass, the spread offenses of the 2000s and 2010s are virtually unrecognizable from the wishbone and Wing T offenses of old (though today’s top offensive minds have been marrying concepts from all of the above).
