College Football - The Campus Game

Perhaps America's most exciting sport (and certainly the most popular campus sport), college football's origins can be traced to the early and mid-1800s. A restrictive atmosphere on campuses of the era led students to seek diversions ... one of the most prominent being a so-called "class rush" which typically pitted incoming freshmen against rising sophomores in competitions the first week of fall term. The most famous example of a class rush was "Bloody Monday" at Harvard. These were very rough and tumble forerunners of the game that would dominate the campus scene by the 1880s.