Tag: Fifth Avenue Hotel

Trending A group of students from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City on April 28, 1882 and made an unambiguous decision: The United States was declaring its independence from British football. "A proposition to adopt the English rugby rules was unanimously rejected," the New York Daily Tribune reported on May 1, 1882. The basic concept at the foundation of American football originated in ancient Greece but came to the United States through Britain. But Col. Alexander Weyand, who captained Amy in 1915, described in his 1955 book, "The Saga of American Football," how American colleges started out playing a game that was neither the English game of soccer nor the English game of rugby. View Cartoon But then, in 1873, students from Princeton, Columbia, Rutgers and Yale -- but not Harvard -- met in New York and adopted rules that Weyand described as "essentially similar" to soccer. They created the Intercollegiate Football Association, Nelson reported, and adopted rugby rules. In 1879, Princeton and Yale tied 0-0, and the association let Princeton retain its championship. When teams did this, they got the ball back at the 25-yard line. "Mr. Moeran, who presided, said that he had only seen two games in this country, and if those were a sample of the way in which the games were to be played it would be better to crush football in its infancy," The New York Times reported the next day. But they did accept another change suggested by Camp that required the team in possession of the ball to get five yards (or lose 10) in three plays or surrender possession.