NCAA Football

S. Although the college game has a much larger margin for talent than its pro counterpart, the sheer number of fans following major colleges provides a financial equalizer for the game, with Division I programs – the highest level – playing in huge stadiums, six of which have seating capacity exceeding 100,000 people. In many cases, college stadiums employ bench-style seating, as opposed to individual seats with backs and arm rests (although many stadiums do have a small number of chair back seats in addition to the bench seating). This allows them to seat more fans in a given amount of space than the typical professional stadium, which tends to have more features and comforts for fans.

S. colleges or universities, L&N Stadium at the University of Louisville , Center Parc Stadium at Georgia State University (which itself was a reconstruction of Turner Field which was a reconstruction of Centennial Olympic Stadium ), and FAU Stadium at Florida Atlantic University , consist entirely of chair back seating. Early history Early 19th century American college students played a disorganized game resembling medieval mob football . In 1827, a Harvard tradition known as "Bloody Monday" began, which consisted of a mass ballgame between the freshman and sophomore classes.

Violent games such as this were banned from college campuses around 1860. By the 1840s, students at Britain's Rugby School were playing a game in which players were able to pick up the ball and run with it, a sport later known as rugby football . The game was taken to Canada by British soldiers stationed there and was soon being played at Canadian colleges. The first documented gridiron football game was played at University College , a college of the University of Toronto , on November 9, 1861.

In 1864, at Trinity College , also a college of the University of Toronto, F. Barlow Cumberland and Frederick A. Bethune devised rules based on rugby football. The first game Left : "The Foot-Ball Match", a news article on the first college football game ever played, published in The Targum , the Rutgers University student newspaper, in November 1869.

Right : A plaque on College Avenue on the campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey commemorating the location where the first intercollegiate football game was played. On November 6, 1869, Rutgers University faced Princeton University , then known as the College of New Jersey, in the first collegiate football game . The game more closely resembled soccer than rugby or gridiron football. It was played with a round ball , and used a set of rules based on The Football Association 's first set of rules .

, soccer). Before this meeting, each school had its own set of rules and games were usually played using the home team's own particular code. However, the colleges coming to an agreement on soccer-like rules were unable to obtain the crucial support of Harvard University , which had been playing its own intramural football based on an informal style called the " Boston game ". Unable to agree upon rules with American colleges, Harvard instead played multiple games against McGill University in 1874 .

In as much as Rugby football had been transplanted to Canada from England, the McGill team played under a set of rules which allowed a player to pick up the ball and run with it whenever he wished. Another rule, unique to McGill, was to count tries (the act of grounding the football past the opposing team's goal line; there was no end zone during this time), as well as goals, in the scoring. In the Rugby rules of the time, a try only provided the attempt to kick a free goal from the field. If the kick was missed, the try did not score any points itself.

" In 1875, Harvard played with adapted McGill rugby rules against Tufts, and then against its closest rival, Yale. Yale and Harvard agreed to play under a set of rules called the "Concessionary Rules", which involved Harvard conceding something to Yale's soccer and Yale conceding a great deal to Harvard's rugby. On November 13, 1875, Yale and Harvard played each other for the first time ever, where Harvard won 4–0. At the first The Game , as the annual contest between Harvard and Yale came to be named, the future "father of American football" Walter Camp was among the 2000 spectators in attendance.

Spectators from Princeton also carried the game back home, where it quickly became the most popular version of football. On November 23, 1876, representatives from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia met at the Massasoit House hotel in Springfield, Massachusetts to standardize a new code of rules based on the rugby game first introduced to Harvard by McGill University in 1874. Three of the schools—Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton—formed the Intercollegiate Football Association, as a result of the meeting. Yale initially refused to join this association because of a disagreement over the number of players to be allowed per team (relenting in 1879) and Rutgers were not invited to the meeting.

The rules that they agreed upon were essentially those of rugby union at the time with the exception that points be awarded for scoring a try , not just the conversion afterwards ( extra point ). Although American football was developed with input from McGill University, Canada had formed a separate amateur rugby league in 1873, the Foot Ball Association of Canada. The Canadian Rugby Football Union , founded in 1880, closely imitated American football rules, but interest in collegiate sports in Canada flagged over the succeeding decades and American football developed much more rapidly.