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One of the quaint facts regarding the first Princeton-Rutgers game, in which William S. Gummere captained Princeton and William Leggett captained Rutgers, is that Judge Irving Hall Lane of Flemington, N.J., the last survivor of that 1869 game, sat in for the Princeton-Rutgers duel on Nov. 5, 1938, when Rutgers, after a lapse of 69 years, again defeated Princeton, 20-18. Judge Lane, then 87, died a few days later, but had lived long enough to see Rutgers conquer Princeton for the first timesince his own student days. When the details of the first 2 Princeton-Rutgers games were wafted around, undergraduates along the Atlantic Seaboard became intrigued. Columbia put together a team in 1870 and played both Princeton and Rutgers that year-at soccer. There were no games in 1871. Yale organized in 1872 and scheduled 1 game, defeating Columbia, 3 goals to 0-at soccer.

Cornell organized for informal campus games early in 1873 and one of its students, corresponding with a friend at the University of Michigan, learned that Michigan had some footballers. This resulted in an exchange of challenges and agreement upon a game to be played on neutral ground-Cleveland-30 men to a side. Naturally, the students had to get permission to absent themselves from studies. When President White of Cornell had perused the request, he made the rather classic decision:

"I will not permit 30 men to travel 400 miles merely to agitate a bag of wind."

As stated, Princeton, Rutgers, Columbia and Yale held the first football meeting late in 1873, Harvard abstaining and playing its first intercollegiate game in 1874 with McGill. Stevens entered the lists in 1873, Tufts in 1874, City College of New York and Wesleyan in 1875, Pennsylvania in 1876 and Trinity College of Hartford in 1877. In 1878 Michigan appeared in the Middle West.