100 years ago

Because football was integral to the founding of the NCAA in 1906, the following are some facts about the origin of the game from Joe Crowley in his NCAA Centennial book called “In the Arena: The NCAA’s First Century.”

• In 1314, Edward II is the first of a string of monarchs to ban an exceptionally violent version of the game played in Britain using a pig bladder.

• A 16th century observer writes that in “footeball,” “Sometymes their necks are broken, sometymes their backes, sometymes their legges, sometymes their armes, sometymes one parte thrust out of joynt. And hereof groweth envie, malice, rancour, cholour, hatred, displeasure, enmitie, and what not els. And sometymes fightying, braulying, contention, quarrel picking, murther, homicide, and great effusion of bloud, as experience daily teacheth.”

• The first American colonists play “pasuckqualkohwog,” meaning “they gather to play football.” It is banned from Boston in 1657.n After an almost two-century hiatus, the game appears in a different form as Princeton University students in the 1820s play “ballown,” a game that began with the fist as a feature and later incorporated the foot.

• Seventeen-year-old Garritt Smith Miller and several of his student peers at Boston’s Dixwell Latin School form the Oneida Football Club, which takes on a team from Boston English in an 1863 game using a ball made of vulcanized rubber.

• On November 6, 1869, Princeton and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey at New Brunswick, meet in what came to be regarded as the first intercollegiate football game.

• Columbia University, Yale University, Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania join Princeton and Rutgers in fielding teams in the 1870s.

• “Mass plays,” including the “v-trick” and the “flying wedge” become popular — and dangerous — in the 1890s.

• In 1905, because of health and safety concerns, President Theodore Roosevelt tells college presidents to either reform or abolish the game.

• In 1906, the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States — the precursor to the NCAA — is formed.