College football () is gridiron football that is played by teams of amateur student-athletes at universities and colleges. It was through collegiate competition that gridiron football first gained popularity in the United States.
Like gridiron football generally, college football is most popular in the United States and Canada. While no single governing body exists for college football in the United States, most schools, especially those at the highest levels of play, are members of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). In Canada, collegiate football competition is governed by U Sports for universities. The Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association (for colleges) governs soccer and other sports but not gridiron football. Other countries, such as Mexico, Japan and South Korea, also host college football leagues with modest levels of support.
Unlike most other major sports in North America, no official minor league farm organizations exist for American football or Canadian football. Therefore, college football is generally considered to be the second tier of American and Canadian football, ahead of high school competition but below professional competition. In some parts of the United States, especially the South and Midwest, college football is more popular than professional football. For much of the 20th century, college football was generally considered to be more prestigious than professional football.
The overwhelming majority of professional football players in the National Football League (NFL) and other leagues previously played college football, with players who previously played in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision, the highest level of college football in the United States, making up 92.7% of the NFL's total active roster during the 2025 season. The NFL draft each spring sees 224 players selected and offered a contract to play in the league, with the vast majority coming from the NCAA. Other professional leagues, such as the Canadian Football League (CFL) and United Football League (UFL), hold their own drafts each year that also involve primarily college players selected. Players who are not selected can still attempt to win a professional roster spot as an undrafted free agent. Despite these opportunities, only around 1.6% of NCAA college football players eventually play professionally in the NFL.
History
Even after the emergence of the professional National Football League (NFL), college football has remained extremely popular throughout the U.S.While Still the Nation's Favorite Sport, Professional Football Drops in Popularity – Baseball and college football are next in popularity at the Harris Interactive website, accessed January 28, 2010. 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. Only three stadiums owned by U.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
Modern North American football has its origins in various games, all known as "football", played at public schools in Great Britain in the mid-19th century. 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.
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.
By 1873, representatives from Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Rutgers met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City to codify the first set of intercollegiate football rules, based closely on association football (i.e., 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. Harvard players were enthusiastic about McGill's rules and quickly abandoned most of the "Boston game."
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.
Walter Camp: father of American football
Walter Camp is widely considered to be the most important figure in the development of American football. Following the introduction of rugby-style rules to American football, Camp became a fixture at the Massasoit House conventions where rules were debated and changed. He reduced the number of players from 15 to 11 and established the line of scrimmage and the snap from center to quarterback. Originally, the snap was executed with the foot of the center. Later changes made it possible to snap the ball with the hands, either through the air or by a direct hand-to-hand pass.
Camp's new scrimmage rules revolutionized the game, though not always as intended. Princeton, in particular, used scrimmage play to slow the game, making incremental progress towards the end zone during each down. Rather than increase scoring, which had been Camp's original intent, the rule was exploited to maintain control of the ball for the entire game, resulting in slow, unexciting contests. At the 1882 rules meeting, Camp proposed that a team be required to advance the ball a minimum of five yards within three downs. These down-and-distance rules, combined with the establishment of the line of scrimmage, transformed the game from a variation of rugby football into the distinct sport of American football.
Scoring table +Historical college football scoringA compilation of seven sources: "History." . 2009 Baylor Football Media Almanac. Baylor Athletics (Baylor University). Retrieved October 11, 2009. The National Collegiate Athletic Association. "Section 11—Extra Points." . 2008 Football Statisticians' Manual. August 2008. Retrieved October 11, 2009. Professional Football Researchers Association. "Yale's Walter Camp and 1870s Rugby." . The Journey to Camp: The Origins of American Football to 1889. Ivy League Rugby Conference (2009-01-31). Retrieved 2009-10-11. Johnson, Greg (2008-08-28). "Two-point conversion turns 50." . The NCAA News. Retrieved 2009-10-11. "NFL History by Decade: 1869–1910." . National Football League. Retrieved 2009-10-11. "NFL History by Decade: 1911–1920." . National Football League. Retrieved October 11, 2009. Era Touchdown Field goal Conversion (kick) Conversion (touchdown) Safety Conversion safety Defensive conversion 1883 2 5 4 – 1 – – 1883–1897 4 2 2 1898–1903 5 1 1904–1908 4 1909–1911 3 1912–1957 6 1958–1987 2 1 1988–present 2 Note: For brief periods in the late 19th century, some penalties awarded one or more points for the opposing teams, and some teams in the late 19th and early 20th centuries chose to negotiate their own scoring system for individual games.
Expansion College football expanded greatly during the last two decades of the 19th century. Several major rivalries date from this time period.
November 1890 was an active time in the sport. In Baldwin City, Kansas, on November 22, 1890, college football was first played in the state of Kansas. Baker beat Kansas 22–9. On the 27th, Vanderbilt played Nashville (Peabody) at Athletic Park and won 40–0. It was the first time organized football played in the state of Tennessee. The 29th also saw the first instance of the Army–Navy Game. Navy won 24–0.
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