Intercollegiate Football Association

The Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA) was one of the first groups to create rules and organize games for college football. It was active from the to seasons. The teams in the IFA were Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Today, these schools are part of the famous Ivy League. The IFA helped make college football more organized and fair by setting shared rules for everyone to follow.

From soccer to rugby

The first intercollegiate football game in America happened in 1869 between Princeton and Rutgers. This game was a version of association football, which we now call 'soccer'. The rules came from The Football Association in London, England.

In 1873, the first IFA was created by Princeton, Yale, and Rutgers to make common rules instead of using each team's own rules. Harvard did not join because they preferred to play the Boston game, which mixed elements of soccer and rugby football.

Massasoit House conventions

On November 23, 1876, teams from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia met at the Massasoit House hotel in Springfield, Massachusetts to create fair rules for a new game. They used ideas from a game called rugby that a university in Canada had shared with Harvard a couple of years earlier.

One big change they made was deciding that scoring a touchdown would be the main way to win, instead of kicking a goal. This helped make the game more exciting. Three of the schools—Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton—started the Intercollegiate Football Association after this meeting. Yale joined later in 1879 after some disagreement about how many players should be on each team. This was the first time anyone tried to organize and make standard rules for American football. The group kept meeting every year from the 1877 season until 1893.

Walter Camp, known as the “father of American football,” helped a lot with making the rules. He suggested many important changes, like reducing the number of players from fifteen to eleven, which helped make the game faster and more fun. He also created rules about where players could start each play and how the ball would be passed to begin a new play. These ideas shaped the game we know today.