Northwestern kicked off the first complete game of American football in the Midwest on Tuesday, February 22, 1876. As we near the 150th anniversary of this (until recently) forgotten milestone, HailToPurple.com is posting a series of articles about the game. This information uses research from the 2023 book Gus Hornsby's Gamble, which describes that first game in detail.

When Did NU Play Its First Game?

Northwestern’s first game, played against the Chicago Foot-Ball Club on February 22, 1876, was played during what would later be called the 1875-1876 season, although no one at the time would have considered football as having “seasons” quite yet—it was mostly an autumn sport, but there were no organized schedules yet. Elsewhere, there were relatively few games of American football during this season:

American Football Games¹, 1875-1876 Season

Date	Location	Team Types	Teams	Score
Oct 17	East	College	Stevens Tech def. NYU	5g-0
Oct 23	Canada	Mixed	Harvard def. Football Assoc. of Canada	2g,2t-0
Oct 24	East	College	Rutgers def. Stevens Tech	6g-0
Oct 27	East	College	Harvard def. Tufts	1g,1t-0
Oct 30	East	College	Stevens Tech def. CCNY	6g-0
Nov 2	East	College	Rutgers tied Columbia	1g-1g
Nov 6	East	College	Columbia def. Stevens Tech	2g-1g
Nov 6	East	College	Yale def. Rutgers	4g-1g
Nov 11	East	College	Columbia def. CCNY	5g-0
Nov 13	East	College	Princeton def. Columbia	6g-2g
Nov 13	East	College	Harvard def. Yale	4g,4t-02
Nov 13	East	College	Stevens Tech def. CCNY (again)	6g-0
Nov 18	East	College	Columbia def. CCNY (again)	6g-0
Nov 20	East	College	Princeton def. Stevens Tech	6g-0
Nov 20	East	College	Yale def. Wesleyan3	6g-0
Nov 23	East	College	Stevens Tech def. Rutgers	3g-1g
Dec 4	East	College	Columbia def. Yale	3g-2g
Feb 22	Midwest	Mixed	Chicago Foot-Ball Club def. Northwestern	3g,3t-0
Mar 20	East	Mixed	Indiana, PA Col. vs. Indiana (PA) Town	Unknown
May 8	East	Mixed	Harvard def. Football Assoc. of Canada	1g-0

Color Codes:

• Yellow: "Association" (soccer) style American football (similar to Rutgers-Princeton 1869)
• Green: "Boston game" (rugby) style American football
• Purple: "Concessionary Rules" (rugby) style American football. Agreed to by students from Harvard and Yale at the conference held at the Massasoit House, Springfield, MA, in October 1875.
  

Notes:
1. This list does not include: Eastern high school-only games, scrimmages, practices, inter-class, or intramural games. Also not included are kicking and holding games not now considered American football.
2. Scoring for the 11/13/75 Harvard-Yale game was complicated. Harvard scored four goals and four touchdowns. Accoriding to the Concessionary Rules, three touchdowns were to equal one goal; therefore, some records of the game show the Harvard score as 5g,1t. Still other records discount the touchdowns entirely and give Harvard just a 4g-0 win.
3. After the Harvard-Yale "Concessionary Rules" game on November 13, Yale briefly reverted to the association style of American football.

…Harvard, having gone 4-0 during this period, would later be considered the collegiate national champion. As shown on the table above, most of the games this season were played using the old, soccer style of American football dating to the 1869 origin of the sport.  During the next few seasons, this would shift dramatically to the rugby style of American football.

Why Was the Game Played on a Holiday?

We often think of college football having an old tradition of staging games on key holidays in the fall, particularly on Thanksgiving. This tradition goes back to 1876, when Princeton hosted Yale on Thanksgiving. The first college team to play a football game purposefully on a holiday, however, was Northwestern earlier that year.

To the CFBC, it was important that its first full “outside match” be played on a holiday. It would lend the occasion greater gravity and ensure outside attention. Despite Washington’s Birthday being a brand-new holiday, declared by President Grant just that month¹, it was still an acceptable holiday to the Chicago team.

People on both sides of the Atlantic had long associated holding public sporting events with key holidays, dating back to “Shrovetide football” in England in the 1170s. Shrovetide football was the medieval, rules-free kicking game common in Europe, played specifically on Shrove Tuesday. The game served as a “pre-Lenten” celebration—and a way to blow off steam. Later, the British would add Boxing Day to their list of sports holidays, playing an early version of association football (soccer) on the holiday in 1860.

In the United States, we see holiday sports dating back to the Civil War. On Christmas Day 1862, Union soldiers played a baseball game in Hilton Head, South Carolina, with 40,000 spectators watching. The first true Thanksgiving Day event was likely the football game between two local Philadelphia cricket clubs in 1869, just a few days after the Rutgers–Princeton game that inaugurated collegiate American football.

And the first Thanksgiving Day football game played by a college would have likely been Northwestern—if the school could have mustered a team in time to accept the CFBC’s first invitation in 1875. Instead, the CFBC played football on Thanksgiving 1875 only as a practice scrimmage (employing, for the second time, a few players from the Chicago Barge Club). At this point, no college team had yet played on Thanksgiving.

The Washington’s Birthday celebration in 1876 was a lead-up to the country’s centennial, so in many cities it was treated as a major holiday: New York, Washington, and Philadelphia all threw lavish celebrations, trying to outdo each other in the scope of their festivities. Chicago, though a bit more low-key than the other big cities, also threw large parties and—in a novelty rarely seen since the 1871 Chicago Fire—staged fireworks that night. In Evanston, however, the only event marking the holiday was the football game on Northwestern’s campus, a fact that the Evanston newspaper noted: “There was a great game of foot-ball played this afternoon. . . Tuesday was the anniversary of Washington’s birthday, and as such was turned into a day of rejoicing everywhere. Evanston was an exception. The foot-ball match was the only thing we know of, that grew out of the fact that Washington once lived and lied not.”

1876 drawing celebrating Washington's birthday

Drawing by Everett Henry depicting the Princeton-Yale Thanksgiving match

1. Grant issued an executive order making Washington’s Birthday a national holiday for 1876, the nation’s centennial year. Grant’s order did not extend to future celebrations. Washington’s Birthday would not be made a permanent holiday until 1879.