

Davis, the 1869 Rutgers football team shared the national title with Princeton. Rutgers won the game, with a score of 6 goals to Princeton's 4. The game was played on a plot of ground where the present-day College Avenue Gymnasium now stands (although the game was based more on soccer than on rugby, unlike the current version of American football, which takes its rules from a rugby-based framework. Rutgers University is often referred to as The Birthplace of College Football as the first intercollegiate football game was held on College Field between Rutgers and Princeton on November 6, 1869, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The first intercollegiate athletic event at Rutgers was a baseball game on May 2, 1866, against Princeton in which they suffered a 40–2 loss. However, by the turn of the century, colleges and universities across the United States also began to participate.


In the early years of intercollegiate athletics, the circle of schools that participated in these athletic events were located solely in the American Northeast. Though invited, Harvard University chose not to attend. The four schools met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Manhattan on October 19, 1873, to establish a set of rules governing their intercollegiate competition, and particularly to codify the new game of football. The university participated in a small circle of schools that included Yale University, Columbia University and long-time rival, Princeton University (then called The College of New Jersey). Rutgers was among the first American institutions to engage in intercollegiate athletics. Main article: History of Rutgers University The Rutgers campuses in Newark and Camden also participate in intercollegiate competition - under the names Scarlet Raiders and Scarlet Raptors, respectively - in NCAA Division III. The athletic programs compete under the name Scarlet Knights, after the Rutgers University mascot which was chosen in 1955 by the student body.

Īmong the first American schools to participate in intercollegiate athletics, Rutgers currently fields 27 teams in the Big Ten Conference, which participates in Division I competition, as sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the following sports: baseball, basketball, cross country, field hockey, football, golf, gymnastics, lacrosse, rowing, soccer, softball, tennis, track and field, swimming and diving, wrestling, and volleyball. In sports, Rutgers is famously known for being the "Birthplace of College Football", hosting the first ever intercollegiate football game on November 6, 1869, in which Rutgers defeated a team from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) with a score of 6 runs to 4. The Rutgers Scarlet Knights are the athletic teams that represent Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus.
