David Rosenthal

So make sure you stay tuned for that because it is nuts.

Wow, that is wild.

Totally wild.

But we do have some sports thank yous to Michael McCambridge, author of America's Game, which provided much of the research for this episode.

And it's just like the definitive biography-style history of the NFL.

All right, we start.

on November 6th, 1869, on the campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, just a very short train ride up from Princeton, New Jersey, as I know well from my time there, where, indeed, a group of about 25 or so Princeton students were

were up at Rutgers to visit a similarly sized group of Rutgers students.

And they were there to play a game of football.

Now, what was football in 1869?

No, no, no, no.

It was essentially what today is classified as mob football, quote-unquote, or medieval football.

This had been played for centuries in England, and basically the only goal of the game was for one side to get a ball to a certain spot on the other side.

And that was it.

There were no rules.

Any number of people could participate on either side.

You could do anything up to and including maiming and killing people on the other side or your own, which happened quite frequently.

Yes.

So now why were these two groups of Princeton and Rutgers students so interested in playing this game?

This terribly violent game.