College football began as a kicking game between two New Jersey colleges in 1869 and grew into a sport with its own liturgy: a rock on a pedestal, a flaming spear, seventy thousand people turning to wave at a hospital window. These stories run from that first afternoon to a missed field goal returned 109 yards, by way of a trophy that held a door.
Every tile in a College Football game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Traditions
nine stories
1The student who dressed but never played
On the tile: 12th Man1922
Texas A&M met undefeated Centre College in the Dixie Classic on January 2, 1922, and injuries kept thinning the Aggie bench. Coach Dana X. Bible called E. King Gill down from the press box. Gill, a basketball player who had left the football team, changed under the bleachers into an injured teammate's uniform and stood on the sideline for the rest of the afternoon. He was never sent in. Texas A&M won 22-14, and a century later the student body still stands for the whole game.
A Clemson alumnus driving through Death Valley, California, picked up a rock by the roadside and carried it home to coach Frank Howard, a nod to the nickname of Clemson's own stadium. Howard used it as a doorstop until the summer of 1966, when he ordered it out of his office, and it went up on a pedestal at the top of the hill. A year later the players began rubbing it before they ran down that hill, and Howard set the terms plainly: give him 110 percent, or keep your hands off it.
Notre Dame's Hesburgh Library carries a stone mosaic finished in 1964 called the Word of Life, designed by Millard Sheets. It was assembled from 81 kinds of stone gathered in 16 countries and set into 324 panels, with Christ the Teacher at the top, arms raised. The library rises beyond one end of the football stadium, and from many seats those raised arms look like an official signaling a touchdown. The nickname Touchdown Jesus appeared almost at once. Credit usually goes to the students, though no one knows who said it first, and the name outran the real one.
The University of Iowa's children's hospital rises beside Kinnick Stadium, and its top floor has a clear view of the field. In 2017 a fan named Krista Young suggested on the Hawkeye Heaven Facebook page that fans wave to the young patients watching from up there. The page's administrator picked the end of the first quarter, and Kinnick first tried it that September. Now more than 70,000 people turn and wave at every home game, and since 2022 each game's Kid Captain has helped choose the song that plays.
Between the third and fourth quarters at Camp Randall Stadium, Wisconsin plays House of Pain's Jump Around, and the crowd leaves the ground together. The marketing staff who ran the sound first put it over the loudspeakers during a 1998 night game against Purdue, and it has played at nearly every game since. The upper deck sways. In 2003, during stadium renovations, the athletic director pulled the song over safety worries. Fans protested, engineers confirmed the stadium could take the motion, and the jumping came back.
The popular story says Texas A&M students branded the new longhorn steer 13-0, the score of their 1915 win, and that Texas students then altered the marks into the name Bevo. It is tidy, and it is wrong. The steer made his debut at the 1916 Thanksgiving game, and the December issue of the Alcalde, the alumni magazine, had already announced that his name was Bevo. The Aggie branding came in February 1917, and the brand was never changed. Where the name came from is unsettled. The editor who chose it never explained.
Before Florida State home games, a rider dressed as the Seminole leader Osceola gallops to midfield on an Appaloosa named Renegade and drives a flaming spear into the turf. The tradition started in 1978, proposed by an alumnus named Bill Durham. What sets it apart from most college mascots is the partnership behind it. The Seminole Tribe of Florida made the first outfit, and the tribe still approves the regalia the rider wears.
Football teams gather in a tight ring before a play, and that ring is usually traced to Gallaudet University, the college for deaf students in Washington, D.C. The story goes that in 1894 quarterback Paul Hubbard worried that a rival deaf team could read the signs he was making in the open, so he pulled his teammates into a closed circle. Gallaudet now calls itself the Home of the Huddle. Other schools have claims of their own, including Oregon State from 1918 and Illinois from 1921.
Grambling State and Southern first met on the football field in 1932. In 1974 the game became the Bayou Classic, played that year at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans and later at the Superdome, around Thanksgiving weekend each November. The football is only part of the draw. On the Friday night before the game, Grambling's Tiger Marching Band and Southern's Human Jukebox face off in a Battle of the Bands, an event with tickets of its own.
1The first college football game was mostly soccer
On the tile: Rutgers 18691869
On November 6, 1869, Rutgers and Princeton met in New Brunswick in what is counted as the first college football game. Twenty-five men a side took the field. Carrying and throwing the ball were not allowed, so the players kicked and batted a round ball toward the other side's goal. Each goal counted as a game, and Rutgers won, six games to four. Princeton took the rematch at home a week later, 8-0, and the third game the schools had planned was never played.
Ohio State and Michigan played through a blizzard in Columbus on November 25, 1950, with five inches of snow on the ground and a gale driving more across the field. Both teams punted again and again, often on third down and sometimes on first. Michigan never made a first down and never completed a pass, and won anyway, 9-3, scoring on a safety and on a blocked punt recovered in the end zone. Ohio State's coach, Wes Fesler, resigned 18 days later. His replacement was Woody Hayes.
The 2013 Iron Bowl was tied with one second left when Alabama sent out a kicker for a 57-yard field goal. It fell short of the crossbar and into the arms of Auburn's Chris Davis, standing deep in his own end zone. Davis found the sideline and ran the length of the field, 109 yards, as the clock reached zero. Auburn won 34-28. Alabama's pursuit of a third straight national title ended on that return.
Stanford kicked a field goal to lead 20-19 with four seconds left in the 1982 Big Game. Midway through the kickoff return, the Stanford band saw zeros on the clock and poured onto the field. California's players were still pitching the ball backward, five laterals in all, and Kevin Moen ran through the scattering musicians into the end zone, colliding with a trombone player named Gary Tyrrell. California won 25-20, and the loss cost Stanford a bowl invitation.
Notre Dame's first football game was also its first football lesson. Michigan's team arrived by rail on the morning of November 23, 1887, spent a few hours looking around the campus, and changed into spotless white uniforms. The visitors had come more to teach than to win, Notre Dame's student magazine reported, so at first the players were mixed into sides regardless of college. Then the two schools played a short game on a field left muddy by a thaw. Michigan won 8-0 and stayed for dinner.
Harvard and Yale met in November 1968 both unbeaten and untied, the first time that had happened since 1909. Yale led 29-13 late in the fourth quarter. Harvard then scored sixteen points in the final forty-two seconds to pull level at 29-29. The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, answered with a headline that was arithmetically impossible and emotionally exact: Harvard Beats Yale 29-29. Forty years later a documentary about the game borrowed the line for its title.
Texas and Oklahoma have played at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas every year since 1932, on neutral ground roughly halfway between the two campuses in Austin and Norman. The fans do not take opposite end zones. The stadium is divided at the fifty-yard line, so the crowd is a clean half-and-half of burnt orange and crimson with a seam down the middle. The game falls during the State Fair of Texas, and the stadium sits on the fairgrounds, right next to the rides.
Lafayette and Lehigh are neighbors in eastern Pennsylvania, and no two colleges have played each other in football more often. They first met in 1884, and their 2025 game was the 161st. From 1884 through 1901 they met twice a season, and in 1891 they played three times. The series has skipped only two years: 1896, over a dispute about a player's eligibility, and 2020, during the pandemic. The schools simply call it The Rivalry.
CBS director Tony Verna brought a bulky videotape machine to the Army-Navy game on December 7, 1963, hoping to show a play again moments after it happened. After a string of failed attempts, only one replay made it onto the air: a touchdown run by Army quarterback Rollie Stichweh. Viewers had never seen anything like it, so announcer Lindsey Nelson had to explain what they were looking at, assuring the audience that Army had not scored again.
Jim Thorpe, of the Sac and Fox Nation, arrived at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and came under the eye of coach Pop Warner. In 1912 he led Carlisle against Army at West Point, and among the cadets trying to bring him down was a future president, Dwight Eisenhower. That same year Thorpe won the Olympic pentathlon and decathlon in Stockholm. He later turned professional, and when the league that became the NFL organized in 1920 he was named its president.
American football did not arrive whole. A Yale player named Walter Camp talked it into existence one rule at a time. In 1880 he proposed replacing rugby's contested scrum with a line of scrimmage, so that one team simply started with the ball, and he cut the sides from fifteen players to eleven. Two years later he added the system of downs. The snap from center and numerical scoring are his as well, which is why he is called the father of the game.
Illinois dedicated its Memorial Stadium on October 18, 1924, against Michigan, and Red Grange took the opening kickoff ninety-five yards to the end zone. Before the first quarter ended he had scored three more, on runs of sixty-seven, fifty-six and forty-four yards, the four of them inside roughly twelve minutes. He added a fifth touchdown later and threw for another. In the summers he hauled ice in Wheaton, which is where one of his nicknames came from.
Ernie Davis carried the ball for Syracuse and in 1961 became the first Black player to win the Heisman Trophy. Washington took him first overall in the 1962 draft and quickly traded him to Cleveland, where the Browns planned to pair him in the backfield with Jim Brown, another Syracuse star. In the summer of 1962 Davis was found to have leukemia. He died in May 1963, at 23, without ever playing a professional game, and the Browns retired his number 45.
Archie Griffin started at tailback for Ohio State four years running and won the Heisman Trophy twice, in 1974 and 1975. No one else has won it twice. He is also the only player to start in four consecutive Rose Bowls. The number that says the most about him is quieter than the trophies. Between his sophomore and senior seasons he ran for a hundred yards or more in thirty-one consecutive regular-season games, which remains an NCAA record.
Doug Flutie was an undersized quarterback at Boston College and the first major college passer to throw for more than ten thousand career yards. He is remembered for one of them: a last-second heave against Miami that Gerard Phelan caught in the end zone to win 47-45. Plenty of fans believe that pass won him the 1984 Heisman Trophy. It could not have. The votes had already been mailed in before he let it go.
7The president who wanted football saved, not banned
On the tile: T. Roosevelt1905Myth busted
A popular story holds that Theodore Roosevelt wanted football banned. He did not. Roosevelt considered it a fittingly vigorous American sport and never thought it should be abolished, though he did want it made safer. On October 9, 1905, he called the coaches of Harvard, Yale and Princeton to the White House and urged them to curb needless violence. They issued a statement against brutality, yet the season that followed was a deadly one. By the end of that year the colleges had founded the association that grew into the NCAA.
Eddie Robinson became Grambling's football coach in 1941 and lost more games than he won that first season. His second team went 9-0 and was never scored on. He was still at Grambling on October 5, 1985, when his 324th victory moved him past Bear Bryant as the winningest coach in college football. He finished with 408 wins, and more than eighty of his players went on to the NFL or AFL, among them Willie Davis, Charlie Joiner and Doug Williams.
Before Brooklyn, Jackie Robinson was a four-sport star at UCLA, lettering in baseball, basketball, football and track, and baseball was actually his weakest sport there. In 1939 he averaged 12.2 yards every time he carried the ball, a UCLA single-season record, and he led the country in punt return average in both 1939 and 1940. He also helped make a critical goal-line tackle before more than 103,000 fans in a scoreless tie with Southern California, which went on to the Rose Bowl.
1The rout that put Pasadena off football for years
On the tile: Rose Bowl 19021902
The Tournament of Roses attached a football game to its New Year's festivities on January 1, 1902, the first postseason game in the country, and matched Michigan against Stanford. Michigan scored at will. With eight minutes left and the score 49-0, Stanford's captain asked to stop and Michigan's captain agreed. The game was so lopsided that Pasadena gave up on football and staged Roman-style chariot races inspired by Ben-Hur instead, along with ostrich races and other events. Football did not come back until 1916.
The Downtown Athletic Club in New York gave its first trophy in 1935 to Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago, as the most valuable college player east of the Mississippi. It was renamed for John Heisman the next year. Berwanger was not overawed. He was the first pick of the first NFL draft and never played professionally, having asked the Bears for more than they would pay. Meanwhile, for decades, his aunt used the trophy as a doorstop.
Nebraska came into the Orange Bowl in January 1984 undefeated and ranked first. Miami was fifth and playing at home. Miami led 31-24 when Nebraska scored late in the fourth quarter. An extra point would have tied the game and, in all likelihood, preserved Nebraska's championship. Coach Tom Osborne sent his offense back out to go for two points instead. The pass was knocked away, Miami won 31-30, and Miami took its first national title.
Stanford students brought a lumberman's axe to a baseball game against California in April 1899 and used it to chop up blue and gold ribbon whenever Stanford did something well. California won, and its students took the axe. One of them hid the head under his overcoat, slipped past the police and carried it across the bay on a ferry. Berkeley kept it for 31 years, until a Stanford raiding party got it back in 1930. Three years later the schools agreed to make it the Big Game trophy.
In the 1929 Rose Bowl, California center Roy Riegels scooped up a Georgia Tech fumble, spun around and ran toward his own goal line. His quarterback, Benny Lom, gave chase and stopped him just short of it. On the next play Lom's punt was blocked for a safety, and those two points decided an 8-7 defeat. The part people forget is what came after. Riegels was elected captain of the California team for the next season, and he was named an All-American.
Michigan's coach Fielding Yost suspected Minnesota might tamper with his team's drinking water, so before their 1903 game a student manager bought a five-gallon jug for thirty cents to carry it. The game was called at 6-6 when celebrating Minnesota fans stormed the field, and in the hurry to catch the train home Michigan left the jug behind. Oscar Munson found it the next morning. He and Minnesota's athletic director painted on the score, their own 6 deliberately larger, and the words Michigan Jug, Captured by Oscar.
In the 1934 Minnesota-Iowa game, Iowa's star Ozzie Simmons, one of the few Black players on a major college team, was knocked out three times, and by the 1935 rematch tempers were high. On game-day morning Minnesota's governor, Floyd B. Olson, wired Iowa's governor with a bet: a Minnesota prize hog against an Iowa prize hog. Minnesota won, and Iowa's governor brought a live pig into the Minnesota Capitol. The hog was named Floyd, after the governor who won him, and a bronze likeness is still the prize.
Weeks after Pearl Harbor, fear of a Japanese attack on the West Coast led to a ban on large gatherings there, and the 1942 Rose Bowl could not be played in Pasadena. Duke, which had been invited to play Oregon State, offered its own stadium in Durham, North Carolina, and borrowed bleachers from North Carolina and North Carolina State to fit the crowd. About 55,000 people watched Oregon State win 20-16 on a muddy field. No other Rose Bowl left Pasadena until the pandemic moved the 2021 game to Texas.
When Indiana and Purdue alumni decided in 1925 that their game needed a trophy, a Purdue man and an Indiana man went looking for an old oaken bucket and found one on a farm in southern Indiana. Each year the winner adds a bronze link to the bucket's chain, an I for Indiana or a P for Purdue, engraved with the score. The first game played for the bucket, in 1925, ended 0-0. So the very first link on the chain carries both letters.