page_title: Yale Bulldogs football
section_title: Early history
hierarchical_section_title: Yale Bulldogs football / History / Early history
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Walter Camp, an American football player, coach, and sports writer known as the "Father of American Football". Camp was pictured here as Yale's captain.
context_page_description: The Yale Bulldogs football program represents Yale University in college football at the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision. Yale's football program is one of the oldest in the world, having begun competing in the sport in 1872. The Bulldogs have a legacy that includes 27 national championships, two of the first three Heisman Trophy winners, 100 consensus All-Americans, 28 College Football Hall of Fame inductees, including the "Father of American Football" Walter Camp, the first professional football player Pudge Heffelfinger, and coaching giants Amos Alonzo Stagg, Howard Jones, Tad Jones and Carmen Cozza. With 890 wins, Yale ranks second in wins in college football history, trailing only the University of Michigan.
context_section_description: The Bulldogs were the dominant team in the early days of intercollegiate football, winning 27 college football national championships, including 26 in 38 years between 1872 and 1909.  Walter Camp, known as the "Father of Football," graduated from Hopkins Grammar School in 1876, and played college football at Yale College from 1876 to 1882.  He later served as the head football coach at Yale from 1888 to 1892. It was Camp who pioneered the fundamental transition of American football from rugby when in 1880, he succeeded in convincing the Intercollegiate Football Association to discontinue the rugby "scrum," and instead have players line up along a "line of scrimmage" for individual plays, which begin with the snap of the ball and conclude with the tackling of the ballcarrier. In 1916, against the advisement of coach Tad Jones, Yale quarterback Chester J. LaRoche (1918s) helped lead the Yale team in a win against Princeton by turning the momentum of the game with a fourth-down call in the huddle to go for first down rather than punt. The team made the down and went on to win the game in one of Yale's greatest victories in its history. LaRoche went on to spearhead the creation of the National Football Foundation and Hall of Fame.
caption: Walter Camp, the "Father of American Football", as Yale's captain in 1878
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