page_title: History of rugby union in the United States
section_title: Early football variants
hierarchical_section_title: History of rugby union in the United States / Early football variants
caption_attribution_description: English: Bradbury Robinson Throwing a Spiral Football Pass
context_page_description: The first recorded rugby match in the United States occurred on May 14, 1874 between Harvard University and McGill University.
  Rugby grew in the early 1900s, spurred in party by American football's crisis of 1905-06 due to the perception that American football was a violent sport. During this era, rugby was perceived as having the potential to challenge American football as the dominant football code on the west coast.
  At the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, a United States rugby team composed largely of players from Stanford University defeated France to win the gold medal. Rugby union was again included in the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, where the United States defeated France for the gold. Despite this success, however, rugby in the United States largely faded away.
  Rugby union in the United States began its revival in the 1960s and 1970s, as many colleges started club rugby teams. USA Rugby, the body that governs rugby in the U.S., was founded in 1975. On 31 January 1976, the U.S. national team played Australia—in its first official match since the 1924 Olympics—before 7,000 fans at Glover Field in Los Angeles.
context_section_description: Early European settlers in North America brought forms of medieval and traditional football with them. However, we know that in 1610, William Strachey, an English colonist at Jamestown, Virginia recorded a game played by Native Americans, called Pahsaheman, so it is clear that they had their own codes as well. Early games appear to have had much in common with the traditional "mob football" played in England. The games remained largely unorganized until the 19th century, when intramural games of football began to be played on college campuses. Each school played its own variety of football.
  Princeton students played a game called "ballown" as early as 1820. A Harvard tradition known as "Bloody Monday" began in 1827, which consisted of a mass ballgame between the freshman and sophomore classes. Dartmouth played its own version called "Old division football", the rules of which were first published in 1871, though the game dates to at least the 1830s. All of these games, and others, shared certain commonalities. They remained largely "mob" style games, with huge numbers of players attempting to advance the ball into a goal area, often by any means necessary. Rules were simple and violence and injury were common.  The violence of these mob-style games led to widespread protests and a decision to abandon them. Yale, under pressure from the city of New Haven, banned the play of all forms of football in 1860, while Harvard followed suit in 1861.
caption: Early American footballs were essentially rugby balls, later redesigned to make them easier to throw.[5]
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