Today's Tidbit... The Case Of The Missing Goal Posts

Football's origin story is that Princeton and Rutgers played the first game in 1869. That game involved 25 players per side kicking and batting a round ball with the ultimate aim of kicking the ball between two posts at either end of a field at Rutgers. The teams met again a week later on a Princeton field with goals at either end.

The proximity of the schools encouraged them to keep playing over the years. Princeton leads the series 53-7-1, though Rutgers went 10-3-1 from 1968 to 1980. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the schools developed a tradition of sorts in which the winning team's fans tore down the goals posts regardless of where they played the game. Unfortunately, on several occasions, the fans started the teardown process before the game ended.

In 1974, the teams played an evenly matched season-opening game at Princeton's Palmer Stadium. Neither team scored in the first half, and Rutgers' only score came on a 94-yard punt return in the third quarter. As the clock ticked down in the fourth quarter, fans left the Rutgers section of the stands with a few minutes left and tore down the goal posts at the enclosed end of the horseshoe-shaped stadium. While those goal posts were falling, a smaller group of fans attacked the goal posts at the stadium's open end, and they soon dropped to earth as well.