The first college football game ever played was split 1-1 between Rutgers and Princeton, but the National Championship Foundation's retroactive pick was Princeton alone, not a Rutgers/Princeton co-championship.
1-1 in the two-game series (won at home Nov. 13, lost at Rutgers Nov. 6); retroactively named national champion by the Billingsley Report, National Championship Foundation, and named co-champion (with Rutgers) only by Parke H. Davis.
Princeton’s 1869 scheduleNo national title game was played after the 1869 season: before 1998 there was no mechanism to play one, which is why so many of these seasons were settled by vote instead.
