The first college football game played was won by Rutgers over Princeton, 6-4. According to a newspaper account, one Rutgers prof was seen waving his umbrella towards the Princeton players and shrieking, “You will come to no Christian end!” Now that's some Old (Testament) School trash-talking.

My alma mater, the University of Chicago was one of the original members of the Big Ten. The first Heisman trophy winner, Jay Berwanger, was a Maroon–yes, amongst the worst team names ever–and the teams were successful enough to inspire the original Monster of the Midway moniker. Chicago eventually dropped out of the Big Ten in the 1930’s to focus on academics leaving Northwestern as the only private university remaining in the conference. Today, there are 120 teams that compete in NCAA Division I football. Here, a nifty map of the US shows their locations. The state of New York has three Division I teams. The state of Utah? Three as well. Go figure. After poring through conference lists, I also learned that only 17 are private. Only one in seven! The remainder are all public institutions. I knew big-time football would skew towards public schools but didn’t realize how heavily.

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