A large amount of interest in the history of American football is accompanying the fiftieth anniversary of the Ivy League. The Big Green Alert Blog has linked (more) to trailers for two new films about Ivy football: The League and For Love and Honor, which is based on Mark F. Bernstein’s Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession.
Both films appear to give some credit to the myth that football began in 1869 when Princeton played Rutgers. (The trailer for the first film mentions that game; the book upon which the second is based also mentions the game.) As has been noted here before, although the teams called their game “foot ball,” the fact that the British still call soccer by that name should be a tipoff: the teams were actually playing soccer, which was and is also known as Association Football. Rutgers acknowledges that the game was FA football and not rugby football in its website about the game.
Although the teams that played in the 1869 soccer match might be called the first American football teams, since they later switched rules to play rugby against other schools, the match itself was not half as significant as the 1874 Harvard-McGill rugby match or the 1875 Harvard-Yale rugby match, either of which is more properly known as the birth of intercollegiate football.
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[Update 11.12.2012: Broken link to Love and Honor replaced with link to Eight; broken link to