On November 23, 1876, representatives from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia met in the Massasoit Residence resort in Springfield, Massachusetts to standardize a whole new code of regulations dependant on the rugby activity first introduced to Harvard by McGill University in 1874. The rules were based largely on the Rugby Football Union's code from England, though 1 essential distinction was the replacement of a kicked goal with a touchdown as the primary means of scoring (a change that may afterwards come about in rugby by itself, favoring the consider as the principle scoring function).

The background of American football is usually traced to early versions of rugby football and association football. Equally games have their site origin in many kinds of football performed in the United Kingdom during the mid-19th century, wherein a football is kicked at a intention or kicked in excess of a line, which in turn have been based on the sorts of English public university football games descending from medieval ball video games.