The Crimson has a legacy that includes 13 national championships and 20 College Football Hall of Fame inductees, including the first African-American college football player William H. Lewis, Huntington "Tack" Hardwick, Barry Wood, Percy Haughton, and Eddie Mahan.

Though rugby style "carrying game" with use of hands permitted (as opposed to "kicking games" where hands were not permitted) between freshmen and sophomores were played in 1858[4] the rugby team was not founded until December 6, 1872,[5] by former members of the Oneida Football Club, formed in 1862 and considered by some historians as the first formal "football" club in the United States.

As a result of this, Harvard refused to attend the rules conference organized by the other schools and continued to play under its own code.

Harvard boys agreed to a rugby match with McGill under the condition the Canadians played the Boston Game.

[6][10][13][14] Inasmuch as rugby football had been transplanted to Canada from England, the McGill team played under a set of rules which allowed a player to pick up the ball and run with it whenever he wished.

In the rugby rules of the time, a touchdown only provided the chance to kick a free goal from the field.

The Canadians were easily defeated by a Harvard squad familiarised with the Boston rules in contrast to the lack of experience of McGill players.

[6] Within a few years, Harvard had both adopted McGill's rules and persuaded other U.S. university teams to do the same.

On June 4, 1875, Harvard played another rugby match v Tufts University (lost 1–0),[16] and then Yale on November 13.

[19][20] In October 1874, the Harvard team once again traveled to Montreal to play McGill in rugby, where they won by three tries.

[32] The NCAA decided to split Division I into two subdivisions in 1978, then called I-A for larger schools, and I-AA for the smaller ones.

The NCAA had devised the split, in part, with the Ivy League in mind, but the conference did not move down for four seasons despite the fact that there were many indications that the ancient eight were on the wrong side of an increasing disparity between the big and small schools.

In 1982, the NCAA created a rule that stated a program's average attendance must be at least 15,000 to qualify for I-A membership.

Choosing to stay together rather than stand their ground separately in the increasingly competitive I-A subdivision, the Ivy League, along with several other conferences and independent programs moved down into I-AA starting with the 1982 season.

Ted Kennedy played football for Harvard and caught a touchdown pass in the 1955 Harvard/Yale game.

Despite never playing high school football, the frosh went 27-for-35 for 359 yards and six passing touchdowns (along with 6 interceptions and 4 lost fumbles).

Thus 'the stadium represents the thought, the money, the ideas, the planning, and the manual labor of Harvard men'.

Afterward, there were smaller temporary stands until the building of the Murr Center (which is topped by the new scoreboard) in 1998.