Dave’s Football Blog

How do you define chaos? Try a soccer match featuring two teams of five hundred.

That’s what the loonies at SUNY Oneonta organized this week with their “World’s Largest Soccer Game.” Their goal was to get 1,000 people on the pitch at once to play a game. This would be Cristiano Ronaldo’s worst nightmare, because there would be no room for him to fall over at the slightest contact.

Of course, the “World’s Largest Soccer Game” isn’t exactly a new idea. In fact, it borrows from one of the oldest American football games ever created.

Old Division Football was first played at Dartmouth College in the 1820s. The idea behind that game was to pit all the upperclassmen against all the underclassmen — and yes, I do mean “all” — in game where they had to kick a ball to the opponent’s end of a huge 375-yard field. The game itself faded out in the 1880s, though some version of it was played at Dartmouth until 1948.

There’s a research paper about Old Division Football that you can find here. Maybe after this stunt at Oneonta, Dartmouth will consider making their old game new again. It’s a piece of American football history that’s gotten awfully dusty.

(Thanks to reader Another Joe for the tip.)

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