With Missouri S&T celebrating its 150^th anniversary over the next year, we will produce a series of articles highlighting various aspects and events within athletics that have taken place over the span of the university's history.  The first article in the series looks at the first football game played in 1893 and the start of intercollegiate athletics at the university.

Football has always been synonymous with college life.  The game has always been unique because its development began at the collegiate level.  The first football game ever played was between teams from Princeton University and Rutgers University on Nov. 6, 1869 in New Brunswick, N.J.

The sport was around the academic scene for more than 50 years before the National Football League was formed.  It was a raw game in the early days, similar to rugby until Walter Camp, a player at Yale University later known as the "founder of American football," worked to revolutionize the game during the 1880s.

The sport of football did not make its way into Missouri in its rawest form, but by 1888, students on Missouri campuses began to form teams for relaxation between classes.  Three years later, the movement to start a football team at Missouri School of Mines began to take shape when an athletic association was formed on campus to promote an interest in various sports.  In 1893, that movement produced the first Miner football – and intercollegiate athletic – squad.

Things were far different in 1893 as opposed to what football fans see on the field in 2020.  Unlike today, with the football program funded primarily through the budget of an athletic department, the players themselves had to come up with the money to make a trip to Springfield, Mo., to play that first game against Drury College on Nov. 20, 1893.  Faculty members could play, but there was no coach.  A.L. McRae, the head of the physics department, served as the team manager – and essentially as its "coach" – and went about acquiring uniforms for the inaugural contest.  The uniforms he got were orange and white.

Drury helped pay some of the expenses for the 15-man squad – a huge difference over the larger travel rosters of today – so it could make the trip.  According to the accounts of that day, the team left Rolla on a delightful Sunday afternoon but the weather the next afternoon was more typical of a fall day as it was cold and wet.  When the teams began playing at 3:10 p.m. the rain was falling steadily on a field already saturated by earlier precipitation that had fallen.

The host Panthers scored on the first play of the game from a "V formation."  The Miners then got the ball at midfield and advanced 10 yards on their first play, but had difficulty sustaining a drive on the muddy turf.  Drury scored its second touchdown minutes later and held a 10-0 halftime lead (the scoring system was also different in 1983, as touchdowns were worth four points, extra points worth two and a field goal netted five points).

The Miners would lose this game 16-0, despite having just two weeks of practice going into a contest with a team that had been playing the sport for three years.  The two schools then planned a return game in Rolla the following November.

More than 1,000 spectators showed up for the rematch on Nov. 12, 1894, which saw the teams battling in a scoreless tie over the first 35 minutes of play.  Drury opened the second half with possession, but gave the ball up to the Miners at midfield.  On the next play, G.W. Smith took a pitchout and ran down the left sideline for the first points in Miner football history.

*However, the Miners missed the extra point and Drury responded with an 85-yard scoring drive; the subsequent extra point gave the Panthers a 6-4 lead.  Another of the rules of the day was that the team that scored always got the ball back, but when the ball was kicked into the end zone, Ed Dwyer fell on the ball for a Miner touchdown to put MSM back in front.

Drury protested this decision and after it had failed to score over the final 19 minutes of the contest, took the matter to Camp, who was a member of the football rules committee.  He ruled in favor of MSM and the Miners had their first win in history.

After football got started at the university, it would be another 15 years before another intercollegiate athletic team started play when basketball got started in 1909 upon the completion of Jackling Gymnasium on campus.  The first baseball and track & field teams got started the following spring.  The next teams to be added came in the 1930s with the addition of swimming, wrestling, rifle and golf squads.

After a period of time after the baseball and wrestling teams had been discontinued, both sports returned during the 1960s, then men's soccer started in the late 1970s – a few years after women's athletics began with volleyball and basketball programs following the passage of Title IX legislation.