The sport of rugby union in the United States has always had a close relationship with the sport of American football. Initially, games of rugby, soccer, and hybrid games had been played between American universities. Primitive forms of rugby, then all covered by the name "football", were being played in the US as far back as the 1840s, at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, stemming partly from Americans who had been educated in English schools.Bath, p.77 However, in 1862, Yale dealt it a major blow by banning it for being too violent and dangerous, about seven years later, in 1869, the first game of rugby football was played between Princeton and Rutgers. the rules of the Princeton–Rutgers game were a form of rugby that predates the adoption of rugby union code and did not allow forward passing. However, rugby union was taking a firm grip of a number of elite private academic schools (that would form the Ivy League in the mid 1950s), University of California and other East Coast and West Coast Universities, where it would have an influence on the nascent gridiron, which later became its major competitor. American football's growth came at exactly the point at which rugby was beginning to establish itself in the States.
