No. 7: Harvard Stadium: Where the Rules Are Made, Always

Reader, take note: on your Saturday morning stroll to New Haven’s Yale Bowl, which is currently being renovated, make sure you look both ways before crossing the street. You don’t want to get bulldozed.

Unlike the 70,000-capacity crater where Elis host football games, Harvard’s very own Harvard Stadium, located across the Charles River at Soldiers Field, has stayed elegant despite few modifications. Shaped in a neo-classical horseshoe, the Stadium looks very much like it did in 1903, when it became the first large, permanent arena for American college athletics.

It’s older than the Yale Bowl—as well as every other stadium in the nation.

And it has been way more important than you may know.

In 1906, Walter Camp, an influential football pioneer and a Yalie, advocated widening the NCAA playing field by 40 feet. The proposal was meant to open more space, and thereby reduce the violent nature of the college game.

The rules committee refused. Considerable alterations would have had to be made to Harvard’s reinforced concrete home.

So what did the committee do? It adopted the forward pass.

“It shaped what football is all about,” says Mark D. Bresnahan, Harvard’s assistant manager of facilities and operations. “More or less, Harvard Stadium has defined football since the beginning.”

That’s not all. Harvard Stadium hosted the first game between Japanese college football teams in 1991, with Keio University edging Waseda University by a 21-19 margin.

Bow to your sensei, Bulldogs.