How the First Thanksgiving College Football Game Kicked Off a Holiday Tradition. In 1876, Yale beat Princeton before a sparse crowd, but by the mid-1880s, their annual contest was a major social event that attracted thousands of fans in New York.In 1873, as college campuses in the Northeast incubated the sport, students from Princeton, Yale, Harvard and Columbia formed the Intercollegiate Football Association. The league standardized rules and set schedules that included an annual Thanksgiving game in New York between the teams with the best records from the previous season.