The air is getting cooler, pumpkin spice lattes are back and Labor Day has passed. Folks, fall football season is here.

The NFL kicks things off Thursday, Sept. 5, with a matchup between the Baltimore Ravens and reigning Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs. The Cincinnati Bengals host their season opener Sunday, Sept. 8, against the New England Patriots.

Those breaking out their jerseys might be wondering: Who invented football?

Here’s a crash course on the American pastime with ancient origins.

American football originated among college students

The sport Americans know and love today is formally called “gridiron football,” distinguished by the grid-like vertical lines seen on American football fields. It’s similar to a couple of other English sports, rugby and soccer.

In short, iterations of what we know today as rugby, soccer and football have been played since the Middle Ages.

The American version of football developed in the 19th century among college students. In 1869, students from Princeton and Rutgers organized the first intercollegiate football contest in New Brunswick, New Jersey, playing a game similar to soccer, according to History.com.

In the early 1870s, students at several other elite Northeastern colleges, including Harvard and Yale, took up the sport, creating a rugby-soccer hybrid before embracing a style that leaned more toward rugby in 1875.

Who invented football?

The transition from rugby-style play to the game we know today kicked into gear around 1876 thanks to a man named Walter Camp, known as the Father of American Football. Camp, a Yale undergraduate and medical student from 1876 to 1881, played halfback, served as team captain and participated in the first Yale-Harvard rugby game in 1876.

He was also a major player on the rules board of the Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA), created in 1873 with representatives from Yale, Princeton and Rutgers. From there, he spearheaded the development of what American football is today, finalizing things such as the line scrimmage, the numerical scale for scores, the structure of eleven men per side, sequences, strategy and more.

Camp also helped establish the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1906, the umbrella under which all collegiate athletics operate now. The NFL was established a few years later in 1920 in Canton, Ohio. The American Football League (AFL) was founded in 1959 and merged with the NFL in 1970.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Who invented football? Looking at the sport’s origins