Havana, Tokyo, Wembley: 152 Years of College Football Played Outside the United States

College football’s 2026 season doesn’t start in Columbus or Tuscaloosa. It starts in Dublin, at noon Eastern on Saturday, when Bill Belichick’s North Carolina meets Sonny Dykes’ TCU at Aviva Stadium in the Aer Lingus College Football Classic. Three weeks later, Arizona State and Kansas walk out at Wembley.

This feels new. It isn’t. American college teams have been packing up and leaving the country for 152 years, and the story includes a Heisman winner accepting his trophy at five in the morning in a Tokyo television studio, a game that nearly got canceled over a dictator’s headshot, and a head coach arrested on the field in Havana.

Here is the whole strange lineage, and where this weekend fits into it.

It started in Montreal, and it changed the sport

The first game played outside the United States happened on October 23, 1874, when Harvard beat McGill 3 to 0 on the Montreal Cricket Grounds in front of about 2,000 people. That series matters more than the scoreline suggests. The Harvard and McGill exchange, with its running game inherited from rugby, is widely credited with pushing American football away from the kicking game and toward the sport we recognize. Five years after Princeton and Rutgers invented the whole thing, the game crossed a border and came back different.

Harvard kept going back, and other American schools followed north:

• 1880: Michigan beat Toronto 13 to 6.
• 1885: Michigan played Windsor under Canadian rules.
• 1912 to 1927: The school that became Eastern Michigan traded games with Assumption College across the Detroit River.
• 1912: Carlisle played Toronto in a hybrid exhibition, American rules for the first half and Canadian rules for the second.

Then the two codes drifted far enough apart that the schools mostly stopped playing each other.

The Bacardi Bowl: seven games, one arrest, one dictator

Cuba is where this gets genuinely weird.

Between 1907 and 1946, Havana hosted a bowl game named after a rum company. The Bacardi Bowl, also billed as the Rhumba Bowl, was the marquee event of Cuba’s national sports festival, and it usually matched a program from the Deep South against a Cuban university or athletic club. LSU opened the series in 1907 by beating the University of Havana 56 to 0.

The Cuban sides were not tackling dummies. The Cuban Athletic Club shut out Tulane 11 to 0 in 1910 and shut out Ole Miss on New Year’s Eve 1921, in what was the first postseason trip of any kind for the Rebels. Ole Miss players paid their own expenses, got fifty cents each for food, and spent the boat ride from New Orleans seasick.

The 1912 trip is the one that belongs in a museum. Florida beat the Vedado Tennis Club 28 to 0 on Christmas Day. Three days later, against the Cuban Athletic Club, Gators coach George Pyle realized the officials were working from the rulebook college football used before 1906, and that the head referee was his opponent’s former coach. He pulled his team off the field in the second quarter. The stadium came apart. Cuban police broke up the scuffle and arrested Pyle for suspending a game after spectators had already paid. He made bail that night, the team boarded a steamship for Tampa the next morning, and Cuban authorities labeled him a fugitive. Florida’s media guide still doesn’t list the game.

The 1937 edition made real history. Auburn and Villanova tied 7 to 7 at La Tropical Stadium in the first game ever played between two American college teams on foreign soil. It nearly didn’t happen. Fulgencio Batista had just seized power, and when his people noticed his portrait was missing from the program, the game was frozen until a printer fixed it. Auburn captain Walter Gilbert later said armed guards were posted to make sure the crowd didn’t turn the afternoon into a coup attempt. Auburn finished the year with seven wins, two losses and two ties, ranked 13th nationally, in what was the program’s first bowl game.

Mississippi Southern beat Havana 55 to 0 in 1946. That was the last one.

Thirty years of nothing, then Tokyo

After Havana, college football stayed home for three decades. It came back in an unexpected place.

In September 1976, Grambling State beat Morgan State 42 to 16 at Korakuen Stadium in Tokyo before 50,000 people, the first NCAA game in the regular season played in Japan. A year later the Mirage Bowl launched, sponsored by Mitsubishi and named after one of its subcompact cars. It ran until 1993, rebranded midway as the Coca Cola Classic when Coke took over the sponsorship. It was never a real bowl. It was a late season game moved 6,000 miles.

What happened there is legitimately part of the sport’s record book:

• 1977: Doug Williams and Grambling beat Temple 35 to 32 on a late touchdown. Williams took MVP.
• 1979: Notre Dame beat Miami 40 to 15 in front of 62,574.
• 1980: UCLA and Oregon State drew a reported crowd north of 80,000 at the National Olympic Stadium.
• 1984: Army and Montana introduced The Wave to Japan, demonstrated on the field by cheerleaders from both schools before the crowd took it over.
• 1988: Barry Sanders closed his 2,628 yard season in Tokyo as Oklahoma State beat Texas Tech 45 to 42. He watched the Heisman announcement from a Tokyo studio at five in the morning.
• 1990: Houston’s David Klingler threw for 716 yards against Arizona State, a record for a single game that stood until 2014.
• 1993: Wisconsin beat Michigan State 41 to 20 and clinched a share of the Big Ten and its first Rose Bowl trip in 31 years.

Nebraska quarterback Tommie Frazier’s memory of the 1992 trip is the honest version of what these games were like for players: a flight that lasted thirteen hours, wedged between two linemen who each weighed north of 300 pounds, a crowd that cheered louder for a fan hopping a barricade than for touchdowns, and piped in noise to cover the silence.

The scattered experiments nobody remembers

The list of games played abroad exactly once is long and gloriously random. In order:

• 1976, across Europe: Texas A&I and Henderson State barnstormed the continent together, five games in Berlin, Vienna, Mannheim, Nuremberg and Paris. The first college football played in Europe, mostly in front of American military personnel. Texas A&I won all five.
• 1985, Melbourne: Wyoming and UTEP played the Australia Bowl.
• 1988, Dublin: Boston College beat Army 38 to 24 at Lansdowne Road before 42,525, the first major college game in Europe and the original Emerald Isle Classic.
• 1989, Milan: Villanova and Rhode Island played in an arena built during the Napoleonic era.
• 1991, Beijing: Pacific Lutheran and Evangel played in Workers’ Stadium in front of 25,000.
• 1993 to 1995, Hamilton: Georgetown, Davidson, Fordham and Holy Cross took turns in the Bermuda Bowl.
• 2011, Arusha: Drake played a Mexican team of all stars in Tanzania, the first American football game on the African continent.
• 2019, Shanghai: Penn beat a China All Stars team 85 to 0.

Two postseason bowls actually took root outside the country:

• International Bowl, Toronto, 2007 to 2010: Played at Rogers Centre, the first bowl game outside the United States since the Bacardi Bowl.
• Bahamas Bowl, Nassau, 2014 onward: Opened with Western Kentucky surviving a 34 point Central Michigan rally, 49 to 48. It was left off the 2025 bowl slate and its future is unsettled, which is why both games on the 2026 calendar fall in the regular season.

Then there are the ghosts, the ones that got scheduled and never kicked off:

• Glasnost Bowl, Moscow, 1989: USC and Illinois were booked before the logistics collapsed and the game moved to the Coliseum.
• Haka Bowl, Auckland, 1996: Lost its NCAA certification over financing.
• Dublin, 2020 and 2021: Both died with COVID.

Why Dublin became the constant

Ireland is now the closest thing college football has to a permanent home overseas. Notre Dame and Navy played there in 1996 and 2012. Penn State and UCF opened 2014 at Croke Park. Since 2022, the Aer Lingus College Football Classic has started the national season from Aviva Stadium every year:

• 2022: Northwestern and Nebraska
• 2023: Notre Dame and Navy
• 2024: Georgia Tech and Florida State
• 2025: Iowa State and Kansas State
• 2026: North Carolina and TCU

Saturday makes five straight.

Dublin: North Carolina versus TCU

• Date: Saturday, August 29
• Kickoff: noon ET, 5 p.m. local
• Venue: Aviva Stadium, Dublin
• TV: ESPN, and TG4 in Ireland
• Teams: North Carolina and TCU
• Make a pick: TCU versus North Carolina prediction page

It is the first international game in the history of either program, and it is a rematch. TCU beat the Tar Heels 48 to 14 in Chapel Hill in last year’s opener, the debut for Belichick. Carolina won four games all season. TCU won nine and finished ranked 25th.

Both teams go into Saturday with a new quarterback. TCU lost Josh Hoover to Indiana, and Jaden Craig, who arrived from Harvard, is expected to take over. That is a pleasing bit of symmetry, since Harvard is the same program that started all of this in Montreal in 1874. The transfer portal tracker follows moves like that one, and it is the reason fuel is refunded when an athlete leaves.

If you want the wider picture for Week 0 and Week 1, our ACC preview and Big 12 preview break down every opener, and our preseason top 25 has both of these teams pegged.

And now Wembley

Wembley: Kansas versus Arizona State

• Date: Saturday, September 19
• Kickoff: noon ET, 5 p.m. BST
• Venue: Wembley Stadium, London
• TV: FOX, with Big Noon Kickoff broadcasting from the stadium
• Teams: Kansas and Arizona State
• Make a pick: Kansas versus Arizona State prediction page

This is the inaugural Union Jack Classic. Kansas is the designated home team. It is a conference game, and it counts in the Big 12 standings.

A few things make it a genuine first. No college football game has ever been played at Wembley, and this is the first FBS game played in England. The only prior college game in London was Richmond against Boston University at Crystal Palace in 1988, in front of about 2,500 people. Wembley holds 90,000. The Big 12 has signed a deal running several years to keep bringing games back, part of the push by commissioner Brett Yormark to make the league the most globally relevant conference in college sports.

That is three Big 12 games in Europe across two seasons. This is no longer a novelty. It is a scheduling strategy. The nonconference and neutral site games shaping the 2026 Playoff race now include a couple with passports.

What is actually different this time

The NCAA has always allowed this. Member schools can play a regular season game in a foreign country once every four years. Teams did it for a century without anyone building a business around it.

What changed is that the athletes now have something that travels with them. A quarterback playing in Dublin at noon Eastern in Week 0 is the only game on television, in front of a crowd that has landed between 47,000 and 49,000 in each of the last three years. That is a valuation event. College football NIL is built on exactly this kind of spike in visibility, and a global broadcast window is worth more to a fringe starter’s brand than a 3:30 conference game in October ever will be. It shows up in the rankings too. Fan demand accounts for a quarter of the score in our Heisman NIL power rankings, which means a quarterback who wins the morning in Dublin climbs in a way the box score alone would not explain.

It cuts the other way too. Rosters are more international than they have ever been, and the athletes who grew up watching this sport from abroad face a specific set of problems when they try to earn from it: visa restrictions that most American teammates never think about, and cultural and market barriers that make deals harder to find. Taking games to Dublin and London grows the audience. It does not automatically grow the ability of the athlete to get paid by it.

That gap is the whole reason platforms like this exist. Every roster in both games is on RallyFuel: North Carolina and TCU for Dublin, Arizona State and Kansas for Wembley. The full football directory covers everyone else.

It is worth scrolling past the quarterbacks. The athletes who gain the most from a fan backing them are the ones no brand is calling: players like North Carolina’s Nyqir Helton and Jaylen McGill, or Kansas tight end Quinton Conley. Ninety percent of every contribution goes to the athlete, and if the conditions of a deal are not met, your money comes back. Here is how it works, and the school leaderboard shows which fan bases are actually turning up. The prediction board is open for every game on the schedule at 20 points a pick, and the events hub collects the tournament brackets and streak competitions that run alongside it.

Harvard crossed into Montreal in 1874 and the sport came home changed. It will be interesting to see what comes back from Wembley.