Sport Football Meetings total 72 | Next meeting 2018 | |
 | ||
First meeting November 6, 1897
UMass 36, Connecticut 0 Latest meeting August 30, 2012
Connecticut 37, UMass 0 All-time series UMass leads, 36–34–2 (.514) | ||
The UConn–UMass football rivalry (also known as the U Game) is an American college football rivalry between the Connecticut Huskies football team of the University of Connecticut and the Massachusetts Minutemen football team of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The rivalry was dormant from the 2000 season, when UConn moved to FBS, until 2012, when UMass traveled to Rentschler Field to play the Huskies in the season opener.
History
The first game played between the two schools took place on November 6, 1897, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Massachusetts won 36–0. At the time, UMass was known as Massachusetts Agricultural College and Connecticut was officially Storrs Agricultural College. They had formed a loose association with other public colleges in New England such as present day New Hampshire and Rhode Island for the purpose of scheduling football matchups between the schools.
The colleges continued to schedule matches intermittently until after World War I, when they began to play on an almost-yearly basis through the mid-1920s. The series was discontinued until 1932, when the schools again met each year until World War II saw both universities disband their football teams. The schools would not match up again on the gridiron until Connecticut joined Massachusetts in the Yankee Conference in 1952. UConn and UMass played every season from that point on until UConn began their transition to what was then Division I-A in 2000.
UMass leads the all-time series 36–34–2. Massachusetts dominated the rivalry early, winning the first eight and 13 of the first 15 meetings between the two universities. Connecticut went on a streak of their own after that, winning 14 of the next 16 games. The 1960s again belonged to the then-Redmen of Massachusetts, as they lost only two games that decade. In the remaining years of the rivalry, the series was much more even, with neither team able to put together a winning streak of more than four games.
In April 2011, UMass announced plans to join the Mid-American Conference and move up to the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision, the highest level of college football in the country. Prior to this decision, the two schools had scheduled a game for August 30, 2012. UMass later became a FBS Independent school starting in 2016. In 2015, the two schools announced that the Minutemen will visit Pratt & Whitney Stadium at Rentschler Field in 2018 and 2020, and the Huskies will visit Gillette Stadium in 2019 and 2021.