Although parts of this are pre-1900, around the turn of the century, or so, football had a reputation as a dangerous, brutal, violent, and disreputable game, leading a number of academics, assorted activists, and politicians to call for it being banned, and around the 1880-1900 timeframe, several schools dropped football and played rugby as something close, but seen safer and more respectable instead for a few years- IIRC, Cal & Stanford were a couple of them; it got so bad that TR effectively issued an ultimatum to a number of university presidents to clean up the game or else, and the response led to the development of the current game and the NCAA among other things.
Now, keeping that in mind, using the POD of your choice, it's easy to imagine a scenario where for whatever reason, football doesn't clean up its act, and gets banned as dangerous and immoral, or otherwise falls further into disrepute, and as part of the fallout colleges start turning to rugby as a more socially acceptable alternative that still keeps something of that sort of game and the benefits to the development of masculinity and character football's proponents raised in these arguments at this point in history.