You don’t need to know about the literary backdrop of Princeton University football to take an interest in Saturday’s game against Harvard. For two years running this storied rivalry has produced thrillers that came down to the final seconds—last year in triple overtime. At stake once again is the Ivy League title.

It’s safe to say that this weekend’s game would have mattered a lot to F. Scott Fitzgerald. As a prep-school student in the stands for the 1911 installment of the rivalry, Fitzgerald watched Princeton pull off an improbable late victory. At that instant, his biographers say, he vowed to enroll at Princeton. Once there, he tried out for the team—but got cut on the first day, a well-chronicled disappointment that some scholars believe explains the sense of rejection that permeates his novels, especially “The Great Gatsby.”

But long overlooked evidence suggests that football didn’t just influence Fitzgerald: Fitzgerald himself may have exerted a decisive influence on the development of the game.

The evidence comes from a 1956 interview with Fritz Crisler, a man who unquestionably shaped the game of football. After becoming head coach at Michigan in 1938, Crisler established the practice of fielding distinct offensive and defensive units; previously, 11 men had played both sides of the ball for 60 minutes. This shift became Crisler’s legacy. His biography at the College Football Hall of Fame calls him “the father of two-platoon football.”

The tantalizing question raised by the 1956 interview is: Did Crisler get the idea from Fitzgerald? It is not a subject discussed in the ever-expanding library of popular and academic writing on Fitzgerald. (This year alone has seen the publication of at least three books about Fitzgerald.)