HANOVER, N.H. — The earliest football game between two eventual members of the Ivy League took place when Columbia played Yale in 1872. Dartmouth’s football team had its first intercollegiate game in 1881, several years before the sport was formally introduced at Ohio State and Alabama.

This is supposedly the league of football the way it once was. But today, in this northern outpost of the Ancient Eight, a program soaked in football’s past is trying to drag the sport into the future.

In 2010, the Big Green eliminated tackling in all practices — even preseason camp and spring ball. Coach Buddy Teevens likes to say that a freshman will play four years without being tackled by another Dartmouth player. The N.C.A.A. has since recommended dialing back contact significantly in practice.

A couple of years ago, Dartmouth began using moving robots as tackling dummies. The tall, remote-controlled cones of padding whir along Memorial Field’s turf like R2-D2. Now, more than half of N.F.L. teams, several dozen college programs and around 100 high schools have these mobile virtual players, or M.V.P.s, Teevens said.