An irreverent look back at the 1875 college football season

A Fourth of July game in 1875 is sometimes referred to as the first “real” college football game. Let’s take an irreverent look at the 1875 season.

It was a down year for defending national champion Yale, as the Bulldogs finished their 1875 campaign a perfectly mediocre 2-2 in the standings. Big wins over Rutgers and Wesleyan were neutralized by losses to Harvard and Columbia, eliminating any chance of a repeat title in Connecticut.

Instead, it was a year of firsts as the college football world slowly continued to evolve into the shape we know in the 21st century. The United States still numbered 37 states, and football still lacked a definite set of rules that governed all colleges throughout the country. One team, though, would quickly turn the game away from its soccer-inflected roots and on the path toward the gridiron game.

An Independence Day contest irreversibly changed the course of college football history, as Yale’s nemesis incorporated aspects of the sport they had learned from the Canadians the year before into their own idiosyncratic Bostonian version of football and promptly lost at their own game.

Let’s look at the twists and turns of the 1875 season in this irreverent look back at a key turning point in college football history.

The Jumbos down the Crimson on the Fourth of July

At this point of college football history, Harvard was effectively a nobody in the national race. The Crimson had precisely three intercollegiate games on their historical record. All three came against McGill University, playing a version of football very different from that practiced at other schools around the northeastern United States.

Unwilling to reconcile their rules with those of Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, and Columbia, the Crimson instead took on Tufts for their first intercollegiate battle against an American school. Located two miles north of Cambridge, Tufts accepted the Fourth of July challenge against Harvard.

Meeting up at Jarvis Field — now the site of the Littauer Center of Public Administration on the Harvard campus — Tufts surprised their counterparts with a 1-0 victory at a time when a team had to score a touchdown and then convert a kick to score.

Harvard returned the favor when the two teams met in a return match on Tufts’ campus in Medford in October, beating the Jumbos 1-0. What makes this game notable, though, is the fact that it featured two American schools wearing uniforms and playing a version of the game more akin to rugby than soccer.

The messy, convoluted national championship race of 1875

Given that their July loss to Tufts didn’t technically count against their 1875 schedule but inexplicably against their 1874 record, Harvard finished their first full season of American college football with a perfect 3-0 record. Prior to their victory over Tufts, the Crimson toppled a team of Canadian all-stars 1-0 to begin the fall campaign.

The big game, however, was a showdown against defending national champion Yale. For the first time in the illustrious history of the rivalry series known simply as The Game, the two upper-crust institutions of higher learning squared off on a football field.

First the two teams had to reconcile their rules. What came out of the negotiations was a series of concessionary rules that allowed the two universities to meet for the first time in the sport.

Meeting in New Haven on November 13, the reconciled rules proved almost immediately to favor Harvard. With each team fielding 15 men instead of 11, Yale’s speed advantage was neutralized by the additional bulk in the way. More than 2000 spectators were in attendance at Hamilton Park to watch the Crimson down the Bulldogs 4-0, Harvard getting the best of the first edition of The Game. Still adjusting to the new rules in the first half, Yale adjusted over time but could not find a way to get on the scoreboard.

That Harvard victory kept the Crimson undefeated, and officially they earned the national title according to the NCAA. They were not the only team with a legitimate claim to the championship in 1875, though, and Harvard doesn’t even recognize this season among their national championship campaigns.

Columbia also had a claim to the national title in 1875, as the Lions romped to a 4-1-1 record. The New York squad tied Rutgers, beat CCNY twice, and defeated both Stevens Tech and Yale on the road. A loss against Princeton, though, dulled their claim — especially since the Tigers were the third team with a claim to the crown.

After ceding the advantage to Yale in 1874, Princeton had little trouble with its two games in 1875. Collins Denny captained the Tigers to a convincing 6-2 victory over Columbia, showcasing Princeton’s talent and pedigree on the field.

As the above clipping shows, 21 players took the field for Princeton-Columbia in New Jersey on the same day that only 15 per side suited up for Harvard-Yale in Connecticut. This provides a great example as to why national championships during this period raise major red flags. It can be an exercise in futility to try to retroactively assess greatness between teams that didn’t always even themselves play with the same number of players from game to game.

We still do it anyway, because college football fans are nothing if not attached to one myth or another. But we do it without any certitude as to the accuracy or legitimacy of our claims, no matter how much contemporary coverage we might dredge up.

Still, Princeton’s win over Columbia blunts any legitimacy the Lions might have at claiming 1875 for themselves. The Tigers went on to destroy Stevens Tech 6-0 a week later, finishing 2-0 on the year. Unlike Harvard, whose claim was at least as legitimate as the Garden Staters, or the Columbia team that they knocked off in their season opener, Princeton had no qualms about claiming the title as their own.

College football is still a very regional affair at this point

As we look back at the shape college football took at this point, we find a sport that is still very much trying to find its way. Each contest was a negotiation between two schools that didn’t always see eye to eye on how the game should be played or even how many should get to play it at a given time.

It was also a rather regional affair, with intercollegiate competition relegated to a handful of schools centered along the Atlantic seaboard. Teams were inclined to play Canadian schools (or even an English institution like Eton) rather than schools further south or west than New Jersey.

As such, claiming national supremacy is a bit like the National Football League claiming its Super Bowl winners to be “world champions”… while it is technically accurate, it is more by default than by merit in terms of the global connotation.

Still, as college football entered the second half of its first decade of existence, the sport was starting to take a more concrete shape. The reconciliation of rules continued apace, and as schools familiarized themselves with one another’s eclectic twists to the sport they adopted some and discarded others. That admixture helped drive the sport slowly toward a form that would look familiar to fans of the modern game.