An irreverent look back at the 1876 college football season

Yale didn’t allow a single point as it took down Harvard for the first time and won the national title. Here’s a look back at the 1876 college football season.

Eight years after Princeton and Rutgers kicked around in New Jersey, planting the mythic roots of college football into the soil of the Garden State, the game was finally beginning to evolve away from the Association (i.e. soccer) code to embrace more elements of rugby. Because universities and colleges each featured their own distinct house rules, though, the game was still nothing like what we watch in the 21st century.

That began to change in 1876, the centennial year for the United States. Like the hodgepodge of colonies that banded together to claim independence from British rule, the major football-playing universities of the time finally set aside their differences and agreed to band together. Forming the first intercollegiate football association with the intention of reconciling the rules of the game, four future Ivy League institutions steered football ever closer to modernity in a uniquely American form.

After the confusion of 1875, where nobody seemed really desperate to rise up and claim the still-nebulous national championship for future generations of fans, one team rose clearly above the others in the centennial year. Only one team with a multi-game schedule ran the table in 1876, leaving no question as to who was the best of the year.

The first truly dominant program in the sport’s long history was finally starting to get its foundation built, and it paid off in retroactive glory. Let’s dive in and take a bit of an irreverent look at what all transpired during the 1876 season as America’s greatest spectacle started to really take shape.

The first game in the centennial year featured Canadian All-Stars

As the school entered 1876, Harvard could not quell either of its fetishes, for spring football or for contests against Canadian opponents. The early interactions with McGill University in Montreal are what allowed Harvard to hold such influence over the early development of college football, as they integrated rugby laws into their idiosyncratic Boston rules.

On May 8, a game that technically gets counted in the 1875-1876 season (given the design of the academic calendar to straddle the new year between semesters), Harvard welcomed a team of Canadian All-Stars to Cambridge for a duel.

Harvard prevailed on their home field in front of a reported crowd of 5,000 interested observers. The 1-0 victory set up the Crimson for another strong campaign, especially after taking down Yale the year before in the first edition of The Game.

First, however, they had two more games against Canadian teams as the Crimson traveled over the border to Montreal in October. A rematch against the Canadian All-Stars on October 28 yielded a 2-0 victory for Harvard. Two days later, the Americans followed up that victory with a 1-0 takedown of McGill University to conclude their visit to Quebec.

Harvard continued playing Canadian teams, both collegiate and otherwise, until 1884. Getting international competition completely out of their system, it seems, proved difficult for the Crimson when it came to football.

Princeton and Yale on their usual collision course in 1876

Over the first quarter-century of college football history, two teams clearly stood head and shoulders above the rest on the field. Princeton, one half of that first football-like product put forth on the field against Rutgers in 1869, and their Connecticut nemesis Yale between them earned at least a share of 23 of the first 25 national championships that were awarded retroactively in the 1930s.

Only Harvard titles in 1875 and 1890 prevented a perfect sweep by the Bulldogs and Tigers. Rutgers is the only other team in this period to win even a share of the crown, when they did so in the inaugural 1869 season.

Harvard was officially champion of 1875 in the eyes of the NCAA, looking back more than a century later. Princeton is the team that actually claimed the 1875 national title, with the Crimson eschewing the opportunity to snag a share for themselves. Coming into the centennial year, the Tigers had hopes of repeating once again as champions.

They downed Penn 6-0 in the Quakers’ first-ever intercollegiate football game, then followed up that early November victory with a 3-0 takedown of Columbia the following week. Two Princeton players and one Columbia athlete were knocked out of the contest in what proved to be a rather spirited affair on neutral ground.

Princeton routed Penn a second time on the final weekend of November, leaving the Quakers wondering why they got themselves into the brutal game. The contest against Columbia was ostensibly played by rugby rules after Tigers captain A.J. McCosh apparently asked for a 10-foot crossbar rope to be strung between the goalposts. The game in Princeton, on the other hand, was apparently played by Association rules if press reports on the subject are reliable.

That set up Princeton with a perfect 3-0 record as they prepared for their year-end duel with Yale. The Bulldogs would make sure that the contest in Hoboken was a high-stakes affair.

Yale conquers Harvard in the second edition of The Game

A year earlier, Yale got pasted 4-0 by Harvard in the inaugural edition of their rivalry series on the football field. The smaller, fleeter Bulldogs team could do little against a Crimson team playing their preferred style of game with a greater number of players on the field than Yale was used to employing.

The Elis welcomed Harvard to New Haven on the same day that Princeton took down Columbia. In a spirited affair at Hamilton Park, Yale prevailed 1-0 on the strength of a Thompson goal. Harvard reached the end zone but was unable to convert their goal kick, allowing their rivals to squeak by with a narrow victory on their home field thanks to the vagaries of the scoring system of the era.

This Yale team boasted a legend of the sport a legend of the sport among its ranks. Walter Camp, playing in his first game as a Bulldog halfback, was noted in the press reports for his “splendid play” on the field.

After claiming their maiden victory over Harvard on the field, Yale turned their attention to an early December battle with Princeton. That showdown would effectively determine which team won the national championship for 1876.

For the first time Princeton played Yale under rugby-style rules, their favored Association style left by the wayside. The shift crushed any chance the Tigers had to down the visitors from Connecticut. Yale walked away 2-0 victors, goals by Bigelow and Thompson setting them up for a clean run at the national title.

All they needed to do after knocking off Princeton in Hoboken was return to the city a week later for the chance to take down Columbia in the season finale. Yale made good work of their chance, securing another 2-0 victory as college football concluded for the year with a bang.

The rules still were not completely reconciled, but were getting closer

As the 1876 season showed, more contests were being played in this centennial season under rugby-style rules rather than the Association laws that we know today as soccer. Harvard’s popularization of those rules — thanks their international contests against Canadian universities and all-star selections, and the Crimson’s subsequent introduction of those rules to other American universities — turned football in the United States from an almost exclusively kicking game to one that relied on the boot to an extent but also incorporated other elements that brought greater physicality to the game.

In late November, Princeton called for the formation of an intercollegiate football association to reconcile these rules once and for all. Sending out invitations to Columbia, Yale, and Harvard, the quartet came together in December and agreed to form an association to create a more unified rulebook for the American game.

Because those rules weren’t yet codified, however, it resulted in less football than fans might have had opportunity to enjoy in 1876. For instance, the duel between Tufts and Harvard that brought together the two Middlesex County institutions of higher learning the year before was not replicated in the 1876 season due to disagreements over how the game should be played.

In general, however, most schools were willing to take a chance on Harvard’s idiosyncratic style of play — and when they did, it often proved more popular than what schools were already playing on campus.

Princeton lost the battle, as the game they pioneered fell by the wayside. Their sacrifice proved to be for the good of the sport, as unification of the rules paved the way for more people to play and become interested in the spectacle.

Notably absent from this association of colleges and universities was Rutgers, the team whose home field hosted what stands as the first-ever college football game. The Queensmen had been bypassed by more recent adopters of the sport, both in terms of their abilities on the field and their influence off the field.

Over the next few years, the shift toward a single style of play opened the doors for the sport to proliferate even further across the country. The first step to evolve from a regional sport to a national sport was in motion, as the schools that started the phenomenon finally came around to sorting out the discrepancies in their codes.