An irreverent look back at the 1877 college football season

What games do you count toward the present college football season, and which games do you count for the year before and the year after?

One of the weirdest things about college football in its first decades was the lack not just of uniform rules but also of a clear window for scheduling contests. Most schools confined their games to the fall months of October, November, and December, but this was not a requirement so much as a convention.

While the big four football-playing universities — Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and Columbia — called for the formation of a football association the prior year, 1877 was marked by more confusion. Forging the conditions for more widespread participation did not necessarily rectify this issue, and it required colleges to be on board with the changes. At the start of 1877, Yale opted to decline the invitation to join the association with the other three vanguards of the sport, throwing the entire operation into doubt.

1877 also raised questions about which games count toward a season and which games should more legitimately be considered part of the previous or subsequent seasonsOnce again in 1877, there was spring ball that theoretically counts toward the previous season. For these early years, though, the game could just as easily count toward their fall record.

However you opt to account for spring contests, one thing remains indisputably true — gestation periods for new sports are always going to be strange, convoluted, messy affairs. Let’s take a look at all that mess in 1877 with today’s irreverent look back at college football history.

Springtime football between the Crimson and the Tigers

Harvard and Princeton were two titans of the sport in this period. Princeton could boast participation in the inaugural season, and a streak of four national championships at the beginning of college football history. In 1877, however, the Tigers sat four years removed from their last national championship (at least recognized by the NCAA… they are still happy to claim 1875 as their own) and were increasingly becoming alienated from their preferred style of play by the shift in rules.

In early March, Princeton made their way north to Cambridge to take on the Crimson in a spring game between the two teams. Harvard got the better of the Tigers that day, winning 1-0 on their home field. It was an anomalous trend that Harvard started with their forays to Canada over the previous few seasons, and it was something that did not survive beyond 1877. As such, this game marks the last gasp of a dying era.

Eight months later, Princeton returned the favor with a 1-0 win over the Crimson in Hoboken, New Jersey. The game was marked by spectacular violence, as most were in this period. Several players walked away injured, and one Harvard player even lost a tooth in the fracas.

The split effectively eliminated both teams from the national championship picture — but only if you count that March game against the 1877 schedule. Because academic calendars begin in August or September rather than January, and end in May or June rather than December, the game is most frequently lumped in with the 1876 results.

Harvard downed Columbia two days later, and Princeton took down the New Yorkers two weeks after their showdown with the crimson. If not for the loss to the Tigers, Harvard likely would have walked away with at least a share of the national title. Instead, the Tigers have received the nod from some selectors throughout time… again, thanks in large part to the fact that the March 3 loss in Cambridge is most often held at arm’s length from the 1877 standings.

The defending champions rise again in 1877

Thanks to a split title selection by Parke Davis in the 1930s, Princeton claims 1877 as one of their national championship seasons. When one ignores their springtime loss at Harvard, the Tigers look far more dominant than they otherwise might in retrospect.

The 1-0 win over Harvard in early November atoned for their defeat in March, and a convincing takedown of Columbia kept the Tigers undefeated. As it did so often in this period, the championship came down to the head-to-head showdown between Princeton and their counterparts from Yale.

With Walter Camp in his second season on the Yale football team, the Elis rattled off three big wins to start the year. At the same time Princeton was beating Harvard, the Bulldogs took down Tufts. An intrastate battle against Trinity College in late November resulted in a 7-0 Yale victory, and they also toppled Columbia to start December. (Notable is that Yale won only 1-0 against the Lions; Harvard trounced Columbia 6-0, and Princeton downed the New Yorkers 4-0.)

Yale sat 3-0 in the standings, and Princeton was officially 2-0 absent the March defeat to Harvard. Meeting on the St. George’s Cricket Club grounds in Hoboken,

the contest was billed by multiple newspapers as a championship matchup

.

This contest reveals the vagaries of scoring during this period of the sport’s history. The two schools agreed only to count goals that went over the crossbar, with touchdowns only affording a team the chance to kick at the goal. Yale reached the endzone twice against Princeton, but was unable to convert their kicks.

Under a different scoring system, Yale would have walked away undefeated, untied, and the undisputed champion of 1877. Because the two teams agreed before the game that touchdowns offered no scoreboard relief, however, the Bulldogs were forced to settle for a scoreless draw against their hosts.

Implications of the 1877 season for the future of college football

According to the NCAA, Yale walked away with the national championship after the 1877 season. Princeton, being Princeton, also claims the 1877 title as their own. Even though Yale proved superior in their head-to-head contest, the lack of any uniform scoring system proved the Bulldogs’ downfall in their final battle of the year.

With Yale backing out of the call for an intercollegiate football association, it was that much harder to reconcile local discrepancies in the rule book and eliminate the need for pregame negotiations between teams to determine the rules and conventions by which individual contests were played.

College football was still confusing as hell at this point of the sport’s history. Simple things we take for granted — a touchdown offering six points, four downs to gain 10 yards, the line of scrimmage — remained inventions for the future. Unbalanced schedules, different rules from game to game, and the lack of any oversight turned tony institutions of higher learning into bastions of wild west-style anarchy.

Football continued to soldier on in 1877, still looking for the batch of ingredients that was just right for its explosion from a regional curiosity to a national obsession.