An irreverent look back at the 1878 college football season

In 1878, Princeton won what might be the school’s first legitimate college football national championship. Let’s take an irreverent look back at the season.

For the first four years of college football history, Princeton won national championships largely by default. They enjoyed a split against Rutgers in the inaugural season, sharing the spoils with the Queensmen. A year later, all the Tigers had to do was beat Rutgers once to claim the crown for themselves. The same scenario played out in 1872, and in 1873 a solitary win over Yale was enough to snatch the top honors.

Four wins, one loss… four national championships.

Princeton happily claims all of those title seasons, along with some of more dubious veracity. Call it stats padding (because that’s exactly what it is), but for the most part the Princeton narrative jibes with the NCAA’s conception of who came out as national champions in the earliest days of the sport’s history.

There was no doubt about Princeton’s right to claim the 1878 national title, however. The Tigers went out and ran the table on the longest season any contender had played to date, racking up a half-dozen wins between mid-October and the end of November. While we can crack jokes about how much Princeton really deserved the first five championships they claim, nothing about that 1878 campaign was anything but dominant.

Let’s look in and see how Princeton stacked up against the pretenders of 1878.

The rules remain as fuzzy as ever in 1878

Over the previous few seasons, the major football-playing colleges made efforts to come together and hash out a uniform set of rules to govern the sport. Every time, representatives proved incapable of coming to any sort of consensus on the number of players per side, the system for scoring, and other disputed aspects of the flow of play.

Once again, there was a call to reconcile the rules of the game. In October, representatives from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia came together in hopes of finally coming to some sort of understanding with one another. Columbia, though, talked about potentially shuttering their program in 1878, and Yale sent representatives to the meeting who had no real power to act on behalf of their institution.

Yale wanted to play with 11 men per team. Princeton and Harvard advocated for 15 per side. The Bulldogs eventually conceded the point, meaning at this point that football was drawing more into alignment with rugby. The days of 20 or 25 per squad, however, were fading rapidly into the past as some semblance of standardization started to kick in.

Princeton and Harvard came to agreement on scoring, as touchdowns increasingly became a mechanism for scoring on their own merits rather than simply a means for earning a chance to convert a goal kick. The foot still remained the most significant part of football in this period, but getting into the endzone started to take on a significance that continued to grow over time.

Still, there were lots of question marks about the shape of the 1878 campaign and to what extent this convention actually settled anything moving forward. The first tentative steps toward unification of the sport continued apace, but in real time it dredged up enmities between schools unwilling to sacrifice the idiosyncrasies that allowed each to find a path to dominance.

Princeton’s run to an undisputed national championship in 1878

The big story in 1878 was Princeton. While every other team in the country suffered at least one loss, the Tigers rumbled through a six-game schedule that pitted them against a range of opponents. Right out of the gate, they helped introduce a nascent Penn program to the sport by dealing the Quakers their first loss in their first intercollegiate football game. Finishing with a 2-0 victory, Princeton came out firing on all cylinders and ready to restore their place atop the college football hierarchy.

After taking down their future Ivy League rivals, Princeton turned their attention to a duel against in-state challenger Stevens Tech. One of the earliest schools to adopt the game, Stevens Tech dealt with rising and falling fortunes in the 19th century that more often than not were in a trough rather than a peak. The Ducks fell 4-0 against their Garden State foes as the Tigers improved to 2-0 on the year.

Another in-state battle ensued at the beginning of November, as a rematch of the first college football game against Rutgers ended 5-0 in Princeton’s favor. Penn managed to score against the Tigers in their November 9 rematch in Philadelphia, but Princeton earned their fourth win in a row with a 2-1 survival against the Quakers.

That left two clashes left that might still trip up the Princeton lads — a November 16 date with Harvard and the annual season-ending clash against Yale.

First up were the Crimson, who took down Amherst the weekend before their meeting with Princeton. The Tigers had a month-long head start on their Harvard counterparts, but the two teams proved well matched on the football field.

Thanks to the agreement that touchdowns would count toward the final result, Princeton was able to emerge victorious after managing the only trip to the endzone either team could muster on a hard-fought day.

Harvard went on to lose to Yale as well on November 23, even though the Crimson won the battle over how many teams should be on the field for each squad. Finishing with one win and a pair of losses, it was hardly a season to brag about in Cambridge.

For Yale, the showdown with Princeton once again took on the feel of a national championship game. The 1877 draw between the two sides left each with legitimate claims to the title, while the 1876 victory by the Bulldogs secured the crown for Yale.

Princeton was a perfect 5-0 on the year as they welcomed the Bulldogs to Hoboken. Only a scoreless tie against Amherst the previous week blemished an otherwise immaculate 4-0-1 record for Yale. Once again, as it had been the previous few years, the heavyweight clash between the Bulldogs and the Tigers was billed as a championship bout.

Battling for two 45-minute halves at the St. George’s Cricket Club grounds, Princeton’s McNair converted a goal kick after the team’s only touchdown of the day. Yale fought back gamely, reaching the endzone once, but were unable to put a kick over the crossbar. As a result, the Tigers concluded the contest 1-0 victors. There were no questions this time, as Princeton definitively walked away champions as the first team ever to win six games in a college football season.

1878 marks both an expanding field and a narrowed scope of focus

The 1878 season saw Brown University’s football team come online for the first time. Amherst started to make a splash on the football field, and Swarthmore also started to play the game. Officially, 11 different teams participated in intercollegiate football a decade after the sport’s launch in New Jersey, and they did so entirely within the confines of a fall season.

While these smaller schools, along with more established programs like Rutgers and Stevens Tech, continued to take up the sport, football was still not on the stablest of foundations. After it appeared they would sit out the 1878 season, Columbia ended up playing one game against Penn in mid-November. Brown and Swarthmore also played just once during the season.

With nearly a dozen schools playing, though, football was on its way toward greater relevance as a campus pastime. On the cusp of the sport’s first real boom, 1878 marks the crossroads between college football’s earliest anarchy and an increasing level of standardization that would mark the rest of the 19th century.