An irreverent look back at the 1879 college football season

As college football wrapped up its first decade, it was the usual cast of characters in competition for the crown. Here’s an irreverent look back at 1879.

College football turned 10 years old in 1879, as more than a dozen colleges took to the field. Six years after a stillborn effort to grow in the south, football headed back southward. This was also the season where football started to spread westward from its epicenter in the northeastern United States through the Great Lakes region into the Midwest.

In fact, 1879 marks the year when the storied program was born at Michigan. The Wolverines traveled to Chicago to play Racine College at the ballpark of the Chicago White Stockings baseball team in May. Michigan sent their counterparts from Wisconsin back home dejected after the Wolverines won 1-0.

Six months later, Michigan returned to the football field and managed a scoreless tie against the University of Toronto on the first day of November to finish unbeaten at 1-0-1 in the school’s first season.

While the sport also made a foray toward the south once again this season, it did not quite cross the Mason-Dixon Line. Nevertheless, college football drifted down the coast from its birthplace once again. The midshipmen of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis suited up for their first football game, a December donnybrook against the Baltimore Athletic Club. Playing on the cow pasture near the academy superintendent’s house, Navy drew 0-0 against the Baltimoreans.

The real power players of the sport, however, were still the usual suspects at this point. Yale and Princeton, Princeton and Yale — the two institutions stood at the head of the pack to the extent that everyone else was left competing for crumbs. Their annual contest was perennially billed as a championship game, as the two teams dueled for national honors.

That certainly didn’t change in 1879, even as more schools created football teams and started playing the sport. Let’s take an irreverent look back at the year where college football concluded its first decade of existence.

Two heavyweights and a quintet of pretenders

Seven different teams finished the 1879 season with undefeated records. Of course, in an era where scheduling was in no way standardized and a game was played pretty much whenever two teams agreed to schedule one, some of these undefeated marks were dubious distinctions.

Four of those seven teams only played one game over the course of 1879. Like Princeton in the earliest days, all they had to do was keep from losing to come out looking perfect. Three of those seven teams finished with a single tie on their record for the year, those 0-0-1 finishes leaving Navy and a pair of Canadian schools (McGill and Toronto) both undefeated and unsatisfied at the same time.

UMass launched a program as well in 1879. With a 4-0 win in their only game of the season against Amherst, the Minutemen technically ended the season as the only undefeated and untied team in the entire country.

Then there was Michigan, which finished the season 1-0-1 after their games against Racine and Toronto. While the inaugural game against Racine was touted as a “championship of the Western Colleges” it was hardly enough to tip the scales in Michigan’s favor when evaluating them against the eastern schools.

None of those five, ultimately, had any real claim to the national championship in 1879. Instead, as had been the case for the first decade of the sport’s evolution as an intercollegiate pastime, Princeton and Yale quickly asserted their dominance and set up another showdown in late November to determine the champion of the season.

First, though, a look at another convoluted Harvard campaign

Harvard’s significance in the earliest years of the sport was less as a champion than as an agitator. The Crimson, through their contests with McGill University of Montreal, helped steer American football away from a more predominantly soccer-style kicking game to one that more closely resembled rugby in its rules and style of play. Their affinity for playing Canadian teams continued through the end of the 1870s, as Harvard opened their 1879 campaign with a pair of games against Britannia Football Club.

On October 25, Harvard welcomed the Canadians to Cambridge and emerged with a 2-0 victory on their home field. The collegians followed up that opening win with a trip to Montreal on the first week of November. Across the border, Harvard won their rematch 1-0 against Britannia on November 1 before playing out a scoreless draw against McGill two days later.

In these early years, Canadian contests went a long way toward bolstering the overall record of Harvard programs. After going 2-0-1 against the Great White North, the Crimson mustered a 0-1-1 plummet against American counterparts.

First on the schedule back home in the United States was The Game, that spirited annual contest between Harvard and Yale. The Crimson traveled to Connecticut to face off against their rivals. Yale, the defending national champions, won their first game of the season in a 3-0 walkover against Penn, and hoped to do the same against Harvard.

Instead, playing with 15 men each instead of Yale’s preferred 11 per side, the Bulldogs had the better run of play. Neither team reached the endzone, as defense was the buzzword of the game. (At a time when they counted for no points, the Yale defense racked up nine safeties on Harvard. The Crimson returned the favor with three of their own safeties on Yale’s offense.) With both teams bogged down and unable to move the ball, a weird struggle that would have ended 18-6 under current scoring instead finished in a scoreless deadlock.

After Harvard, Yale went on to win its next two games. Rutgers went down in a 5-0 rout. Then, five days before their scheduled showdown against Princeton, Yale made an advance trip to New Jersey to square off against Columbia in Hoboken. The New Yorkers fell 2-0 across the river from home, as Yale improved to 3-0-1 in the standings.

Harvard, meanwhile, collapsed 1-0 against Princeton at the same time Yale was pummeling Rutgers. The Crimson, unable to put in the kind of results against fellow American universities that they pulled off earlier in the year against Canadian squads, limped to the finish line of the 1879 campaign.

Thus only two were left standing at the end with a shot at the 1879 title

At 3-0-1 in the standings, Yale could certainly claim an undisputed national championship in their season finale against Princeton. The Tigers, on the other hand, were an even more impressive 4-0-0 after putting in four shutout performances over the course of October and November. As the defending national champions, Princeton was on a 10-game winning streak and had not lost a game since 1876.

Princeton opened their campaign with a 6-0 blowout of Penn on October 18, showing no mercy against the second-year program. Two weeks later, the Tigers took down Columbia 2-0 for their eighth straight win. Number nine came on November 8 in a 7-0 pasting of Stevens Tech, and Princeton won another on their home field when they took down Harvard on November 15.

Thus November 27 — Thanksgiving Day 1879 — marked the date on the calendar when a champion would be crowned. A win by either team would earn them the honors. With the holiday freeing up a large contingent of fans, between 6,000 and 7,000 spectators bore down on St. George’s Cricket Ground in Hoboken to witness the spectacle.

The two teams played a defensive struggle similar to that battled out by Harvard and Yale. Princeton forced four safety touches to two by Yale’s defense, as the Tigers prevailed in terms of physicality but proved incapable of converting their command of the game into an advantage on the scoreboard.

For the second time in the previous three years, Princeton and Yale officially ended in scoreless gridlock. Both teams earned retroactive shares of the championship, Yale at 3-0-2 and Princeton at 4-0-1, but the Tigers have usually been recognized by more outlets over time as the true champion of the season.

1879 highlights a series of trends in college football

What made college football in 1879 so fascinating was the series of trends that started to emerge over the course of the year. Michigan’s development of their football program launched a long history of the game in the Midwest. Over the next few years, the game expanded rapidly to colleges and universities throughout the Midwest, as well as in New England and into the south.

Though the first foray into the south proved a one-off affair between Washington and Lee and the Virginia Military Institute, interest in the game continued to develop below the Mason-Dixon Line. Papers as far south as Richmond and Charlotte offered brief news flashes about the Yale-Princeton game, showing the influence of elite-level college football competition far beyond the reach of the thousands who were able to watch in person.

As college football closed the door on the 1870s, it found itself in a strong position as a still-developing sport that already enjoyed rapidly growing popularity. While still top-heavy in terms of the title contenders, college football could boast a rising influence on the national discourse as the country entered the final decades of the 19th century.