An irreverent look back at the 1880 college football season

College football started a new decade with games in more places than ever before, but it was the same old story at the top. Let’s look irreverently at 1880.

At the end of its first decade of existence, the still-nebulous game of college football expanded out to the Midwest and gained popularity more deeply through the northeastern areas of the United States. Expansion took another turn in 1880, as football pushed its way southward once again and anchored more permanent roots.

Yet the growth of the game did not necessarily mean more competitive balance. Princeton claimed national championships in the 1869, 1870, 1872, 1873, 1874, 1875, 1877, 1878 and 1879 seasons. The only year where they could not weasel out some semblance of a claim came in 1876, when Yale trounced the Tigers 2-0 on the last day of November and left no question about their right to claim the title.

(Of course, not all of Yale’s 1870s five title claims in eight years after the program’s formation in 1872 are as strong as others… in every one of those years save 1876, Princeton and sometimes Harvard also had an equally legitimate case to make.)

How legitimate each individual title might be in retrospect, though, is less significant than the incontrovertible truth of the matter. No team of the 1870s could stack up to the hegemonic forces being developed in New Haven and New Jersey.

At the start of the 1880s, that bipolar hegemony over college football remained firmly implanted in the DNA of the sport. Once again, Yale and Princeton duked it out indecisively for the national championship. But there are more interesting stories beyond the Elis and the Princetonians, so let’s dive in and take an irreverent look back at the 1880 season.

A new location launches spring games in 1880

College football has become such a critical facet of the regional identity of the southeastern United States that it is sometimes hard to picture the sport’s slow development in the region. For  fans of the SEC and ACC, it can be even harder to imagine Ivy League institutions giving birth to the game in a part of the country where college football is now largely an afterthought on the biggest stage.

By 1880, though, campuses in the south were starting to warm to the game. One pair of contests in particular stands out, as it introduced a pair of new teams in a state where the sport previously had no roots.

Centre College, a small private institution in Danville, Kentucky, has an outsized place in the early history of college football. It was an inauspicious start for the Praying Colonels, however, as they took on Kentucky University (not the University of Kentucky, mind you, but the private school now known as Transylvania University) in a series of games between the two institutions.

In the first contest on April 9 in Lexington, the two schools agreed to use a popular version of scoring rules where four touchdowns counted as one goal. Kentucky throttled Centre College by 13¾-0. A week later, the Praying Colonels fell once again to their counterparts. This time the game was closer, but Centre still fell 5½ to nothing on their home field.

It was a home-and-home series that didn’t necessarily have a massive impact on the 1880 season, but did prove significant in the long run as Centre shook off its early cobwebs and became increasingly relevant in the early 20th century.

A new push to standardize the rules of the game

Previous attempts to get the various football-playing colleges and universities together to formulate a unified set of rules flamed out. Disagreements over style of play and numbers per side plagued the sport over its first decade, as the first contests pitted 25 players per school against one another before the numbers slowly whittled away.

The big argument remained whether to play with 11 or 15 per team. Harvard, who was critical in steering the American game more toward rugby-style play than the Association kicking game imported from England, favored the 15 per side that fell in line with rugby. Yale led the charge for smaller squads.

When the schools agreed to come back together before the 1880 season, there was no guarantee that they would finally hash out these disagreements. Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia — the three titans of the game at the time and the New Yorkers for good measure — were the only schools in attendance. Amherst also hoped to send representatives to the meeting, but never received an invitation.

The influence of the big three schools on the sport in the period, however, was more than enough for their conclusions to sway the entire discourse around American football.

Only Harvard voted to set the standard squad size at 15 players per team. Other than that, little changed with the rules. The field stayed the same size, nothing was really settled about scoring systems, and the teams went on their way after scheduling games among one another.

Still, the shift from 15 players (or more in some cases) per team to the standard that still governs the sport today was a massive enough impact on its own. Schools set in and started to adjust to the new reality as they prepared for the 1880 campaign.

A short discussion about the actual games in 1880

It can be easy to get bogged down in the significance of shifting the rosters to 11 men on the field at a time for each team. At the same time, the best teams in the previous decade remained the best teams in the 11th season of college football history.

With their two April wins over Centre, Kentucky University joined three other teams atop the unbeaten ranks — if we opt to include their spring schedule in with the 1880 campaign, instead of the previous 1879 season where history has often lumped intercollegiate spring contests.

Michigan also went unbeaten, knocking off the University of Toronto 13-6 in their only showdown of the year. What is interesting about this game is the way the final score went into the record books, compared to the other games played on November 6.

In the official records, Harvard won 3-0 over Columbia, with the touchdown counting for no points and only goal kicks impacting the scoreboard. Princeton’s win over Penn is marked as a 1-0 victory, meaning their touchdown seems to have counted as equivalent to a goal kick. The records say that Michigan, meanwhile, won by seven points.

Given they were said in contemporary press reports at the time to have won by “one goal and one touchdown” it appears that Michigan and the Canadians agreed on some strange scoring system that likely served as a prototype for future changes to the scoring schema. It doesn’t match up with rugby scoring rules of the period, and could have been an early Canadian variant on the game. (More research would need to be done to prove that… alas, we’re focusing on American college football here, not the Great White North, so that will have to wait for another time.)

No matter what scoring system was utilized, though, the two teams that once again stood atop the pack were Yale and Princeton. The Bulldogs opened the year with a lopsided 13-0 win over Columbia, took down Brown and Penn by identical 8-0 pastings, and survived rival Harvard for a 1-0 win. Princeton also arrived undefeated to their season-ending showdown with Yale, shutting out Stevens Tech, Penn, Rutgers, and Penn again.

An unsatisfactory finish to the season

With four wins apiece, the 1880 duel between Princeton and Yale once again set up as a de facto national championship game. Squaring off on a snowy day on neutral turf at the Polo Grounds in New York City, the two teams played once again to a scoreless gridlock that determined nothing definitive by the end of the contest.

The field conditions made it difficult for players to find their footing in Manhattan, and the 0-0 result meant both the Tigers and Bulldogs were left with another campaign where they could claim themselves the superior squad in the country but were forced to share that right with one another.

The New York Times reported further on the game that Yale was willing to play another game against the Tigers to see if a more satisfactory conclusion could be reached. Princeton ultimately turned down the challenge, though, and the Times felt compelled to hand Yale the championship based on their games against the other major players in the sport who had met earlier in the year to solidify some semblance of uniformity to the rules of the game.

This is the first instance to date where a definitive table of season results can be found in a major newspaper. Officially both schools went into the record books as champions. It is interesting, though, that such a preeminent newspaper at the time felt compelled to dismiss Yale’s duels against Brown and Penn and to toss aside Princeton’s games against Penn and Stevens Tech.

Another New York newspaper on hand to report the battle at the Polo Grounds came to a different conclusion, noting that “Princeton Still Claims the Championship.”

The two rival juggernauts were forced to agree to disagree on who reigned supreme, each claiming their place atop the college football hierarchy for 1880.

Ultimately, though, what stands out from 1880 is less another defensive struggle between two powerhouses at the end of the year than the meeting that transpired prior to the season’s start.