An irreverent look back at the 1883 college football season

Yale extended its winning streak to 17 games and rolled to a repeat national title in 1883. Let’s take an irreverent look back at college football.

Looking back, one could theoretically say that Princeton was the first dynasty in college football. The Tigers claimed a share of the national title in nine seasons over the first decade of the sport’s existence on campuses. Those claims, however, often left a lot to be desired. Often the Tigers were forced to share the crown, and retroactively a couple of their claimed titles probably don’t deserve the merit they are given.

The first true juggernaut, one who stomped all challengers along the way and then turned around and did it again, was not the Princetonians from New Jersey but rather the Elis from New Haven. Yale romped to a perfect 8-0 record in 1882, fending off challenges by Princeton and Harvard to secure an undisputed national title. Entering 1883, Yale was still as formidable and motivated as ever.

What made 1883 so interesting, then, was not that Yale stomped through all nine opponents on their schedule and reclaimed the national championship. Rather, it was the manner in which the Bulldogs capitalized on a new, more liberalized scoring system that provided a greater range of ways to rack up points.

Before, scoring was largely a negotiated truce between two opponents. Now, it was more clearly laid out. We weren’t quite at a modern scoring system yet, which only came to fruition in 1912. With touchdowns counting for two points, the kick after touchdown an additional four points, a field goal worth five points, and safeties counting as one point, teams had a much easier time of rolling up the score.

It was a system tailor-made for what Yale did on the football field. They were hardly the only team to benefit, though, as scoring trends went up around the country — at least at those schools which played the American intercollegiate version of football rather than rugby or soccer. Let’s step back to 1883 and take an irreverent look at what transpired that season.

Spring ball returns in 1883 thanks to the Wolverines

In the previous season, Michigan remained on their campus in Ann Arbor and scrimmaged amongst themselves. With no intercollegiate battles in 1882, the Wolverines were something of an unknown commodity when they stormed into the 1883 season with a May showdown against the Detroit Independents. After crushing their non-college opponents in the spring, using the new scoring system to rack up a 40-5 victory, Michigan prepared for another east coast barnstorming tour in the fall.

The road trip began with a visit to Hartford, where the Wolverines took on Wesleyan in the first of three games in four days. Though the game was close in Connecticut, the home crowd left happy at the end of a 14-6 Wesleyan victory.

Two days later, Michigan was 40 miles southwest in New Haven to take on the defending national champions. With around 400 spectators congregated at Hamilton Park, Yale put on a clinic of what was possible under the new scoring system. Within the first three minutes of play the Bulldogs were already on the scoreboard with their first touchdown, and they never let up against their overmatched opponents. With 10 goals through the uprights, a couple of touchdowns on the ground, and several forced Michigan safeties, Yale prevailed in a 62-0 blowout of their visitors.

Sitting below .500 in the standings, Michigan then headed 135 miles northeast up the Atlantic coast to Cambridge for a duel against Harvard. This game proved contentious, as Harvard students broke campus policy and kicked off 15 minutes prior to the end of daily lectures.

Even with the early start, the contest concluded before time ran out as it became too dark to see the ball on the field. Harvard officially went down as 3-0 winners in the game, as the referee in charge was apparently still operating under the archaic scoring system. The Crimson protested to no avail, and the next day campus administration proved irate.

Coming down on the football team, the Harvard administration canceled a second game against Michigan scheduled for Saturday. Also at risk was the annual showdown against Yale.

Michigan and Harvard did not play again that season. It would take another dozen years before the Wolverines and the Crimson met again on the football field.

The Game, though, did ultimately take place at the Polo Grounds

This was one of several contests played at baseball parks throughout the northeast. In addition to the Polo Grounds, Yale also took on Rutgers earlier in the season at Hamilton Park in Brooklyn. St. George’s Cricket Grounds in Hoboken also served as a regular venue for the biggest battles. At this point in college football history, campuses had not yet started to construct monolithic stadiums. The majority of games took place on pastures and open fields near universities, but neutral-site battles were already a regular feature for powerhouses and afterthoughts alike.

For Harvard, it might have been better to just cancel the game. The Crimson, already bearing one loss on their record from Princeton, had no chance at all against the Bulldogs. As the New York Times said after the game, “The foot-ball season closed yesterday. Yalensians and the friends of Yale think it closed brilliantly. Harvard admirers think now it would have been more brilliant had it closed on Wednesday.”

Only the second game in college football history with 10,000 spectators in attendance (the first being Princeton-Yale at the Polo Grounds in 1881), there were plenty of Yale partisans to celebrate and plenty of Harvard partisans to weep.

Harvard did manage to score one touchdown, the only team to put points on Yale all season. Two points, though, was never going to be enough to vanquish the steamroller from New Haven. One massive blowout after another marked the year for the Bulldogs, as they kicked off the season in September under the new scoring rules with 58-0 and 90-0 takedowns of in-state challenger Wesleyan. Stevens Tech fell 59-0 to Yale on the first Saturday of October, the only game the Bulldogs played that month.

Emerging with a rather straightforward 23-2 victory, Yale once again claimed its mantle as the top team in the United States. Leading up to the Harvard game, Yale romped through November. The Bulldogs crushed Rutgers 92-0 in Brooklyn, overpowered Brooklyn Polytechnic for a 49-0 win, pummeled Columbia 93-0, and rattled Michigan in that 62-0 mismatch.

Only Princeton — Yale’s nemesis in these days far more than Harvard — was able to keep things close against the Elis. An early touchdown and goal kick proved the only  points Yale could muster against their rival, as the game quickly developed into a defensive deadlock. Quarterback Harry Twombley, the young man who first introduced pre-snap quarterback signals to the game, suffered a black eye after taking a punch from a Princeton opponent as the physicality arose to the forefront.

With more than 500 points scored over the course of nine games, and only two points conceded to the Crimson, nobody could even pretend to match Yale among the best teams of 1883.

The best of the rest in 1883

That is not to say there was no other quality football being played elsewhere in the United States. The tweaks to scoring rendered a lot of high point totals and many lopsided results. At least 13 games identified in contemporary media sources featured more than 40 points scored.

As much as any other innovation, this adjustment to scoring was critical for separating American football from its British-born counterparts. Colleges outside of the northeast sometimes elected to adopt these new intercollegiate standards, but others continued to operate on the same negotiated basis that proved a key feature of the sport since its inception.

One of the most fascinating new programs to emerge this season was Gallaudet, a private university for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. Launching their team in 1883, the school kicked off their first season with a pair of victories over Georgetown. Keep that name in the background, because it will come up in later irreverent takes.

Carleton College in Minnesota defeated their counterparts from the state’s flagship university in their only game of 1883, launching the football program on a high note.

No other teams finished undefeated and untied. Neither Gallaudet (average margin of victory: 14-0) nor Carleton (which played rugby against Minnesota rather than the American version of the game) had much business trying to claim a national championship.

The Bison and the Knights would have been laughed down if they tried. At this point in college football history, there was one juggernaut, two understudies, and a couple dozen schools just feeling their way into this brave new world.