An irreverent look back at the 1885 college football season

Concerns about football safety grew in 1885, as Harvard dropped the sport for a year. Let’s look at this and more from the 1885 college football season.

Harvard-Yale was almost canceled in 1884, as the faculty questioned whether the physicality of college football ran counter to universities’ mission of higher learning. The Game ultimately went on, with Yale vanquishing the Crimson and securing another national championship.

As 1885 rolled around, however, Harvard once again decided that football was not suitable for the student body. Faculty members voted on the issue, banning the game by a landslide vote. Only five faculty members voted in favor of playing football, and there was to be no further discussion of the matter.

The possibility of modifying the rules wasn’t even enough to sway the faculty. Students requested leave to meet with representatives of the other major football-playing institutions, and the students were denied.

Thus the 1885 football season commenced with the advance knowledge that Harvard would be nowhere near the football field.

It wasn’t the death knell of the sport, obviously, as we’re still playing college football in the 21st century. It did, however, signify that college football would be at risk of further defections as long as people continued to get injured on the field.

Did anything happen in 1885 to change opinions on the matter? Let’s dive in and take an irreverent look at all that transpired that year.

The first college football conference was born in 1885

We tend to think about college football in the 19th century as an eastern affair. After all, the Big Ten was originally known as the Western Conference… which would only make sense if the conference formed before the Louisiana Purchase. (The Big Ten, it would seem, has stretched the boundaries of credulity with its moniker plenty of times throughout the league’s history.)

Eleven years before the Big Ten came into existence, the first effort to form a conference took place. Given the sport’s eastward focus at this period, and the epicenter of its proliferation, it makes sense that the first conference also took place in the northeast.

On October 16, 1885, representatives from Amherst, MIT, Williams, and Tufts met at the Hotel Warwick in Springfield, Massachusetts to discuss the formation of an intercollegiate alliance. Agreeing to play a series of games against one another, the four institutions formed the Northern Intercollegiate Football Association.

What made this league unique as opposed to the Intercollegiate Football Association forged by Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton was the motivation behind its formation. While the future Ivy League institutions came together originally to rectify differences in their rules, the primary motive of the Northern Intercollegiate Football Association was the creation of a league whose members played one another regularly and competed for a championship.

In this fashion, the alliance between four Massachusetts schools served as an under-appreciated and little-known prototype for the future of college football. A sport we know now is indelibly linked to regional identities and local bragging rights began down that path with that meeting in Springfield before the start of the 1885 season.

Springtime football returns to the Rocky Mountains

Just as regionality was so critical to the formation of the Northern Intercollegiate Football Association, so too was it a key ingredient in determining who played football — and against whom they played. Football did not make its first foray to the Rocky Mountains in 1885, as the game first appeared in this area of the United States three years earlier. Its sporadic appearance, however, was due to the limited number of institutions adopting the game in this period.

In 1885, though, the sport returned to the Rockies. Colorado College participated in that inaugural 1882 contest, but given the fact they played a factory team in that encounter we can look at their April 1885 duel against the University of Denver as the first truly intercollegiate matchup in Colorado.

The hosts from Colorado Springs welcomed their opponents from the capital city and promptly sent them back home losers. Denver fell in a 12-0 shutout to the Tigers in a game that served as another milestone for the intercollegiate sport.

Also of note here, beyond the scoreline, is the fact that they apparently played with nine per side. Implicit in that note in the news blurb is the fact that football rules and standards codified on the eastern seaboard didn’t necessarily translate to the football being played elsewhere in the country during this point in the game’s history.

With rugby and soccer still maintaining preeminence in other parts of the country, this contest in Colorado Springs shows that the sport was anything but uniform even in its second decade of existence.

A quick look at the usual suspects on the east coast

With Harvard out of the picture in 1885, the battle for the national championship was even more skewed toward the bipolar hegemonies of the game since its inception. In layman’s terms, nobody had a hope in hell of stopping Princeton and Yale from meeting once again in a championship tilt.

The squad from New Haven kicked off its campaign with a road swing, winning 55-0 against Stevens Tech in Hoboken and 18-0 against Wesleyan in Boston. Returning home to Yale Field, inaugurated the season prior, the Bulldogs took on Wesleyan again in a return match and nearly doubled their total points on the season with a 71-0 clobbering.

Another trip to Boston on Halloween resulted in Yale’s fourth win of the year, as the Bulldogs ran up the score in a 51-0 takedown of MIT.

As the calendar shifted from October to November, Yale opened the new month with a 52-0 victory over former alumni affiliated with the Crescent Athletic Club in Brooklyn. On November 14, the last before Yale’s annual showdown with Princeton, Penn became the first team to score on the Bulldogs in 1885. But while the Quakers broke Yale’s shutout streak, they did so in a 53-5 defeat.

Princeton, meanwhile, opened its 1885 campaign with a home-and-home series against Stevens Tech. The Tigers mauled their in-state foes in Hoboken on October 3 by a 94-0 scoreline, then turned around and repeated the feat on their home field 11 days later in a 76-0 victory. Back-to-back games against Penn closed out the month of October, as Princeton secured a 57-0 win in Philadelphia and took down the Quakers 80-10 at home on Halloween.

A team of law students from Columbia were no match for the Tigers at the start of November, as Princeton easily prevailed 64-0 in New York City. Johns Hopkins played the Tigers close, falling only 10-0. The high-scoring antics returned just in time for the last contest before the showdown against Yale, as Princeton toppled Wesleyan 76-0 at home.

Even though both teams had another Thanksgiving game to play after meeting on the Saturday before the holiday, nobody doubted that this was the championship battle of the season. For the first time in the series since their inaugural 1873 meeting, the two teams met on campus rather than a neutral site in Hoboken or New York City. Princeton traveled to New Haven to take on the Bulldogs at Yale Field.

In front of more than 5,000 spectators at Yale Field, the hometown Bulldogs held a lead late into the contest. Up 5-0 after George Watkinson booted a goal from the field for five points, Yale looked poised to claim their third undefeated and untied national championship in four years and extend their unbeaten streak to a gaudy 49 games.

Then Yale decided to punt in the closing minutes of the contest. Princeton put two men back around their own 20-yard line. The ball bounced off one player and directly into the arms of the other man back to field, Henry Lamar. Lamar collected the ball on the run and darted down the sideline. Avoiding a pair of Yale defenders, Lamar cut back to the middle of the field and set up Princeton to kick the winning points. Soon after the goal after touchdown was converted, time ran out on Yale.

It was one of the most legendary plays of college football’s first two decades, as Lamar handed his team the undisputed national championship rather than their rivals. Prevailing on the road, Princeton returned to New Jersey to prepare for their Thanksgiving duel against Penn.

Leaving no doubt as to who was the best team of 1885, the Tigers took down the Quakers for the third time that year in another high-scoring mismatch. Yale, without the opportunity to take on Harvard to end the season, instead toppled Wesleyan for a third time with a 61-0 shutout in New York City.

What ultimately defined football in 1885, though, was not Lamar’s daring punt return but the way the game felt like it was simultaneously pushing forward and withdrawing into itself. The formation of the Northern Intercollegiate Football Association further anchored the game in the northeastern United States at a time when it competed with other football code variations for the interest of the rest of the country.

Most importantly, though, the absence of Harvard forced a reexamination. While it was the Crimson who first helped make the sport as violent as it became by the mid-1880s, their withdrawal from competition in 1885 made everyone reassess what was most important in college football.