An irreverent look back at the 1887 college football season

College football swirled in a holding pattern in 1887 while several states forged deeper connections with the sport. Here’s an irreverent look back.

By the mid-1880s, college football was not quite the national spectacle that it would soon become nor the simple diversion of its origins. The game deepened its roots in several locations, as programs well known to 21st-century fans came online for the first time and other big names consolidated their place in the sport.

Ultimately, though, let’s face it: 1887 was something akin to filler material, the necessary next step chronologically but hardly the most earth-shattering of seasons. Programs that had previously been dominant remained dominant. Nothing substantively changed with the rules put forth by the Intercollegiate Football Association. There were no tweaks to scoring methodologies.

There was also little controversy, as all of the main players in the game fielded teams and played a full schedule. Nothing akin to Harvard’s 1885 withdrawal occurred, at least among schools where the shuttering of the football team would make real noise on anything but a campus-wide level.

Thus it once again fell to the usual suspects in the northeast to compete for the ultimate prize, while standout performances elsewhere in the United States went relatively unrecognized and unappreciated. Let’s tuck in and take an irreverent look at what transpired in college football in 1887.

Golden Domers get their first taste of college football

One of the most storied programs in college football history resides in northern Indiana. Notre Dame, the Catholic institution in South Bend, experienced the thrill of taking to the field for the first time in 1887 when the team from Michigan stopped in town on their way to a Thanksgiving tilt in Chicago to teach the game to their Notre Dame counterparts.

What they were playing was the rugby variant of the game that still dominated at Michigan. The visitors trained their hosts, played a short scrimmage with mixed teams comprised of players from both schools, and then regrouped for the first intercollegiate competition in Notre Dame football history.

The two schools then played an abbreviated contest in front of a crowd of 400 to 500 bystanders. The Wolverines, as might be expected, had little problem knocking off the team they just finished training. Winning by 8-0, Michigan left South Bend with the promise to return in the spring for more intercollegiate competition.

For one of college football’s most legendary teams, it was a rather inauspicious start. Still, it was obvious that the football bug had infected the Notre Dame campus, and we can point to 1887 as the genesis of one of the sport’s most decorated and dynastic programs.

With wins over Albion and the Chicago Harvard School, Michigan finished its 1887 campaign with a perfect 3-0 record. Given the level of their competition, however, there was no chance whatsoever that the eastern press would think to consider the Wolverines as a national championship-caliber team.

More important than their victories throughout the year, however, was this landmark visit to South Bend. When it comes to the rivalry between the Wolverines and the Fighting Irish, Michigan men have only their past cohorts to blame for introducing the game to the Golden Domers.

Dispelling the myth of first football in Old Dominion

The University of Virginia loves to claim that they were the protagonists in the first football game held within their state. On November 13, 1887, the Cavaliers took on Pantops Academy — a private prep school also located in Charlottesville. Virginia emerged one other side of the contest with a scoreless tie.

What makes this claim so funny is not that they were playing a team representing something other than a college or university, but rather that it completely ignores a game that took place more than a decade earlier. About 55 miles southwest of Charlottesville, Washington & Lee and the Virginia Military Institute squared off in 1873 for what is more likely the first game in Old Dominion.

It also ignores the series of games played by Richmond and Randolph-Macon that first started six years earlier in 1881.

Even Virginia acknowledges that the game was played as early as 1870 on campus among students, and there is speculation that they challenged Washington & Lee in 1871. Without extant documentation, however, the swirl around Virginia’s place in the sport’s history is incomplete. Still, we can say with relative confidence that this was at the very least the first game against outside competition in Virginia Cavaliers history.

The situation at the core of football’s popularity in 1887

As much as football gained popularity in other parts of the country, its spiritual home still resided indisputably in the northeastern region of the United States. And really, there was only one game that truly mattered in the annual calendar. Other than the perennial championship contest between Princeton and Yale, the rest of the schedule in this region was just so much filler.

That isn’t entirely fair, mind you. Princeton didn’t live up to their end of the bargain in 1887. The Tigers fell on November 12 against Harvard in Cambridge, then dropped their contest against Yale at the Polo Grounds a week later. As such, it opened the door for Harvard to challenge for a national championship for the first time in over a decade.

Harvard’s run to the championship opportunity included a win over MIT, which finished atop the Eastern Intercollegiate Football Association. As the champions of college football’s first true conference, the Engineers finished the year 5-1 in the standings. Yet Harvard still trounced their Massachusetts counterparts 62-0, setting up what the Crimson faithful hoped would be their own perfect season.

Harvard won its first 10 games of the season by a combined score of 652-6, securing nine of their victories by shutout. The only team that managed to put points on the scoreboard against the Crimson was Williams — yet the Ephs still fell 52-6 against the Harvard juggernaut.

That put Harvard on a collision course to play Yale for the national championship at the Polo Grounds on Thanksgiving. A 12-0 win over Princeton ensured that The Game would be for more than just bragging rights in 1887.

The Bulldogs, meanwhile, stampeded through their own schedule. Three games against Wesleyan finished with three Yale victories and a 220-4 aggregate score. Williams, Penn, Rutgers, Princeton, and the Crescent Athletic Club team from Brooklyn comprised of Yale alumni all fell to the Bulldogs in lopsided shutouts.

The buzz around the battle between Harvard and Yale brought thousands to New York City. Reports variously peg the attendance at the Polo Grounds for The Game at somewhere between 15,000 and 23,000 spectators for the title clash.

As happens so often in championship games, officiating became a major source of contention for the vanquished party. Harvard argued that one Yale touchdown was illegally scored, while a touchdown of their own was taken off the board erroneously by a referee who couldn’t keep time. Conveniently, the adjustments to the scoreline would have given Harvard their first national championship since 1875.

Instead, Yale walked away with a result far more satisfying than the unearned draws they were forced to suffer against Princeton in two of the previous three seasons. Retroactively, nobody questions Yale’s championship from this season even as Michigan, Minnesota, and California also finished with unblemished records.

Without any chance to test the quality of teams between different regions, nothing can truly be definitive about this period of college football history. The popularity contest we call national championships always skewed in favor of the sport’s biggest hotbed, where a team like Yale or Harvard could play a much larger schedule thanks to the proliferation of viable intercollegiate programs across the region.