An irreverent look back at the 1888 college football season

Guess who won yet another national championship? Looking at Yale as well as the rise of a future west coast college football powerhouse.

1888, like the year before it, was one of slow, steady growth. New programs dotted the national map, as students organized themselves to play this new game sweeping the country. Some would decide down the road that football was not something to which they wanted to commit vast resources. Others would evolve into the powerhouses that still dominate the sport at its top echelon.

Football continued its push west and its push south in this season, but the stars of the show remained those blueblood institutions in the northeast that first brought the sport onto campus. Yale was in the midst of another run of dominance, entering the new campaign with a 20-game winning streak to its name. By the end, that number grew ever larger.

The most important takeaway from this year, though, was not another Bulldogs national title in Walter Camp’s first season as the head coach of his alma mater. Rather, it was the resilience and staying power of football as it moved across the country.

Thinking in that vein of logic, let’s now turn and take an irreverent look back at all that took place during the 1888 college football season.

Future powerhouses continue to take up the sport in 1888

In April, Michigan came back to South Bend after teaching a team of students at Notre Dame how to play football the previous fall. Welcoming back the squad from Ann Arbor, Notre Dame continued a time-honored tradition at this point of intercollegiate football in the fall.

Michigan defeated the Golden Domers both times, though the margins of victory narrowed significantly between the first and second showdowns. After securing a relatively straightforward 26-6 victory on April 20, the Wolverines wet down to the wire the following day in a tense 10-4 win. Returning to the field in the fall, Notre Dame finally secured the first win in program history in a 20-0 shutout of Harvard Prep of Chicago in early December.

Meanwhile, another new program took root on the Pacific coast. Football had already reached California by 1888, but only as far south as the Bay Area. The game expanded its coverage of the state when Southern California formed its first squad this year. At the time USC was still in its infancy as an institution, its first buildings rising in Los Angeles only eight years prior. The students took up football and issued an intra-city challenge to Alliance Athletic Club.

Meeting on a vacant field by campus, USC took down their counterparts from Alliance 16-0 on November 14. Two months later, just into the new year on January 19, the teams met again on a different vacant lot in the city, with USC again getting the best of their athletic club opponents. This time, however, the collegians mustered only four points while maintaining a shutout.

Like many of the versions of football taking place around the country, what was played between USC and Alliance wasn’t quite rugby or soccer, nor was it aligned entirely with the intercollegiate sport being played at universities in the northeast.

Still, it was football in some form, and the Californians were hooked. And, unlike their future rivals in South Bend, then, Southern Cal had a much more promising launch to their program’s history. Regardless of whether they launched on a high note or a lower note, Notre Dame and USC nevertheless to the sport and inaugurated what would soon become two of the most storied schools in college football history.

Football proliferates in the Deep South this year

The intercollegiate game already made its first furtive inroads across the Mason-Dixon Line in the early 1870s when Washington and Lee first played VMI in a cross-town derby. A dozen years later, the University of Virginia tried to claim their game against Pantops Academy was the first interscholastic battle in the state. When 1888 arrived, Virginia suited up for their second season while it had been several years since Washington and Lee last played in a game against outside competition.

In either case, football was already starting to sink roots slowly southward. Another milestone occurred in 1888 when the sport reached North Carolina for the first time.

As part of that year’s North Carolina State Fair, students at UNC in Chapel Hill and at Wake Forest in Winston-Salem organized teams to play a game of football. Meeting on neutral turf in Raleigh as part of the fair festivities, the two schools played to a 6-4 Demon Deacons victory.

Given the inconsistent application of scoring conventions at this time and the dearth of details in the local press, it is not clear whether this was a game of soccer or rugby, but it is highly unlikely that the two teams played a low-scoring game modeled after the intercollegiate rules from the northeast. Whatever was played, though, it was obviously popular as both schools arranged further contests.

Wake Forest waited until spring to return to the field. North Carolina extended a challenge to Trinity College (the school we now know as Duke University) for late November. This is traditionally heralded as the first game to follow rules from the Intercollegiate Football Association, and the Tar Heels walked away 16-0 victors over their rivals.

Yale redefined what it meant to finish perfect in 1888

Just a year before, Yale ran the table to claim the consensus national championship. It was the sixth time the Bulldogs went undefeated and untied since the program’s inception in 1872. On six other occasions, Yale finished with only wins and ties. In their first 16 seasons of existence, the Bulldogs lost just five games total.

Still, since the adoption of a more modern scoring system earlier in the decade, no team had run through a schedule without a single blemish on the scoreboard. Princeton went undefeated, untied, and without allowing any points in their 1873 and 1874 seasons. Of course, the Tigers played just three games total over those two years and were still operating under an archaic  system where only goal kicks counted for points.

Yale set a new benchmark for excellence in 1888 as they stampeded unblemished through a 13-game campaign. The Bulldogs battled out one blowout after another, crushing all comers and allowing not one single point along the way to another national title.

Wesleyan fell thrice against the Bulldogs — first by 76-0 in September, then again 46-0 in October, and finally by a whopping 105-0 scoreline in November. Penn dropped 34-0 and 54-0 chances against Yale. Amherst also lost twice, falling on the short end of 39-0 and 70-0 scores.

Rutgers crumbled 65-0 in New Haven. Williams fell 30-0 at home against the Bulldogs. MIT collapsed 68-0, then Stevens Tech suffered a near-identical 69-0 drubbing three days later. A team of Yale alumni from Brooklyn’s Crescent Athletic Club came closest to defeating a younger cohort of Bulldogs stars, yet the Crescent crew still lost 28-0 in the end.

Princeton and Yale both entered their annual showdown undefeated and untied. The Tigers gave up six points against Harvard the weekend before their showdown against the Bulldogs, but otherwise Princeton also boasted a long string of shutout victories. The winner of the contest, once again, would be the national champion of the year.

In the closest contest of the year for both squads, Yale’s defense held firm. Princeton conceded only 10 points, but that proved 10 points too many on the final Saturday of November. A crowd reported as high as 20,000 in some reports witnessed another classic rivalry game between college football’s two superpowers of this era.

The Game that wasn’t played

Harvard and Yale were thus poised to play one another on Thanksgiving Day in New York. The Crimson, though, came up against a faculty unwilling to let their football team return to the city. While Harvard captain J.H. Sears tried to convince Yale to shift the game to one of their respective college campuses, even willing to turn their encounter into a true road game, his Yale counterpart William Corbin was intractable on the matter.

Increasingly frustrated, Sears eventually turned to goading his fellow captain. Lucky for us, these encounters were published in various newspapers such as the Boston Globe and the New York Times.

With no showdown against Harvard on the schedule in 1888, we didn’t quite get to see Yale tested by all of the top teams. The Crimson finished 12-1 that season, their only loss coming against Princeton 18-6 on the road in New Jersey. Had Harvard played and defeated — or even just tied — the Bulldogs, it would have thrown a major wrench in how we look back at this year.

Instead, Yale escaped the final challenge and walked away with the most perfect record yet rendered by any team in college football’s first two decades of existence.