An irreverent look back at the 1889 college football season

As college football ended its second decade in 1889, it started to look like a national sport. Was that actually true? Let’s take an irreverent look back.

For the first two decades of college football’s existence — in one form or another, whether soccer, rugby, or the increasingly Americanized version of the game — two teams defined the upper limits of the sport. Princeton dominated the field over the sport’s first decade, then Yale took up the mantle in a perennial duel with their ivied counterparts. That discourse didn’t necessarily change in 1889 as college football entered its 20th season of play.

The game expanded in fits and spurts, but in 1889 football’s spiritual epicenter remained the northern Atlantic seaboard where it first took shape. This is where the rules of the game were shaped by men like Yale player and coach Walter Camp. This is where conferences first came into existence. This is where the national championship lived.

Princeton did end Yale’s 48-game unbeaten streak and 37-game winning streak on Thanksgiving Day 1889 in the final game of the season for both teams. The Tigers claimed the national title for themselves with a 10-0 shutout victory over the Bulldogs at the Berkley Oval in New York that was the centerpiece of a perfect 10-0 season.

It was the culmination of a campaign that began with back-to-back wins over Lehigh home and away in early October and continued into November with successively larger blowouts of Stevens Tech, Penn, Wesleyan, and Columbia. Harvard fell 41-15 in Cambridge, only one of two losses the Crimson sustained in 1889.

A warm-up takedown of the Orange Athletic Club allowed Princeton to come into their rivalry against Yale with even more momentum, and after killing the Bulldogs winning streak the Tigers went on to finish undefeated on the last day of November by taking down Columbia Athletic Club in Washington, DC.

While this remained football’s focal point as the nation neared the 1890s, it was also a season where the sports future epicenters started to gestate. Football exploded throughout the Midwest, pushed southward down the Atlantic seaboard into the Deep South, and even started to generate more buzz along the Pacific coast as well.

Let’s look at some of these emerging storylines in today’s irreverent look back at college football history.

The proliferation of the future Big Ten Conference

Spoiler alert!

The balance of power in college football remains in the northeastern reaches of the United States for the next decade. What 1889 marks, however, is the first foundations of a Midwestern football network that would soon grow within seven years into a full-blown conference.

Michigan was already playing football for several years at this point, though how well they did so still remains in question. The 1889 Wolverines team flamed out to a 1-2 record, suffering big shutout losses against Cornell and the Chicago University Club after opening their November slate with a 33-4 defeat of Albion.

The game against the Big Red was particularly ugly, as Cornell trampled the Wolverines 66-0 on neutral turf before a crowd of several thousand spectators at Olympic Park in Buffalo, New York.

Michigan had already established itself as a football school, though. Far more interesting was the growing popularity of the sport on other campuses that would join the Big Ten in 1896. Several teams that would form the new conference kick-started their football programs in 1889.

Purdue, whose president James H. Smart called the 1895 meeting that launched the country’s oldest conference still in existence, launched its program with a 48-6 loss to Butler at Athletic Park in Indianapolis in October. Iowa fell on the road in a 24-0 shutout to Iowa College (now Grinnell College) in November. Wisconsin came online with a pair of defeats against the Calumet Club in Milwaukee and against Beloit College.

Other schools had already established programs but really started to make noise in the sport. Northwestern was playing on and off as early as 1876, and by 1889 they were playing four games a season. Minnesota’s team launched in 1882 and also played four games in 1889, two against alumni and two against Shattuck Academy.

Indiana also took to the field for their third season of play, drawing against DePauw and falling to Wabash. That constituted the bulk of the Big Ten membership by the turn of the century, with only charter members Illinois and Chicago without teams by 1889. (Their teams came online in the next few seasons, Illinois in 1890 and Chicago in 1892.)

Power wasn’t about to shift just yet away from the northeast, but the groundwork was being laid in 1889 for a Midwestern takeover of the sport.

Other locales rising around the country in 1889

Football continued to find an interested public by the end of the 1880s, and it also started to make its way up the Pacific coast. The Golden Bears, though, saw their entire season washed out by heavy rains in the Bay Area. That left only USC to hold the mantle for the Golden State, and the Methodists responded with wins over St. Vincent’s (now Loyola Marymount) and Pasadena College.

The University of Washington launched their football team up in the Pacific Northwest in 1889, holding one contest against a group of alumni from Eastern College. The Huskies stumbled their way to a 20-0 loss before about 400 spectators in Seattle.

It wasn’t much, but it was definitely another step toward the eventual formation of the Pacific Coast Conference and its successors.

In the same fashion, football continued to sink deeper roots toward the Deep South. Virginia continued to pace the growth, as the Tidewater region encompassing Washington, DC and Maryland also saw the sport proliferate. Delaware also started its football team this season, as the Blue Hens played a trio of athletic clubs from Wilmington and Dover.

Trinity College (now Duke University), North Carolina, and Wake Forest continued the rivalry series against one another started the previous season. Even more significantly, Furman and Wofford launched football in South Carolina with a home-and-home series in Spartansburg and Greenville. While Georgia and Auburn want to claim their duel as the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry, that distinction really belongs to the Terriers and the Paladins.

Caspar Whitney names the first All-America Team in 1889

While all this great football was starting to take place around the country in 1889, another feature of the college game also launched that season. Caspar Whitney, the longtime football writer who worked for Harper’s Magazine and later Outing, named his top 11 of the season in a time when there was no separate platoon for offense and defense.

Despite all the football being played around the country, it should come as no surprise that only three teams landed players on Whitney’s first list. Princeton led the way with five players, including Knowlton “Snake” Ames who scored 730 points over his four-year college career in New Jersey. Yale and Harvard each landed three on the list, with notable names from Yale like Pudge Hefffelfinger and Amos Alonso Stagg and Harvard men like future Rough Rider Roscoe Channing.

It was at once another modernization of the sport and acknowledgement that the sport’s upper echelon remained triangulated between the towns of Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton.

Football was growing, but Whitney and most other sportswriters of the time were well aware that the head start enjoyed by teams in the northeast led to an elevated quality of play in the region that simply couldn’t be matched. All they had to do was point to results like Michigan-Cornell as their evidence to support the claim. They needed to enjoy the sense of superiority as long as