An irreverent look back at the 1890 college football season

Harvard broke up the Yale/Princeton duopoly at the top of the sport in 1890, and college football continued to gain popularity in locales across the nation.

For the first time in college football history, neither Princeton nor Yale boasted any claim to the national championship when the dust settled on the 1890 season. Only a few other times in the first two decades of the sport’s existence did anyone even come close to challenging the supremacy of the Tigers and Bulldogs.

The first was in 1869, when Rutgers and Princeton split the first two college football games ever played and consequently split the title that year. The other was in 1875, when Harvard and Princeton both ran the table and Columbia received retroactive love for their 4-1-1 record.

Harvard doesn’t even claim 1875 among their national championship seasons. Instead, 1890 marked the campaign where the Crimson finally got over the hump and left no doubt about their place atop the college football hierarchy.

Blitzing through a season that opened with a blowout of Phillips Exeter Academy and included a pair of victories over both Dartmouth and Amherst, Harvard entered its final contest of the year with the title on the line. The Game against Yale, also undefeated at that point of the 1890 campaign, would settle the national championship.

Meeting at Hampden Park in Springfield, Massachusetts, the two teams proved formidable foes for one another. Eking out a 12-6 victory, Harvard wrapped up a perfect season and blemished Yale’s attempt at another unbeaten run of their own.

Yale went on to defeat Princeton on Thanksgiving Day at Eastern Park in Brooklyn (pictured at the top of the article), but it was not enough to lay claim to any share of the championship. For the first time ever, Harvard was indisputably the best team in the country. Five Crimson stars landed on Caspar Whitney’s All-America team, with Yale and Princeton each contributing a trio of players to a list heavily skewed toward the sport’s Big Three at the time.

Football, though, was growing up all over the United States. What began in 1890 and continued throughout the decade was the launch of one iconic team after another. After several Big Ten members started to pop online the previous season, the conference took further shape in 1890 with the rise of teams at Ohio State and Illinois. At the same time, the nucleus of the Big 8 started to form in the Great Plains with the birth of football at Missouri, Nebraska, Colorado, and Kansas.

Power hadn’t yet shifted from the northeastern part of the country to the lands of future powerhouses like the Buckeyes or the Cornhuskers. Foundations were being laid for this eventual shift, however, and 1890 launched college football into a new growth spurt.

The nucleus of the Big Ten grows in the Midwest

By 1890, all but one of the charter members of what developed into the Big Ten conference were playing football. The lone holdover from the founding seven, the University of Chicago, was still two years away from launching its football team. Outside of the northeast, the Midwest marked at this point the largest network of football-playing institutions anywhere in the country.

Illinois, one of those charter members, slogged through an inauspicious 1-2 season. Ohio State, which joined the league later in the decade several years after its 1896 formation, was even more abysmal. The Buckeyes finished 1-4 against a schedule against a murderer’s row of Ohio Wesleyan, the Dayton Booster Club, Wooster, Denison, and Kenyon.

Perhaps more significant even than the birth of future Big Ten programs was the inauguration of some of the rivalries that came to mark the league. Michigan and Purdue played the first game featuring future Big Ten squads against one another, meeting in Ann Arbor on November 1. The Boilermakers collapsed 34-6 against the hometown Wolverines.

Two weeks later, Minnesota and Wisconsin gave birth to their interstate rivalry in Minneapolis. Wisconsin, only in their second season of intercollegiate play, proved no match for their rivals.

The Golden Gophers were up 20-0 by halftime against the visitors from Madison. By the end of the game, Minnesota extended their lead to a 63-0 blowout of the Badgers. With their lopsided win in the budding rivalry, Minnesota was proclaimed the “champions of the Northwest” by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

After losing to Michigan, Purdue knocked off Illinois 62-0. Meanwhile, Wisconsin failed to recover from their beatdown in Minneapolis and fell 22-10 against Northwestern in another matchup of future Big Ten programs.

All told, football in the Midwest was starting to round more completely into form by 1890. The connections made between teams in 1890 served as the first stepping stones toward the formation of a full-fledged conference.

Pushing beyond the Midwest into the Great Plains

Another future epicenter of the sport started to blossom in this period, as teams emerged throughout the Great Plains states. These were the most modest of efforts, but the development of several future powerhouses is well worth noting here.

Nebraska, known at the time as the Old Gold Knights long before taking on the Cornhuskers moniker, went 2-0 against a team from the Omaha YMCA and from Doane College. It was hardly a brutal schedule, but it did secure the boys from Lincoln what amounted to a state championship.

Missouri went 2-1 in its first season of play, with two of those wins apparently coming against themselves. The lone loss was the single verifiable game against off-campus competition, as the Tigers fell 28-0 against Washington University in St. Louis.

Kansas fell 22-9 against Baker on November 22 in the first college football game played in the state. After losing to the Kansas City YMCA five days later on Thanksgiving, the Jayhawks finally secured the school’s first win in a rematch against Baker on December 8. Kansas fans would become quite familiar with one-win seasons over the years.

Similarly, it was a rough start for Colorado. The Silver and Gold from Boulder went 1-6 in their first season of play, the only win coming against Colorado Agricultural College (now Colorado State) in the first edition of what we now know as the Rocky Mountain Showdown. The team not yet known as the Buffaloes trounced their rivals 63-0 for the lone bright spot of an otherwise dismal campaign.

The importance of the 1890 season wasn’t evident in real time

When the country wasn’t focused on its own local football in 1890, the big storyline was the tripartite duel for the national championship taking place in the sport’s spiritual home. Harvard was the big story at the time, dominating on the scoreboard and in the individual honors.

While the Big Three in the northeast remained relevant into the early 20th century, however, they eventually ceded ground as the dominant force in the game. Of course Harvard had to finally break through in a year where so many other stories blossomed around the country.

The teams that were in position to pick up the torch and run with it throughout the 20th century started to come online in 1890. Over the next few years, even more of those powerhouse programs started to rise out of whole cloth to take their position on the gridiron. It was a trend that really started in 1889, and the snowball really started to avalanche down the mountain in an 1890 season that provided ample space for growth around the United States.