An irreverent look back at the 1892 college football season

College Football exploded throughout the south in 1892. Conferences we know to this day started to coalesce. Yet attention still focused elsewhere.

After several years of rapid growth at the beginning of the 1890s, the 1892 season was the first where the college football map would look fairly familiar to fans of the modern sport. Programs popped up throughout the future SEC, and prototypes of conference affiliations that remain in existence today started to form in the Midwest and on the Great Plains.

Of course, the bulk of the attention doled out by sportswriters and the general public still centered on the northeastern bloc led by Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. The Bulldogs claimed a second straight national title as they extended not just their winning streak but also a shutout streak to 27 games.

Nobody had a chance against Yale in 1892. Walter Camp’s squad averaged 33 points per game while holding all 13 of their opponents scoreless. The Bulldogs left no question about who was the best program among the top tier of college teams.

Harvard came closest to beating the Elis, holding them scoreless in the first half at Hampden Park in Springfield, Massachusetts before conceding a late score to the Bulldogs.

With power concentrated in the northeast, the All-America selections for the year all came from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Penn. Notable among the selections was Harvard center William H. Lewis, who became the first African-American player to receive All-America honors.

Meanwhile, football was being played more than ever before at locales across the United States. College football’s modern spiritual epicenter in the Deep South blossomed as teams came online in Alabama and Georgia. Antecedents of the Big Ten and the Big 12 started to emerge in the Midwest and on the Great Plains. The first night game took place well off the beaten path.

Enough of the big guys along the Atlantic seaboard. Let’s dive into some of college football’s other stories from across the sport as it was played in 1892.

A surge of football schools emerge throughout the Deep South

For fans of college football in the 21st century, the sport feels like it was conceived for SEC country. Nowhere produces quite as deep a pool of prospective talent at the high-school ranks. No other league comes close to graduating its college talent on to the NFL — in the 2019 NFL Draft, the SEC set a new benchmark with 64 players selected.

A century before the SEC inaugurated the concept of the conference championship game, its powerhouse programs were just coming to life. By 1892, the SEC’s original three Tennessee schools (Tennessee, Sewanee, and Vanderbilt) were all playing football. So too was the University f Kentucky, whose history dates back to 1881.

With the addition of football in Alabama and Georgia in 1892, eight of the 13 charter members that formed the SEC in 1932 were playing football.

The Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry between Auburn and Georgia launched early in the year, as the two teams met in Atlanta on February 20. The lads of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama took down their counterparts from Athens 10-0 on neutral turf to claim the first bragging rights in the long-standing feud.

That game concluded Georgia’s season, as the Bulldogs proved incapable of replicating the magic of their inaugural win over Mercer. Football returned in the fall to the Yellowhammer State, though. Auburn traveled back to Atlanta for a trio of November games against Trinity College (now Duke), North Carolina, and Georgia Tech.

The last of that trio is memorable as another future SEC charter member that started its football history in 1892. Before they made the shift to help form the ACC, Georgia Tech came online with a trio of losses to Mercer, Vanderbilt, and the finale against Auburn. Playing at several sites in Macon and Atlanta, the team soon to be known as the Yellow Jackets got its fans used to losing both home and away from an early date.

Last but not least among the quartet of new southern programs in 1892 was the University of Alabama. They played the first college football games actually hosted in the state, given Auburn’s propensity for crossing the border to Atlanta.

It was hardly the most auspicious of beginnings for one of college football’s most dominant forces of the 21st century. Alabama played all of its games in November and December at Lakeview Park in Birmingham. The first contest in program history was a 56-0 whitewashing of Birmingham High School, and a history of SEC teams playing cupcake opponents was born. They also split a pair of contests against Birmingham Athletic Club.

It wasn’t until the following spring that Alabama finally played another institution of higher learning when the Iron Bowl took place for the first time. With two new rivalry games, things in the Deep South would never be quite the same.

New conferences emerge throughout new hotbeds in 1892

In the south, the rising popularity of college football invited the creation of a new conference. At the end of the 1892 season, the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association was formed out of a meeting that included North Carolina, Wake Forest, Virginia, St. John’s College in Maryland, Johns Hopkins, Tennessee, Sewanee and Alabama.

Eventually coming online in 1894, the league in its original form eventually came to include Auburn, Texas, and a slew of other teams from across a wide geographic swath of the southeastern United States. Over the years other iterations would replace the SIAA, including the Southern Conference in 1921, the SEC in 1932, and the ACC in 1953.

That was hardly the only locale starting to find value in associating in conferences. In what still constituted the “northwest” part of the country in the popular imagination, four Midwestern teams banded together to form a loop prior to the 1892 season.

Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Northwestern banded together and scheduled games against one another as part of their 1892 campaigns. Minnesota came out on top, as the Golden Gophers finished a perfect 5-0 on the year. Michigan fell 14-6 on the road in Minneapolis on October 17. After toppling Grinnell, Minnesota obliterated rival Wisconsin in a 32-4 walkover. The Gophers concluded their campaign as Northwest champions with a 16-12 victory at Northwestern in Evanston.

Future Big Ten member Iowa, meanwhile, decided to pivot toward the Great Plains instead of the Midwest in terms of their conference affiliations. Joining forces with Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska, the Jayhawks came out on top of the four-team loop.

It wasn’t immediately the most successful league, but the Western College Football Association hung on for six years before dissolving in 1898.

A quick word about the first night game ever attempted

One of the great traditions in college football are night games under the lights. Whether it is a White Out at Beaver Stadium in State College or the atmosphere of a place like Death Valley at night, electricity amplifies the drama of every contest.

We can thank Mansfield Normal School in Pennsylvania for setting the trend. Now Mansfield University, a Division II program whose football team was shuttered for a few years early in the 21st century, the school started playing football the season before. Hoping to capitalize on the crowd already congregated at the Elmira State Fair, Mansfield issued a challenge to Wyoming Seminary — another small Pennsylvania school 75 miles to the southeast — to play a novel game underneath electric lights.

Eventually Wyoming came around and accepted the challenge. The game, arranged for September 28, served as a vanguard for a trend that would take many years to really take root.

The two teams had little success actually playing under the inadequate illumination. Getting off just 10 plays in the course of 20 minutes, the two teams struggled to do anything of substance. Especially challenging was the need to navigate around a pole in the center of the field on which some of the lights were affixed.

Fog and weak lighting forced referee Dwight Smith to call the game and declare a 0-0 draw. Lights wouldn’t become a staple of stadiums until the 20th century, but Mansfield and Wyoming can always boast their place as trendsetters in college football history.

That was the ingenuity and innovation that marked the sport in the final decade of the 19th century. Teams formed and teams issued challenges. Rivalries were born and conferences were erected. All the while, Yale continued to dominate the public consciousness even as new locales started to fall in love with teams of their own.