![]() While the schools each pocketed $340.42 for their 1880 game, that number soared to over $14,000 by 1891.įans from around the country filled Fifth Avenue’s swankiest hotels, and shop owners courting business in the weeks leading up to the Thanksgiving game placed photographs and colors of the teams in their storefront windows.ĭecades before Macy’s dispatched balloons and marching bands through the city streets on Thanksgiving morning, Princeton and Yale fans staged their own parade as they proceeded uptown to the Polo Grounds. With their new venue, Princeton and Yale demonstrated that, although an amateur enterprise, college football had become a big business. ![]() That game in the newly opened Polo Grounds was played before 40,000 fans, including thousands who watched from a distance atop the rocky crags of Manhattan’s Washington Heights. The following year, Yale shut out Princeton, 19-0, in a pelting rain to complete a perfect season in which it outscored opponents, 488-0. By 1890, 45 former Yale players and 35 former Princeton players were football coaches around the country.Īt the dawn of the new decade, Yale started a 37-game winning streak (which included 36 shutouts) with a 32-0 blanking of Princeton at Brooklyn’s Eastern Park in 1890. Yale Wins 37 Straight Football Games in 1890sīy the close of the 1880s, football teams had sprouted on college campuses from coast to coast, and veterans of the Princeton-Yale game, such as Walter Camp and Amos Alonzo Stagg, were instrumental in its spread. Led by All-America quarterback Edgar Allan Poe, whose father was a cousin of the famed writer, Princeton capped an undefeated season with a 10-0 victory. Vanderbilt was among those enjoying a sideline view at the 1889 game at the Berkley Oval in the Bronx. Sitting in his coach drinking champagne from a goblet, millionaire William K. Ticketholders in stagecoaches and carriages parked next to the football field to enjoy the ultimate tailgating experience. Yale’s female fans wore violets, while their counterparts from Princeton donned yellow chrysanthemums and orange and black rosettes Fans tied handkerchiefs with their team’s colors to umbrella handles and walking sticks and decorated hats and lapels with colored ribbons. Like the fall foliage, the stands were ablaze in color with Princeton’s supporters decked in orange and black and Yale’s backers in blue. Oddsmakers exchanged betting slips for cash from fans, who gambled on the outcomes of games. Profiteers resold $1 tickets for five bucks. Outside venues, vendors hawked pennants and flags. While football in the 1880s was a brutal game of mass tackles and flying wedges between players wearing nothing thicker than skull caps on their heads, the fan experience wasn’t far different than it is today. Ten thousand fans watched the 1881 game, and attendance surged throughout the decade.īy the mid-1880s, the Princeton-Yale showdown had become a major social event in New York City, and an annual game between Wesleyan and Pennsylvania was added as a side dish to the main course. When the Thanksgiving game between Princeton and Yale shifted across the Hudson River to Manhattan’s’ Polo Grounds in 1880, crowds swelled from hundreds to thousands. Vanderbilt sipped champagne while watching the 1889 Yale-Princeton game. READ MORE: How the NFL Popularized Thanksgiving Day Football Princeton-Yale Becomes a New York Tradition In the 1880s and 1890s, their Thanksgiving confrontations became the biggest events on the college football calendar. The league standardized rules and set schedules that included an annual Thanksgiving game in New York between the teams with the best records from the previous season.Įxcept for Harvard in 18, those teams were Princeton and Yale. In 1873, as college campuses in the Northeast incubated the sport, students from Princeton, Yale, Harvard and Columbia formed the Intercollegiate Football Association. ![]() Less than five years later, as college football's popularity surged, the rivalry had become a major event on the social calendar, with thousands of fans filling stands. Seven years after battling Rutgers in what is considered the first college football game, Princeton met Yale on November 30, 1876, in the first college game played on Thanksgiving. Fewer than 1,000 fans-mostly alumni and students-watched Yale win, 2-0, in Hoboken, New Jersey, in a game that resembled rugby. ![]()
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