The Greatest Days in College Football History: Thanksgiving 1896 Gave Us A Modern Game

Scandal, questions of amateurism, a disputed national championship and a conference championship decided on end-of-season tumult: The preceding could describe most any college football campaign of modern times.

But, in this context, it describes the final full day of the 1896 college football season.

This edition of Greatest Days throws it back to a time when, on the gridiron, one only could throw back. The forward pass was not yet universally legal until a decade later.

We rewind to Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 26, 1896, just a few weeks after William McKinley beat William Jennings Bryan in a presidential election that, for Bryan, began a run of futility that makes Oklahoma’s College Football Playoff misfires pale in comparison.

Football settled on universal rules in the decade prior thanks to Walter Camp, evolving from a game that varied between a hybrid of rugby and soccer depending on which campus it was played in the 1870s. Still, the game near the turn of the 20th Century was vastly different from today in terms of elements like scoring.

1896 was the penultimate year in which field goals were worth more (five points) than touchdowns (four points), for example, though a touchdown and kick after was the greatest value at six points. There’s plenty more which could make for its own separate entry, but I’ll leave it to this notation on scoring for this entry since it plays a direct part in the retrospective.

To that end, I originally intended to avoid the years pre-World War I upon conceiving this series or two reasons: First, I am working on a project that covers the sport’s early years and didn’t want to run the risk of redundancy; and, second, football then was so different in how it was played that it hardly resembles the game played even by the 1920s when passing became more en vogue and helmets — crude as they were then — became standard (though not mandated until the 1930s).

However, the 1896 season offers enough intrigue on its own that it, in some ways, shaped college football as we know it and love it today. Some of the more controversial moments even mirrored the modern sport in an uncanny fashion.

One of my favorite books on the sport is Big Ten Network host Dave Revsine’s The Opening Kickoff, which covers the earliest years of the conference and contrasts public concerns about college football at the turn of the 20th Century with similar issues that resonate today.

Independent of The Opening Kickoff providing inspiration for this particular newsletter, it’s an informative, fun and easy read I highly recommend adding to your summer list.

With that, let’s dive into Thanksgiving Day 1896.