What was the first championship game in American football history?

And can you imagine that this game that the father of American football, Walter Camp, would miss the game to go and officiate a JV game down the road?

Well, we have this and more coming up from our guest today, Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology, as we investigate the championship game of football and its origin coming up right after this.

Check it out.

Pigskin Dispatch video.

Yeah.

Woohoo.

Foreign.

You know, we just recently finished up our, our traditional football seasons where we end with championship games at the college of football, college football, the NFL and high school levels.

Well, when was the first championship game?

Well, we have the guy that has the answer visiting us today, Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology.

Welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey there, good to see you once again.

And I was going to make a Campy joke here, but I, I've opted not to because Walter Camp, you know,

it went right over my head there for.

So yeah, you had to explain it to me for me.

Yeah, that's generally the mark of a bad joke.

You know, when.

Or bad audience.

One of the bad audience in this case, not the, the outside audience, but the one that can hear.

Yeah, right over his head.

What can you tell us about this, Tim?

Yeah, so it's, in some ways it, you know, championship didn't mean the same thing back then.

So I'll, and I'll explain that in a minute.

And you know, I mean you could say it's the, it was the national championship game because, you know, Yale won the game and you know, they ended up, they were the national champs, you know, retroactively because they were, you know, the, their league, which at the time just included Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia.

They were the, they were the premier football teams in the, in the world.

There were probably only maybe there were 20 teams playing football back then, you know, if that.

So, so they were the national, you know, whoever won this game, you know, were the national championship.

But the odd thing about it was that, and this carried on for a while but like in, in their, like August or I think it was May.

May meeting of the ifa, the Inter Intercollegiate Football association, they decided that whoever, whichever teams tied for first and second in the league or in the association the year before, they would play for the, they would play the championship game on Thanksgiving Day in New York City.

It seems a little bit strange, but at the time, it made sense at the time because, you know, it.

They just didn't live in a world where you could, you know, so the idea of postseason play would have made no sense to them for, you know, for college football.

And, you know, the game was supposed to be this big spectacle in New York City, and so people needed to make plans.

And so you couldn't like just have, you couldn't like finish the season the week before and then put the two teams out there, you know, and expect to have a good crowd in New York City, you know, and all the alums could get, you know, you just couldn't do that stuff back then.

No.

Yeah.

Okay, so if it was.

Different rosters.

Okay, that's a good point.

I hadn't, didn't mention that in the tidbit.

So, you know, but.

So that's kind of, it's kind of a weird setup.

But it became, it became this massive social event.

You know, the, the game in New York City on Thanksgiving Day was a big deal, you know, and whoever was playing and tip, you know, as it turned out most years, the two best teams the previous year were the two best teams the next year, and it was Yale and Princeton.

You know, I mean, for the, for about a 25 year period.

Yeah, you know, Harvard butted in there every once in a while, but pretty much it was yelling Princeton.

So, you know, they ended up playing all the time.

And it said, you know, helmets must, you know, protective headgear must be worn in all championship games.

I was like, okay, well that means they don't have to wear it during the regular season.

Well, no, what they meant was any game that counts towards the championship is, you know, they had to wear it because NFL teams back then they play all these exhibition games and they play somebody midweek or on the road back from, you know, New York or something.

And so championship sometimes met league.

It equated to league game.

So what we would call today meaningful games.

Yeah, well, I think it's, I think it's more that it's a league game, you know, that it counted in the standings.

Okay, okay.

So you know, at the, going into this Thanksgiving Day game, Columbia's own three Yellen, Princeton are both 1 and 1 and Yale's 2 0.

So if Yale wins, boom, they're 3 0.

And then, but if, if, if Princeton beat them, then Harvard, Yale and Princeton would all be 2 and 1, right?

So they tie for the championship.

So it was just one of those games where it's like, you know, it, there was a lot of snow the day before, so they had to hire all these guys to come in and dig the place out.

And I, I don't know what it was like, you know, you know, they didn't have snow wars, you know, so that they talk about pickaxe use pickaxes and all kinds of stuff.

So I'm sure the field was in really fine condition the next day.

But in the game itself, it turns out that, you know, both teams kick a goal because this, and actually that's the other thing.

1882 was the last year that football was played without a points based system.

You know, the only way to score was to kick a goal.

Touchdowns didn't count for anything.

There were no safeties yet, or at least not those didn't count as a score.

So anyways, both teams kicked a goal in the first half, so it's one to one.

And then in the second half, one of the all time great things happens.

A guy named Tom Tompkins for Yale carries the ball over the goal line.

And back then you had to touch the ball to the ground, you had to touch down, you had to touch it down, which is why it's called a touchdown, right?

And so they had this thing called a mall in.

So if you were, you know, the other team could keep you from touching it down, they could hold you up and try to push you back out of the end zone, in which case you wouldn't have scored.

And so anyways, they had a mall and that went for about like 10 minutes.

Fans were coming out of the stands and getting involved in it.

And eventually to is, you know, is able to get down to the ground, touch the ball down, and then a guy named Richards kicks the goal.

So Yale ends up winning two to one.

But now I mentioned at the beginning about the whole Campy thing.

I haven't mentioned camp since then, have I?

No, no.

You've been very silent on him.

Yes.

Turns out he wasn't there.

So he's.

But, like.

And I didn't look at early season, but he didn't play in the last couple of games, and he was not there.

And in fact, he was refereeing the Harvard, Yale freshman game up in Cambridge at the same time this game was going on.

So anyways, seems like kind of a strange thing to have the championship game.

Yeah.

And then you got the freshman game going, but that was Harvard, Yale.

It wasn't Yale, Princeton, which was a championship game.

So anyways, so Walter wasn't there.

He missed it.

He missed a good one.

And Yale still won, so.

Without one of their better players.

Yeah.

Interesting.

I did.

I didn't realize that.

That is kind of strange.

You know, that's.

That's a.

The big game of the year, and he's one of the, you know, the premier players for Yale at that time.

And he goes to officiate a freshman game.

Yeah, you know, maybe, you know, like he was in med school by then, so who knows?

I don't know.

I thought you're gonna tell me you got called the.

The clock factory.

He had to wind a watch or something.

No, he wasn't working for them yet.

He wasn't.

He wasn't.

Oh, okay.

Didn't do the time.

He wasn't doing his time yet.

That's a whole nother one with.

Yeah, that was another episode we did before that.

You did before with him.

Him being caught in a slammer and everything else.

But that's a good one, though, folks.

You want to check that one out, too?

That's a good one.

But, Tim, you.

You have these great stories of yesteryear in the game of football, the game we love.

And you explain so much and, you know, you enlighten us on things like Walter camp not being at the big game like you did today.

And you do you do this in your tidbits and maybe you could share with folks where they can catch on to some of these tidbits.

Sure, yeah.

Just go to footballarchaeology.com it's substack site, and you can subscribe, in which case you'll get an email.

Every time I publish a story, you can follow on the, on the substack app, which just means it kind of, it's like it'll come into your little inbox and otherwise bookmark it or just, you know, check it out whenever you want to.

So if you're looking for some little factoid on football history there, there's, you know, maybe less so if it's NFL, you know, but especially college football, you know, I've covered a lot of territory.

So use a search function, see if you can find what you're looking for.

All right, Tim.

Well, we appreciate you writing all this and, you know, preserving this football history, and we appreciate you joining us here today, and we'd love to talk to you again next week.

Very good.

Look forward to it.

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