Football History Rewind Part 58

The 1926 College Football season had many a team that had claims to the national title but one game in particular set the record straight in the minds of many experts.

Football hits the national airwaves

The 1926 season would change the way football was brought to the people around the country. Up till then football was either watched live in person or people read about it in the daily fish wrap the next day. There had been some infrequent experiments on a local level of radio stations broadcasting a game. The first was done in 1912 but was not heard by many as radio was not mainstream yet. Remember the first commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, did not hit the airwaves till November 2, 1920. KDKA did their first football broadcast in 1922 as Pittsburgh played West Virginia in a game billed as “the Backyard Brawl.”

The local radio broadcasts of games were infrequent across the country but the Rose Bowl Game played at the end of the 1926 season expanded the ways the people could get their football fix. NBC went out on a limb and broadcast the game using the voice of Graham McNamee to call this game that pitted Alabama against Stanford. The National Broadcasting Company picked the right game to start with as it provided more drama to listeners than any show they could have found to air. The final score was 7-7 as Alabama tainted Stanford’s perfect season. This result crowned co-champions for the nation’s top spot in college football in the Crimson Tide and the Cardinal.

Please look back soon for the next edition of this series when we will examine some rule changes incorporated in 

The banner photo is Courtesy Wikimedia Commons of Birdseye view of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena during a football game circa 1926 via the USC Digital Library

A Very Special thanks to information obtained from the following brilliant internet sites: On This Day Sports, the Sports Reference's family of website databases & Stathead.com