~ The Old Sachem ~ A History of Ivy League Football

By Bill Stewart

The first Ivy League team to play a college football game was Princeton – playing Rutgers in 1869, in which Princeton won 6-4. The league is made up of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale. Both the Heisman and the Outland trophies are named for early Ivy heroes. They created the All-America Team, had the first coaches, developed the basic rules and developed much of the equipment used, and they named the positions.

Attendances of Ivy League football games swelled to 80,000 in the forties and fifties, when the early teams were the football powerhouses. In 1973 Brown and Penn both started the first black quarterbacks in the college game. The first college fight songs were developed at Yale and were written by Cole Porter. The schools developed marching bands that gave fans the ability to share in the program.

The league started with long winning streaks and impressive victories, which started a national obsession in the early twentieth century as other colleges about America developed teams and saw to it that competition was a tribute to the colleges. However, college football was nearly abolished in the early years because of the violence, and President Theordore Roosevelt moved in to mediate disagreements over the rough play.

Gambling and ticket scalping were developed to satisfy the public, and payoffs and recruiting by schools were completed to gain a greater level. The league confronted these issues and helped develop the role of athletics in college life.

Early on, Cornell played Pennsylvania on Thanksgiving. Brown had an “iron man” team that played the whole game against Yale. Dartmouth played all games away against Harvard, Yale and Princeton because it was difficult to attract their followers up to New Hampshire.

The glory days are gone. Now Dartmouth’s home opener this year had 3,573 people in the stands. But in the early days the Ivy League teams played Notre Dame, Pennsylvania State and Michigan. In the early times the Ivy League teams acquired national championships, all except Brown. Columbia beat Stanford in the 1934 Rose Bowl; Yale claimed 27 national football championships; and Princeton had 28. Cornell won five national championships.

Ivy League teams competed in Division 1 from the early days until 1981 when the National Collegiate Athletic Association set rules on home attendance and seating capacity that some of the schools could not meet. They even considered adding two more teams to the league to raise the attendance, but eventually decided against this, and the league was lowered to Division 1AA, now named Division 1 Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). Although the FCS has a national tournament, the Ivy League does not compete in the playoffs. Instead, the team with the best record is the league champion and it ends at that level.

Their students are among the highest rated in the nation, but the Ivy League is happy being its own special football entity.

  (Editor’s Note: Bill Stewart, who is better known to Saugus Advocate readers as “The Old Sachem,” writes a weekly column – sometimes about sports. He also opines on current or historical events or famous people.)