Thus was evolved a regular game limited by rules which were the result of a curious combination of three different factors: the game informally played by “sides” chosen from athletically inclined students, the rough fights of the Freshman and Sophomore classes in the annual rush, and lastly the influence of the adapted rules of the English Rugby game.
THE CREW AT THEIR WINTER WORK.
In the fall of 1874 Yale issued a call to Princeton, Harvard, Columbia and Rutgers to form an Intercollegiate Football Association, but Harvard could not join, because her game was so radically different from that played at the other colleges. The Yale Record remarked: “Harvard said that her game was so strictly scientific as to prevent her from ever contending with other colleges whose games were so entirely devoid of skill.” If Harvard had consented to join the League, American football to-day would be a very different game, but she could not have retained her own rules as they were fundamentally different from those in use at the other four colleges, and they, naturally wishing to retain their own rules, could have out-voted her. By her action in refusing to join the League, and her superiority—principally shown in games against Canadian teams—she forced first Yale and then the other colleges to adopt the Harvard game. In 1875 the first Yale-Harvard game was played under the Rugby Union Rules, practically the same as those used at Cambridge; and in 1876 the Intercollegiate Football Association was formed between Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton. The game that Harvard introduced, Yale and Princeton have since developed.
HARVARD SHOOTING CLUB.
In 1875 Harvard defeated Yale by four goals and four touch-downs to nothing. The next year she suffered defeat from Yale by one goal to three touch-downs, and since that time the Cambridge team has won not a single Yale game, and only a few from Princeton. The season of 1884 was especially disastrous. In vain the college paper, the Crimson, published semiweekly exhortations to the players to play better football, and to the undergraduates to take more interest in the team. The make-up of the eleven was excessively weak, and both the players and the rest of the undergraduates seemed indifferent concerning its success, so that at the close of the season it was disgracefully beaten by Yale and Princeton, and was defeated even by Wesleyan and the University of Pennsylvania. The undergraduates felt little regret when the Athletic Committee, who had for a long time been opposed to the game on account of its brutality as then played, announced that they considered it “brutal and demoralizing,” and that thereafter Harvard was forbidden to engage in any Intercollegiate football games. For a year the rule was enforced, but in 1886 it was reconsidered and Harvard again took her place in the football arena.
THE CREW’S NEW LONDON QUARTERS.
That year’s rest was fortunate, for it served as a breathing spell in which the college could pause and reflect for a brief space, so as to discern just what the fault was that had sent Harvard to the rear in football, while she still retained her prominent position in other games. When in 1886 she was allowed to resume her old position in the League, she began work with a grim determination to recover her lost prestige. With comparatively untried material to work upon, Brooks, ’87, the new captain, produced an eleven which was second only to Princeton and Yale. The record of Captain Holden’s eleven in 1887, the defeat of Princeton, the game lost to Yale at the New York Polo Grounds, and the dissatisfaction and dispute over the result, are still too fresh in the memory to need repetition.