1-0
Ever see a football game with a final score like this?
1-0
You probably don’t know anything about the 1880 college football season.
It’s not surprising. The sport wasn’t very well advertised in those days. In fact, articles like this one about Walter Camp’s innovations didn’t come out until well over a month after the changes were made:
I should note that the phrase “a down given to the opposite side” in reference to penalties meant that the ball would be given over to the other team. This is because the concept of “downs” as we currently understand it had not yet been invented.
On the other side of the country, this article coincided with the big Harvard-Yale game. This contest actually went relatively unnoticed in the newspapers of the time. The only thing I could find even mentioning that a game was taking place was this very short article:
This game was held in Boston at what Wikipedia calls “Boston Baseball Grounds.” I’m pretty sure that refers to South End Grounds, where the Boston Braves played until 1914.
Though it didn’t offer much of a build up for the big game, The Boston Globe did report on the game on the first page:
It was a classic, a rain soaked affair between 3-0 Yale, who had not allowed a single point all season, and 3-1-1 Harvard, who had lost to Princeton at the Polo Grounds just the week before.
The phrases about “the first three quarters” and “the last three quarters” might refer to the 45 minute intervals that the first and second halves were played in.
The only point that counted appears to have been Camp’s drop kick through the goalposts. It’s not clear from this account, and I haven’t been able to find any other newspaper coverage of this game, but it seems that there was no kick after the final touchdown was scored for Yale.
That’s why the final score wound up being 1-0.