Who started Thanksgiving football? How Princeton and Yale changed the holiday forever
Editor’s note: Throughout the month of November, we remember some of the best NFL , college football and sports culture occasions around the Thanksgiving holiday in Thanksgiving Sports Moments .
Are college football players still amateurs? Is excessive attention being lavished on students playing a mere game? Is too much money lining the pockets of the organizers and athletic leaders staging these contests — not to mention the media covering it?
These were the questions asked after the biggest game of the season. It was Thanksgiving Day 1891. College football was 22 years old.
Yale beat Princeton 19-0 in the championship game in front of 40,000 people at the Polo Grounds in New York City. Fifteen years after the football powers’ first Thanksgiving clash across the Hudson River in Hoboken, N.J., some observers couldn’t help but wonder to The Evening World whether the Thanksgiving game had become both an overly commercialized stain on a wholesome holiday and a troubling step too far for college sports.
“They said that the time was when college athletes were content with victory and thought less of dollars; when they were willing to contest for supremacy for glory alone, and did not stipulate that the meeting should be in a city of 3,000,000 inhabitants, where 50,000 or more persons could witness the game by paying for it. They deprecated very much the commercial character which college athletics have assumed of recent years.”
But the naysayers were largely overshadowed by the enthusiastic throngs that took over the city and turned football into the centerpiece of Thanksgiving, from college students spending their holiday reveling in Manhattan to the highest of high society parading to their reserved parking spots in carriages and paying a premium for the best seats.
Long before the Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys became synonymous with Thanksgiving, college football’s pre-eminent teams at Princeton and Yale (and sometimes Harvard) emerged as the toast of New York, staging end-of-season championship games that captured the imagination of newspaper readers around the country and upended holiday traditions, accelerating the growth of football in America in the process.
College football was born on Nov. 6, 1869 , when 25 men from Princeton met 25 men from Rutgers in a rough game that looked more like soccer than the American football we know today. But college football as a spectacle was born seven years later when Princeton and Yale, playing a modified game of rugby, met on Thanksgiving Day 1876 in Hoboken and launched an American holiday tradition.
Nobody could have imagined the far-reaching implications at the time.
“A game of foot-ball will be played between the Yale and Princeton Clubs at the St. George’s Grounds, Hoboken, to-day,” wrote The New York Times on Page 8 in the New Jersey section of “City and Suburban News.”
“A fine game is anticipated. The play will begin at 2 o’clock.”
About 1,000 people watched Princeton win two goals to zero — six years before a points system was instituted for scoring.
By 1880, Princeton and Yale moved their budding rivalry to New York City for the first time. A snowstorm couldn’t dampen the enthusiasm of 4,000 spectators who assembled to witness a scoreless tie, even though “there could hardly have been a worse day for a football game.”
New York’s daily newspapers were in an increasingly competitive battle for readership in the rapidly growing city. They soon recognized an insatiable interest in football, which could sustain expanded sports sections in the fall after baseball season ended. Some began going all in on college football coverage, particularly the Thanksgiving game, which proved over the 1880s to have mass appeal stretching beyond the students and alumni of the schools. Everyone picked a side, proudly displaying the colors of their favored team even if they had no personal connection.
It became a premier fall social event in New York, while also piquing the interest of newspaper readers regardless of social status.
In 1883, 6,000 fans turned out to watch Yale top Harvard for the championship. In 1884, “many wounds, much bad temper and intense excitement” were the themes as Yale and Princeton played a scoreless draw in front of 15,000. In 1887, The Evening World devoted nearly half of the front page of a Thanksgiving extra edition to Yale’s 17-8 win against Harvard, coverage that included everything from a play-by-play recounting of the game to a lengthy list of names of prominent spectators.
By 1889, 30,000 people packed into the Berkeley Oval for Princeton’s 10-0 win against Yale.
“If there has existed a doubt of the popularity of football as a college sport or of the general interest it arouses in the public mind,” wrote The New York Times, which had moved coverage to its front page, “that doubt must disappear in the face of yesterday’s proceedings.”
Debates about the merits of football played by college students are as old as the sport itself. The first wave reached its boiling point in the 1890s amid rapid expansion of the sport across the country and increased recognition of the violent toll the nascent game could take on its athletes in the era before the legalization of the forward pass.
Nowhere were the perceived excesses of football on display more than in the Thanksgiving games in New York, from the brutality of the sport between bitter rivals on the field to the revelry before and after the games from players and students who took advantage of their freedom away from campus to the substantial financial impact as ticket sales soared. In 1891, an estimated $50,000 in revenue was split among the Manhattan Athletic Club, which staged the game, and the Princeton and Yale football associations.
Thanksgiving football in New York reached its peak Nov. 30, 1893, when Princeton ended Yale’s 37-game winning streak at Manhattan Field.
“It was ideal and historic football which was played at Manhattan Field yesterday afternoon,” wrote The New York Times. “Ideal as far as the game, the weather and the spectacular effects of the contest; historic, inasmuch as the victors broke the traditions of Yale’s invincibility and avenged Princeton’s series of past defeats in a manner that was as thorough as it was unexpected.”
By this point, newspapers like the New York World devoted pages of coverage to the event in all facets, from the results on the field to the luminaries in attendance to the celebrations in the streets and theaters at night. On its front page, it published a list of people who were arrested in the aftermath of Princeton’s 6-0 win alongside detailed accounts of what happened on the field, via both writers and artists . It even published full play-by-play charts of the action . The New York Times also gave front-page space to the arrested, listing the employers of those who spent the night in jail. The Times went on to detail various scenes of drunken incidents from Princeton and Yale students and fans and how the police responded.
“Some of the Princeton boys found yellow lamp shades and used them in a most ridiculous fashion,” wrote the Times. “They wore them in their hats, and several of them wore them into the West Thirtieth Street Station.”
As the schools tried to get a handle on the excesses of college football, the Thanksgiving game was an easy target to take back some measure of control. First, Princeton and Yale moved their New York clash to the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 1894. By 1897, the party was over: The rivalry moved back to the Connecticut and New Jersey campuses.
But by then, Thanksgiving football had already spread to those in other areas of the country wishing to duplicate the spectacle and put their teams on the map. Players from Yale and Princeton fanned out across the country to spread the gospel of the sport to football-hungry programs south and west seeking to learn the game from those who knew it best. Thanksgiving traditions followed. Amos Alonzo Stagg learned football from Walter Camp at Yale and was hired to coach football and generate publicity for the new University of Chicago. The Maroons hosted Michigan on Thanksgiving in 1893.
By the time Yale and Princeton played their final Thanksgiving game that year, it was too late for the critics to get their wish. College football was taking over the country, and football on Thanksgiving was here to stay, from Chicago’s famous 2-0 win against Michigan in 1905 to the Nebraska-Oklahoma “Game of the Century” in 1971 to the modern Egg Bowl and the professional tradition of games in Detroit and Dallas that rule the holiday today.
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