1,000 Words: The 1920 Colgate-Cornell Game

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This article is the first in a series that dissects one old football image to illustrate changes in football over the years.

Postcards became legal in the United States in the 1890s. In the days before Facebook and Twitter, commercial and amateur photographers printed images of every sort on postcard stock, resulting in Real Photo Postcards (RPPCs) numbering in the millions. Football teams, crowds, and game action shots were common subjects for RPPCs, with the result that these postcards left a photographic record of football as it existed between 1900 to 1930s approached only by school yearbooks. (RPPCs are often the only remaining pictorial evidence for small schools and town teams.)

The RPPCs sold on college campuses often used images that overlapped those of college yearbooks, and the work of John P. Troy, Cornell's photographer, fit that bill in the 1910s and 1920s. He took the focal image for this story during the October 23, 1920, game between Cornell and Colgate. Though the focal image did not make Cornell's 1921 yearbook, other Troy images did, including the one below.

One of John P. Troy's images of the 1920 Cornell-Colgate game as it appeared in the 1921 Cornell yearbook.

Before describing our primary image, let's review its context. The 1920 season was special for Cornell because it was Gil Dobie's first year at the helm in Ithaca. Cornell had success earlier in the century under Pop Warner and Percy Haughton, but Colgate shut out the Big Red when Cornell went 3-6 in 1917, and Colgate blanked them again in 1919 when Cornell when 3-5. (Cornell fielded separate Student Army Training Corps and Aeronautics teams in 1918. Neither was a varsity outfit.) Dobie's job was to turn things around at Cornell, and their performance against a fellow Central New York state school like Colgate would be an indicator of progress.