Predicting the 1924 National Champs

Among the difficulties of writing about the past is the tendency to bring today's worldview to yesterday's events. I was reminded of that when I decided to look back 100 years to compare the preseason forecasts of 1924 national championship hopefuls to their actual performance. It was a straightforward task I knew I could complete by searching ye old newspaper archives.

I've spent as much time as anyone thinking about old-time football. Yet, I fell into the 2024 trap of assuming that writers in 1924 made predictions about national championship contenders as they do today. But they didn't. Neither did they conduct national polls. Dickinson's mathematical ranking system premiered that year and covered only the Big Ten. (An Illinois professor, Dickinson devised his system because conference schedules were limited. Only one Big Ten team played six conference opponents that year. Five played only four conference games.) The only postseason game of consequence saw the Pacific Coast Conference champion play an Eastern invitee selected by a handful of Pasadena socialites.

Predicting top teams nationally was just not a thing at the time. Football was a regional game, intersectional games were few, and conference titles were all that mattered, other than the Northeast, which, like today, lacked a conference of consequence. Check out the preseason list of top intersectional games:

Among the teams listed in the preseason as playing intersectional games of note are St. Louis, McGill, Detroit, Chicago, Marquette, Haskell, the Quantico Marines, and Vermont. ('Intersectional Football Games,' Gettysburg Times, September 30, 1924.)

Writers played their prediction game at the conference level. So here is what some writers thought and how the teams fared.

The East

Yale's Tad Jones was like many coaches who wrote articles predicting the season's outlook. He cited graduation losses at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and pointed to some newer coaches that might have an impact. He expected Cornell's first-year coach Gil Dobie to succeed after his long run at Washington, while second-year mentors Jess Hawley at Dartmouth and Percy Haughton at Columbia might surprise a few pundits.

('Tad Jones Discusses Outlook In The East,' Anaconda Standard, September 28, 1924)