Stadium Size, Football Droppers, and Deemphasizers: Sewanee
Before researching the football past of most schools in this series, I knew few details about them unless I had crossed paths with the school at some point. I knew more about a few because they were prominent in earlier times, but most schools that dropped football were never prominent independents or members of significant conferences. Only a few have that tradition, and Sewanee is one of them.
Sewanee: The University of the South is the first Southern team covered in this series, and there is only one other Southern school, Tampa, currently on the list.
Sewanee is an old-time Southern school. It was always a small school and competed well in football until the state schools grew larger. It was competitive early on and likely had the South’s first great team. Other Southern teams might have been better, but none were greater.
The 1899 Sewanee football story is told in David Neil Drews’ Iron Tigers. It's a tale of a team from a small school road-tripping to play Texas, Texas A&M, Tulane, LSU, and Ole Miss—five teams in six days—and winning ‘em all. In many ways, the Iron Tigers provided a spark for other Southern schools to build football teams that showed the same brand of toughness and resilience shown by Sewanee.
Sewanee played above its weight for two decades and had a winning record every year from 1902 until 1919, with four to six of the better Southern Conference teams appearing on the schedule each year. Sewanee won some of those games in the first half of the 1920s but lost almost all of them at the backend of the decade.
The American college and university system was changing at the time. The flagship state universities were growing and taking on a science, engineering, and medicine orientation. Their size and orientation transferred to athletics. Sewanee, on the other hand, had just over 200 students. Yet, when they formed the SEC in 1932, Sewanee’s lore, previous competitiveness, and influential alums led them to receive an invitation, and Sewanee made the mistake of accepting it. We’ll come back to that in a moment.
Sewanee's football field, now McGee Field/Harris Stadium, is the fourth oldest football field in continuous use in college football. The oldest in the South, McGee Field dates to the 1891 Vanderbilt-Sewanee game when the fellas pictured below stepped onto the gridiron
Like most football fields of the time, McGee Field had little or no formal seating. Over the years, some stands were built, rebuilt, and renamed, but they remained limited, given the school’s isolated location and tiny enrollment. Despite the 1920s stadium boom, Sewanee remained an outlier since it did not invest money in a facility it would never need, so it topped out at 3,000 seats.
Other signs besides the losing records of the late 1920s suggested Sewanee belonged elsewhere. The Sewanee-Vanderbilt Thanksgiving game had been a Southern classic for several decades, but only 7,000 fans showed up for the 1929 game, so Vandy dropped the Thanksgiving rivalry game and looked for a new dance partner.
The cultural and size gap expanded in the 1930s when the SEC became the first conference to approve athletic scholarships. Starting in 1936, Sewanee’s regents funded 32 football scholarships, which covered an entire team for the 1930s. However, doing so put the school’s finances at greater risk than some could accept.
The nail in Sewanee's big-time coffin came when Alexander Guerry, who they targeted as the school’s new chancellor, told the regents he would accept the job only if Sewanee rejected "big-time" athletics. That proved the trick. Guerry soon announced they would drop scholarships in 1938, and while Sewanee officially remained in the SEC, they faced just one SEC opponent during the 1940 season, losing 20-0 to Vanderbilt. It was their 37th straight SEC loss. They never won an SEC football game and were shut out 26 times.
The December 1940 SEC meetings included a proposal requiring SEC teams to play six league games yearly, effectively forcing Sewanee out of the conference. Sewanee resigned from the SEC, looking to pick on schools its size.
While some alums opposed Sewanee’s withdrawal from the big time, the majority recognized that competing in the SEC would require changing the school's character, and they were unwilling to do so. Unlike many football droppers who continue offering basketball scholarships, Sewanee dropped to the nonscholarship level for all sports.
Since 1940, Sewanee has won periodic College Division or Division III conference championships, the last of which came in 2000. However, the school made the obvious and correct decision to focus on offering football for the players rather than for spectators, alums, and publicity directors.
Next up: St. Mary's
Ranking by Stadium Size
Below are the schools reviewed to date, ranked by stadium size. The stadiums’ opening and demolition years (if applicable) are also noted.
Catholic (Brookland Stadium): 30,000 | 1924 - 1985
Denver (DU/Hilltop Stadium): 30,000 | 1925 - 1971
Marquette (Marquette Stadium): 24,000 | 1924 - 1977
Xavier (Corcoran Stadium): 15,000 | 1929 - 1988
Gonzaga (Gonzaga Stadium): 12,000 | 1922 - 1949
California State University, Fullerton (Titan Stadium): 10,000 | 1992 - TBD
Boston University (Nickerson Field): 10,000 | 1915 - TBD
Vermont (Centennial Field): 10,000 | 1923 - TBD
NYU (Ohio Field): 5,000 (est.) | 1897 - 1947
San Francisco (St. Ignatius Stadium): <5,000 (est.) | c. 1909 - c. 1930
Carnegie-Mellon (Skibo Bowl): 4,500 | 1960 - 1987 | Gesling Stadium: 3,900 | 1990 - TBD
Sewanee (McGee Field): 3,000 | 1891 - TBD
Schools to Review
California State University, Long Beach | University of California, Santa Barbara | Case Western | Chicago | CCNY | Creighton | DePaul | Detroit | Drake | Loyola (Chicago) | Nebraska-Omaha | Pacific | St. Louis | Santa Clara | Tampa | Washington University in St. Louis | Wichita State
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Sewanee colors were orange and black in 1899. I love the panoramic shots.