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.

1899 Sewanee football team (Wiki)

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.