The 1883 Michigan-Wesleyan Game

Michigan's 1883 team was the only non-Eastern team playing football at their level. This series uses period publications to cover Michigan’s trip east to play Wesleyan, Harvard, Yale, and the Stevens Institute in nine days.

Previous posts in the series: Intro

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Michigan had unspecified travel problems on the way from Ann Arbor to Hartford, where it was to play Wesleyan in the first game of the trip. They arrived at 2:20 in the afternoon on November 19, just in time for the game that started at 3:35. Despite being tired from the trip, the Wolverines were committed to playing their best, as they had when they traveled East for games with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (HYP) in 1881.

Wesleyan was one of the top football teams in the East in 1883 but was not an IFA member like HYP and Columbia—or, at least, Columbia had been a member. Their scheduled game with Princeton on Saturday, November 10, was postponed due to cold weather. Columbia did not appear at the rescheduled game two days later, leading to their automatic dismissal from the IFA.

The newspapers mentioned Penn and Michigan as likely replacements over the few days following Columbia’s disappearing act. However, the IFA did not make a replacement for 1884, waiting until the Harvard faculty banned football in 1885. Penn and Wesleyan joined the IFA in 1885, while Harvard took a one-year sabbatical before rejoining in 1886.