The 1904 Little Big Game: We Shall Not See Its Like Again

As Walter Camp and his buddies at Yale prepared for their 1876 game with Harvard, they had limited knowledge of rugby besides the information gleaned from the rule book. Only one Yale team member had ever seen a regulation rugby match, though several played in the 1875 Harvard-Yale match that used compromise or concessionary rules combining rugby, soccer, and local folk rules.

Their situation was typical of the time. Early players learned rugby by reading the rule book and interpreting it as best they could. The early rules were neither detailed nor clear, and since few had playing experience, the rules were often misunderstood. In time, the rules became increasingly detailed to address the situations they had not anticipated and to close loopholes some used to violate the law's spirit when the letter went missing.

The rules have since become more detailed and clear -at least to rules junkies- but it took time for rules omissions to get filled in. One example was covered previously in The 125-Year-Old Safety Penalty, and another, which came during the 1904 Little Big Game, is covered in this story. The Little Big Game was the annual contest between Cal and Stanford's freshmen teams. While we might scoff at freshmen games today -they now exist primarily at the DIII level- fans once followed freshmen games as signs of things to come, much like we treat recruiting rankings today. They received press coverage; a few, like the Little Big Game, were big events.

A complete football-shaped program for the 1919 Cal-Stanford Little Big Game shows the schools once took the freshmen rivalry game seriously. (Personal collection, sold)