Today's Tidbit... As The Quakers Go Rolling Along

A few days ago, I wrote about the 1902 Rose Bowl and how it was viewed for nearly forty years as a one-off game, unconnected to the Rose Bowl contests that began in 1916. Before and after 1916, football teams from northern climes periodically traveled to fair-weather locations for a game or three over the holidays. These games began when Chicago visited the West Coast in 1894, continued with a Yale Consolidated team going South in 1896, and through to the San Diego Christmas Classic in 1921 and 1922. More generally, a mishmash of late-season and one-off holiday games helped prepare us for the college bowl system to come.

Despite attempts by other cities, Pasadena's Rose Bowl and San Francisco's East-West Shrine Bowl were the only bowl games of note until the mid-1930s. So it was under those conditions that the University of Pennsylvania Quakers set off to play California in a one-off game on New Year's Eve in 1927. The game honored the memory of Andy Smith, who played at Penn before the forward pass and coached the Quakers for a few years before making his way to Berkeley, where he restarted the football program in 1916. Over the next ten years, he went 74-16-7, winning four national championships with his Wonder Teams.

Penn, which then led the college football world in attendance year after year, was heading west for the third time. They lost to Oregon 14-0 in the 1920 Rose Bowl and went down to Cal 14-0 on New Year's Day 1924, but they learned their lesson in '24 when they traveled across the country by train and arrived in Berkeley only two days before the game. This time, they left Philadelphia on December 17 and arrived in Berkeley on the 21st, giving them ten days to practice and acclimate before facing the Bears in a Saturday night game. After the game, they would head south to Pasadena to attend the 1928 Rose Bowl, played on Monday since New Year's Day fell on Sunday.