Today's Tidbit... Football's Most Lopsided Score: Dickinson 227 Haverford 0, Right?

Most of us have gone through life thinking the most lopsided college football game was John Heisman and Georgia Tech's 222-0 victory over Cumberland, but how do we know that? Most likely, you have read or heard of the 1916 game, and its 222-0 score repeated so often that you came to believe it. Who could blame you?

A few days ago, I was flipping through a Four Roses advertising premium from 1953. It included a football trivia quiz, with question 14 asking about the largest-ever score in a football game. The answer page indicated it was Dickinson's 227-0 shellacking of Haverford in 1900. What gives? Why has everyone told us it was Georgia Tech's 222-0 victory, not Dickinson's 227-point win?

To determine why the conflict existed, I searched for the answer. The most recent example of a newspaper citing the 227-0 score came in 1974 when the High Point Enterprise included the score in a Q&A column. It appears they used the Guinness Book of World Records as its source.

'High Scorers,' High Point Enterprise (NC), July 14, 1974.

Similar stories and quizzes from 1969, 1967, and 1966 mention Dickinson beating Haverford 227-0 in 1900, with at least one mentioning that they confirmed the score using their library’s copy of Encyclopedia of Sports.

We had the 1953 Four Roses quiz shown previously, and before that, there was a 1947 article in a Harrisburg newspaper telling us the Dickinson-Haverford score was incorrect. It blamed Johnny Nelson, Jr.'s column in the Bradford (PA) Era from 1946, which showed the 227-0 score topping the list, but where did Nelson source the score?

(Nelson, Jr., Johnny, 'Sport Corner,' Bradford Era (PA), November 7, 1946.