Today's Tidbit... Let's Play Two

Yesterday's Tidbit included images of the cover and internal pages from a 1937 Shell Oil football schedule booklet. Used as a giveaway at Shell stations on the West Coast, most internal pages listed the 1937 schedule and 1936 results for West Coast colleges.

Below is an image of pages 2 and 3, which shows the schedules for six Pacific Coast Conference teams, several of which have interesting elements. Oregon has a late game with the U. S Marines, a football team typically referred to as the San Diego Marines during the 1930s.

Three teams play intersectional games. Georgia Tech visits Cal, Montana heads to Lubbock to play Texas Tech, while Stanford ends the regular season playing Columbia in New York City before heading to Honolulu. Stanford followed the 1920s and 1930s pattern of teams traveling to Hawaii over the holidays to play the University of Hawaii and a game with the Islands' top amateur team.

However, the most interesting element on these pages is California's schedule on October 16 which shows them playing both the Cal Aggies, now Cal-Davis, and the College of the Pacific, then headed by Amos Alonzo Stagg. Their schedule is an example of teams playing doubleheaders, which typically saw the second and third-string playing a lower-quality opponent in the first game and a medium-quality team versus the starters in the second game.

I published an article about football doubleheaders in January 2020. Those interested in learning how those games emerged in the late 1920s and continued through the 1930s, with Cal being their top proponent, can read the article linked below.

Hopefully, you'll enjoy the read.

The Good Old Days of Football Doubleheaders

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