Today's Tidbit... Procrastination and the 1904 Cal-Stanford Game

Words to live by: The best time to finish things is at the last minute. Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.

I'll get back to that thought momentarily, but let's talk about the 1904 Cal-Stanford game, the first Big Game played on either team's campus. Many schools in the 1800s and early 1900s played big games at major or minor league baseball parks because those were the biggest stadiums with the most seating capacity. Only a handful of schools nationwide had on-campus stadiums that sat 10,000 people. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, and Chicago could pull it off, but not many others. Before 1904, they played the Big Game at neutral sites in San Francisco, but once Cal built California Field, it made sense to play the 1904 game in Berkeley.

Cal entered the game at 6-0 while Stanford was 5-2-1 after both teams faced the always tough San Francisco Olympic Club, Oregon, and the Sherman Institute, then the Carlisle of the West. While both teams had played the best competition on the West Coast, even those games were considered inconsequential compared to the Big Game, as shown by Cal's yearbook categorizing all non-Stanford games as practice games.

All games preceding the Stanford game fell under the practice game header. (1906 Cal yearbook)

Having set up the importance of the game, it's about time we talk about procrastination. Regular readers know I enjoy RPPCs (Real Photo Postcards) that illustrate elements of football we don't see much anymore. The notoriety of the teams in an RPPC is less significant than the concept illustrated, so I was happy to acquire the image below. Mailed in November 1906, the photo shows a pre-game moment at the 1904 Big Game. We know it is the 1904 game since California Field opened that year, and the Stanford students in the stands under a large sign match a similar image in the 1906 Cal yearbook. (College yearbooks then were commonly published by the junior class for the senior class, so Cal's Class of 1906 yearbook covered the 1904-1905 academic year and 1904 football season.) Also, the 1905 game occurred at Stanford, and both schools dropped football before 1906, so the picture had to be from 1904.

The ground crew is still striping the field as Stanford rooters yell themselves silly. (Personal collection)