Today's Tidbit... Two-Day Football Games

Football does not do weather cancellations. As they say, neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night stays these mighty ballcarriers from the swift completion of their appointed runs. However, football games are delayed occasionally due to scheduling conflicts, lightning, faulty lighting systems, or other issues that cause games to stretch across two days.

The idea for an article on two-day games came from a reader, Aaron Cromer, who read the story about St. Mary's of Kansas and the dispute resulting from ending the game at a set time to allow St. Mary's to catch the train home. The story reminded him of games that extended past or started after midnight for one reason or another, so he sent a note asking about the history of two-day games.

Amos Alonzo Stagg regularly shows up in stories about football firsts, and he was there for the first college game that stretched over two days. Stagg's Springfield YMCA Training School team took on a Yale aggregation at New York's Twenty-Second Regiment Armory in January 1891 in what is often called the first indoor football game. While at least one other indoor game preceded it, the Springfield-Yale game started late in the evening and did not finish before the clock struck midnight, so it was the first two-day game and likely the second indoor game.