Today's Tidbit... Walter Camp's California Adventures

A drawing celebrating Stanford’s 1895 season. (1897 Stanford Quad)

It had to get boring playing football in California in the early Nineties, the 1890s, that is. Teams such as Cal and Stanford had few teams to play unless they or someone else spent the Christmas season traveling and playing football.

Cal, for example, played nineteen games from the fall of 1892 through 1895. They played:

• San Francisco Athletic Club (AC) once

• Olympic AC six times

• Reliance AC eight times

• Stanford four times.

Stanford had it better. Their regular season games during that stretch included:

• One game with the Sacramento AC

• Seven games with the Olympic AC

• Seven games with the Reliance AC

• Four contests with Cal.