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Showing posts from December, 2021

January 1, 1902: The 1st College Football Bowl Game

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January 1, 1902: The Tournament of Roses Association, operator of the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California, outside Los Angeles, every New Year's Day since 1890, hosts a college football game. Although not immediately, it becomes an annual tradition. By the dawn of the 20th Century, football had become a big business at a few American colleges, especially in the East. The schools that would eventually form the Ivy League led the way: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and Brown. A few other Northeastern schools were already playing, including Rutgers and Penn State. In the South, schools such as the Universities of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, and Auburn University, had already begun play. And in the Midwest, some of the schools that would eventually form the Big Ten Conference had done so, including the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, and the University of Chicago -- a school that w...

Ground Rules

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* Professional baseball, as we know it, began in 1869. So did the recording of scores for it. Therefore, no historical events prior to 1869 will be posted. * I have tried to find lists of scores from baseball's amateur era, roughly 1858, when the rules became standardized, until 1868, the last officially all-amateur season. If I can find them, I will correlate them with famous dates history from those years, and extend this blog, probably starting in 1860, the year before the American Civil War began, the Year of Meteors , as historian Douglas Edgerton called it as the title of his book on the year's events. * Baseball Leagues eligible to be covered in this blog: The National Association (NA, 1871-1875), the National League (NL, 1876-present), the American Association (AA, 1882-1891), the Players' League (PL, 1890), the American League (AL, 1901-present), and the Federal League (FL, 1914-1915). * Professional Football Leagues eligible: The National Football League (NFL, 192...