1898
Sponsor Note: I can't get Matt Demorest of HomeSure Lending to sit down for a beer recently because rates recently dropped to the lowest they've been since 2015-'16. If you bought or financed your house in the last year or so, for some reason Matt would rather personally handling whether a refinance now can save you some coin than listen to me be mopey about football and hockey.
He also stepped up to buy us some new equipment and cover the hosting (and host) costs for Sap and I to launch our new podcast, The Teams (first episode here) where we cover one historical Michigan football season per episode. In the process we had to go through a lot of historical teams. Since I have to do the research anyway, I figured I would turn it into some offseason #content you can flip through while Matt is working on your loan.
A Tournament of Great Michigan Football Teams Past
Mostly I wanted a way to have something about all these teams in the blog history. I went with an NCAA basketball-style tournament to keep it interesting as we go. I'll take a few games per episode, pit two great teams against each other, and eulogize the loser. The seeding went like a committee might: more wins, big wins, big postseason wins etc. count, and national champs are treated like conference champs. Since football's gotten harder to win over the years, further back in time means weaker SOS, relegating Bo teams from the Big 2 Little 8 Era to low majors, etc.
We'll start today with the play-in round.
---------------------------
16th Seed Game 1: 1885 vs. 1895
Worthy though they were, Horace G. Prettyman's squad would have gaped at the advancements in the game and Michigan's program just a decade later. Backed by hundreds of dollars raised from the students themselves, and organized by a man who would do more than anyone else to build a premier athletics program at the University of Michigan, the 1895 team would steamroll their forebears, then everyone would go down to Hangsterfer's Saloon (a Mongolian BBQ today) for drinks and songs. 1895 wins 42-2.
The 1895s advance to take on Charles Woodson and the 1997 team. Maybe they can get Prettyman back?
[After THE JUMP: About the 1885 team, and a few more like this]
-------------------------------------------------
keep going please
-------------------------------------------------
Ye olde football time. The @MichiganHist twitter account regularly throws out bits and pieces of Michigan athletic coverage from years past and this one is a doozy:
The Detroit Free Press did a massive profile on University of Michigan football in their 10/9/1898 issue pic.twitter.com/EgdBILzYD6
— Michigan's Past (@MichiganHist) October 9, 2018
"Such is the training that football, played by eleven gentlemanly fellows with eleven other gentlemanly fellows, gives to the one who enters its lists."
AAGO update. A clarification from the AAGO on the Wisconsin game:
Park-n-party pre-paid passes have been rescinded. This is preemptive to allow people to make alternative plans. We will take in our season pass holders if possible. That decision will be made Wednesday or Thursday. We did sustain significant damage and the course is still too wet to repair.
Touch and go but not definitively closed.
A history of cheese violence. MVictors has a history of crowd disasters against Wisconsin:
1902 – Chicago (Marshall Field) – U-M 6, Wisconsin 0. In a massive game held in the Windy City, trains full of fans from Madison and Ann Arbor descended on Chicago to be there. According to John Kryk’s epic Stagg vs. Yost, both schools agreed to construct temporary stands to meet the demand for a few hundred additional fans. Unfortunately it seems many more than could fit hopped aboard the stands…and it got ugly. Again, Kryk:
In the middle of the first half, timbers in the grandstand suddenly began to creak–then snapped. The whole stand swayed to the north then collapsed, dropping hundreds. Incredibly, no one was killed and only a few were seriously injured.
The game was interrupted for fifteen minutes as stunned, scared, and some bloodied spectators flooded onto the northeast corner of the playing field to escape the woodpile wreckage.
A lighter note: during the hysteria following the collapse, with the guards distracted while tending to the mess, hundreds of ticketless fans rushed in to the field to grab of a view of this huge game.
And no, things never change as a big legal mess ensued between Wisconsin, Michigan and even Chicago (whose Marshall Field was used to stage the big game), with fingers pointing in all directions.
I love that the damn stadium collapsed and the delay was 15 minutes, or half of the current wait when there's a thunderbolt in the area. Let's go! It's 1902, we're all dying in the near future!
[After THE JUMP: a worse crime against football than the above]
22