Factoid 50 - College Football in the 19th Century (Part Two)

The 19th century saw a complete dominance by the schools that we now call the Ivy League with the lone exception of the Lafayette Maroon who shared the championship with Princeton Bulldogs in 1896. Other than Lafayette, all other national champions for this century were Ivy League schools.

The following schools won national championships in the 19th century through one polling service or another: Princeton (20); Yale (20); Harvard (5); Penn (3); Columbia (1); and the Lafayette Maroon (1). This list also includes championships won via the Parker H. Davis selector; Davis was a college historian who used research to pick his retroactive champions in the year 1933.

By the end of the century, football had become commonplace on the college and university landscapes across the country. While it was not the behemoth it would become by the end of the 20th century, it was nonetheless popular and growing.