I like to take a look at history every offseason, and what better time to do that than now? Nothing is going on, and there is doubt about what the fall football season will look like if it happens at all.
The last time Florida football faced a situation where a global pandemic threatened a season was 1918. What was the sport like back then? Barely anything we’d recognize today.
The college football scene
The NCAA itself only came into being in 1906, and it used a different name until 1910. That’s the kind of time frame we’re discussing here.
Two world events affected the 1918 season: the Great War and the so-called Spanish flu pandemic. The former meant that many colleges were still in the business of training soldiers, and military training schools often found their way onto the schedules of academic institutions’ teams. A number of schools didn’t even field teams in 1918 due to the war effort. The flu, which probably originated in Kansas but was famous in WWI belligerents’ newspapers for devastating neutral Spain, ensured that teams that did have a go at it played wildly different numbers of games.
Despite the many differences and squabbles between conferences, college football has never been more centralized than it is now. It was far less so in the past, particularly the relatively distant past of a century ago. Conferences were in their infancy, with only the Southwest Conference and the Big Ten (which then included the University of Chicago) using names that’d still exist by the time Steve Spurrier took over as Florida’s head coach. The leagues that did exist didn’t impose anything like uniform scheduling.
Purdue shared the Big Ten championship with a 1-0-0 conference record alongside 2-0-0 Michigan and 4-0-0 Illinois. In the Southwest Conference, Texas played nine overall games while Baylor played four. The Missouri Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Association, which later split into what would become the Big Eight and Missouri Valley Conference, officially didn’t have a season and didn’t keep standings. Every member school still played at least two games, though, some of them against conference foes.
The biggest game of the season was a charity benefit played almost two weeks after the armistice was signed. It matched up John Heisman’s Georgia Tech with Pop Warner and his Pittsburgh squad. Heisman got the better of it with a 32-0 win.
The Rose Bowl was the only postseason game at the time. As a celebration of the war ending, it staged a game with the team from the Great Lakes naval training center winning a 17-7 contest over a team of Marines from the Mare Island navy base in California. Great Lakes is still open as, among other things, the Navy’s boot camp for enlisted sailors, while Mare Island closed in 1996.
On the gridiron, the forward pass was only 13 years old. It, along with the NCAA itself, was a reform of the game brokered in 1905 in response to how brutally violent the sport was at the time. Because so many schools didn’t field teams or played reduced schedules in 1918, all players got an extra year of eligibility. It was a lot easier to do that back then than it would be today, as the folks trying to figure out what to do with spring sports eligibility right now can attest.
Florida football
The Gators’ official first season was in 1906. Well, not quite. The school didn’t take on the “Gators” nickname until 1911. Before then, the athletics teams were either known as just “Florida” or the “Orange and Blue”. Yes, the colors do predate the nickname. They were probably the combination of UF’s predecessor schools’ colors, taking from the blue and white of the University of Florida at Lake City and the orange and black of the East Florida Seminary in Gainesville.
So in 1918, Florida football had only a dozen seasons under its belt, and the “Gators” nickname was less than ten years old. It also was only six years removed from the last time the team had played an athletic club not associated with a university.
In 1912, UF beat Tampa Athletic Club and Vedado Athletic Club by a combined score of 71-0. The latter was a Cuban team, and the game took place in the Bacardi Bowl (yes, really) in Havana. It was supposed to be a two-game series, but the second game A) wasn’t completed, and B) led to Florida’s head coach fleeing the country as a “fugitive from justice”. It’s a wild story.
Anyway, 1918 was also UF’s sixth in the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association. The SIAA was a sometimes sprawling proto-conference founded in 1894 that at some point housed much of the current SEC, some of the current ACC, and Texas. Rules disputes led some colleges to break away from the SIAA to form the Southern Conference, which was the one that is still around today. Florida wasn’t among the first batch of SoCon breakaways but joined up a year after the league’s formation in 1922.
UF only played one football game in 1918, a 14-2 loss to Camp Johnston on October 5. A combination of the war draft and the flu prevented the school from having any other games that year. Camp Johnston was an Army training base in Jacksonville founded the prior year in October 1917, and the site would eventually become a Navy base in 1940. I can’t find any definitive proof, but the timing would suggest that the game against the Gators was the only one Camp Johnston ever played against a college team.
Al Buser was Florida’s head coach from 1917-19. As was common back in the day, he had several jobs on campus. Buser was the school’s athletic director and was the professor in charge of physical education. If that sounds like a lot, he was a slacker compared to his successor William G. Kline. Kline coached the Gators from 1920-22 while teaching in the law school and, in 1921, coaching the baseball team as well. Buser went 2-4 in 1917 and 5-3 in 1919; Kline won at least six games in each of his campaigns.
Florida’s media guide lists Gordon Clemens as the 1918 team captain. Records from the time are sketchy enough that the all-time letterwinners section has some incomplete names for that season, such as W. Madison and someone with just the last name of Sewell.
I hope and pray for the benefit of the country, and at this point, all of humanity that the novel coronavirus will be in check enough that we’ll get to see a college football season this fall. If nothing else, we’ll at least know all the first and last names of the players on the teams.