Top 50 Cal Sports Moments -- No. 40: Western Glory, 1899

The dominant college football teams in 1899 were on the East Coast -- until Cal played the Carlisle Indian Industrial School on Christmas Day

1899 Carlisle football team / Photo public domain

THE MOMENT: The instant time expired in the football game played on December 25, 1899, between Cal and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School at Richmond Field in San Francisco, the country realized West Coast college football had arrived. It was the first time an Eastern powerhouse had come to the West Coast to play a football game, and though Cal lost the game 2-0, the teams had played on virtually even terms. Cal had surprised everyone by showing it could compete with the elite Eastern team, and that performance set the stage of the first postseason college football game, a contest between a West Coast team and a team from the East that would become known as the Rose Bowl.

THE STORY: There was no debate that the best college football was played on the East Coast in 1899.  Harvard was named the national champion that year. Forty-nine players were named to All-America teams by at least one reputable selector that year, but none was from west of the Mississippi River and 41 of them played on the East Coast.

Stanford had lost to the University of Chicago 24-4 in San Francisco in 1894 in the first intersectional game played on the West Coast, but the Native Americans squad from Carlisle, Pa., represented a different level of competition in 1899.  Carlisle had defeated Columbia and Penn that season, and its only losses were to Harvard and Princeton, the top two teams in the country, earning Carlisle a retroactive ranking of No. 4 for the season.

Cal finished its 1899 regular season undefeated and unscored upon, beating its seven opponents by a combined score of 142-0. But the Bears were major underdogs against Carlisle, which agreed to face the Bears on Christmas Day well after both teams’ regular season had ended, earning a payday of $4,500 from Cal for travel expenses.

The game was played at Richmond Field on the corner of 16h and Folsom streets in San Francisco, with a crowd of about 6,000 expecting Cal to get creamed. 

That didn’t happen, the only scoring in the game occurred in the first half, when Cal’s center misinterpreted a call for a fake punt and snapped the ball to the wrong spot, where no one was waiting.  The ball flew back to the Cal goal-line, where it was recovered by a Cal player, who was tackled into the end zone for a safety – the only score of the game. Carlisle later complained that the playing field was too soft and the ball being used was different from the one its players were used to. Nonetheless, the bottom line was that Cal had played Carlisle to a virtual standstill.

The close result was a major surprise, much like Super Bowl III in 1969, when the New York Jets of the belittled, neophyte AFL shocked the Baltimore Colts of the tradition-rich NFL.

The huge banner headline on the San Francisco Chronicle on December 26, 1899, read: “California Virtually Ties Carlisle,” with a subhead of “Indians Score Two Points on A Fluke.” The accompanying story said “. . . spectators saw the representative team of the Far West demonstrate the much vaunted superiority of the big Eastern football elevens is not very perceptible against the best this state can produce.”

The San Francisco Call’s top-of-the page banner headline read: “Carlisle Barely Beats California,” and the story said “California surprised everyone” and “the team advanced her football into territory hitherto supposed to belong exclusively to the Eastern Varsity teams.”

Across the country, a New York Sun columnist wrote in the paper’s December 26 edition that he was so impressed with Cal’s surprising performance that “An annual game between the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts may yet become a fixture.”

Two seasons later the first postseason bowl game would be played in Pasadena, Calif., having the title of “Tournament East-West football game.” In 1923 that game changed its name to The Rose Bowl.

* Top Moment No. 42 – Dazzling Debut, 2002

* Top Moment No. 41 – Corvallis Minute, 1988

Only specific acts that occurred while the team or athlete was at Cal were considered for the Top 50 list, and accomplishments spanning a season or a career were not included.

Leslie Mitchell of the Cal Bears History Twitter site aided in the selection of the top 50 moments.

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