The First All-American Football Team: A Historic Milestone

On January seventh, eighteen eighty nine, the very first college football All American Team. All American Team list was released, letting the country know who the best players in college football were and becoming an annual thing is one of the most prestigious honors a college football player can have, and the name All American has become synonymous with greatness and all started before nineteen hundred. Today we're going to dive into how it started at college and high school sports forever today on Daily Sports History. Welcome to Daily Sports History, I mean than Ree your guide as you daily learn more about sports history, increasing your sports knowledge as we dive into the first All American Team and today's Treviy question to listen out for is who was the very first West Coast athlete featured on the All American List? Listen to the episode to find the answer, and if you miss it, listen all the way to the end where I will give you the answer. So, back in the late eighteen hundreds, college football was one of the biggest sporting event around. This was before the NFL, and the game was different than it is today, and the scoring was different, the style was different, and the past wasn't really a thing back then, and it was very dangerous. Multiple people would die playing college football every year, so why the NCAA was actually created was to put rules in place to help keep college football safe. But that didn't Despite the dangerousness of the game, it didn't keep fans and players from loving to play, and it swept across the country. And that's when Casper Whitney decided to do something that had never been done before and change the college landscape forever. And Casper was a New England guy born in Massachusetts, but he got educated when he went to Saint Matthew's College in California, and back then, having experiences across the nation was very rare, and he became a writer after college, and he loved writing so much so that he was actually writing articles while on the front lines in Cuba during the Spanish American War, and this is where he got popular because he wrote about what was actually happening on the battlefields, and his description of the Rough Writers, which is still one of the most famous regiments to this day, especially since Teddy Roosevelt was part of them, helped popularize him as a writer, and he would go on to be the owner and editor in chief of Outing magazine, promoting outdoors and sporting pursuits. And he would go on to become an advocate for amateur athletics and become a member of the IOC and the American Olympic Committee. But he did all of this after he published the very first All American Lists, and he took the success he had from the All American Lists to even higher heights and he posted it in these weeks Sports. Now, not much is known about this Week's Sports, but it was a weekly publication of sporting events which is very different than what we see today cos hunting, other outdoorsy things rather than what we know as today in sports. And it would be a weekly magazine. And he released this with an association with Walter Camp, who became known as the father of American football after playing football when he went to Yale. But what really made him popular when he was playing in college, he proposed rules for the game that included such thing as the line of scrimmage, the snap back from the center, the system of downs, the scoring system, and the seven man line in foreman in the backfield. And during his coaching career, he coached at Yale from eighteen eighty eight to eighteen eighty two, where he won sixty seven games in lounch just two. Then he moved across the country coaching at Stanford University, which again he had a great record of twenty four and four, and over this time he won threetional championships. This was very different than today. This was voted on by writers and this was all while he was at Yale, where Eastern bias really factored into the voting system as they didn't have a playoff or even a ranking system back then, and he got involved in doing the All American list because he was a writer. Also, by the time he passed away, he had written over thirty books in over two hundred and fifty magazine articles, mainly focused on football in the sporting world, and in nineteen fifty one he'd be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. And every year the top player in Division one college football is given the Walter Camp Award, which is very similar and most of the time that is given to the same player that wins the Heisman Trophy. This award started in nineteen sixty seven, but the All American team they actually picked eleven All Americans, but it was limited to the big three college football teams at the time, which were Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, which Walter Camp at the time who helped make this list also coached at Yale, giving them a little bit of a bias as well. And this was a unique thing. It shows how different the game is to now. So it featured at quarterback, it featured at Gary Allan Poe from Princeton, who is not the writer but actually a relative of the writer in who he was named after. At halfback, it had Roscoe Channing from Princeton and later would serve with the Rough Riders and Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish American War, and James L. Lee from Harvard. Fullback was Knowlton Amos, who had the unofficial collegiate scoring record at the time from Princeton who later joined the College Football Hall of Fame. At tackles there was Hector Gowan and Princeton who also joined the College Football Hall of Fame, Charles O'Gill of Yale. At guard they have Pewed Haflinger of Yale who would go on to be the College who would go on to join the College Football Hall of Fame, and become the first professional American football athlete, and John Cranston of Harvard, and as they had Amos Alonzo Staggs of Yale who joined the College Football Hall of Fame, and Arthur Kumchruk of Harvard. Those eleven men made up the first the very first All American team, which focused on offense ends was more reference to Titans, and there were really no receivers. At the time, the game was very different. It was more of a wing tea type of game is the most relatable to this time period, although it was still very different from then. The passing game was not a part of the game and it was very different overall. But over the years it morphed and eventually they grew it from just these three main schools to include schools all over the country, and every year it came out, it became more popular as the college game became more popular and people wanted to consume it, and the name All American really became synonymous, especially after World War One, where American pride gained even more sentiment with everyone across the world, and being part of an All American was a great honor for the players, but it also made Americans and fans really cleaning on to this as patriotism, and by the nineteen twenties it was a standardized form that was published in the New York Times in the Associated Press. As in the nineteen fifties, as sports overall grew, the All American term was something people wanted. As the NFL became more popular, they wanted to draft All Americans and it allowed them a chance to grow and have a financial opportunity from this as well. Now this also expanded to not just be for football. It's been expanded to now include not only college but high school as well, and in college it includes archery, baseball, basketball, cross country, fencing, football, golf, gymnastics, ice hockey, lacrosse, rowing, rugby, sailing, soccer, swimming and diving, tennis, track and field, volleyball, and wrestling. Now, the All American designation actually has adjusted over the years because each public it's normally done by a newspaper or magazine, does their own All American list, so a concrete list it is hard to come by, but in general the schools that have the most All Americans are thought to be Notre Dame and USC, Southern California, and the running in Quarterbacks with the most All All American designations are Tommy Frasier, Johnny Uniteds, and Terry Bradshaw. And running backs with the most are Tony Dorsett, Herschel Walker and Barry Sanders. The first African American to get an All American designation with Fitz Pollard, who went on to become a pioneer not only in the college game, but in the professional game as well, And in nineteen eleven was the first time they included a West Coast player in Frank Gorman from Stanford, showing that it was truly all American, as there was an Eastern bias when they first started, which happened in every single sport. All sports have done that as well, Baseball, football, basketball, All the sports started east and made their way west, and so the same point with this list, the same with the Heisman as well. It all started east and made its way west eventually, and this list has grown into something that is and just shows that something that started over in the eighteen hundreds has grown and morphed and still is a sense of pride to this day. Getting named an All American in any sport is an honor that every athlete loves to get and athletes try to become All Americans all the time, and it's not something that will often be forgotten. And I want to thank you for listening to today's Daily Sports History. If you want more college sports history, check out the Official Heisman Trophy Podcast, where your hosts Chris Hudson ak The Heisman Pundit, takes you through weekly conversations about college football, top Heisman candidates, and in depth stories about the trophy's history and focus on the Heisman Trophy Trust and charitable efforts. It's a great look behind the scenes at college football's immortality and we'll put a link in the description below for you to check them out. And if you liked this episode of Daily Sports History, please share it on all your social medias. I'd love to see that puts a smile on my face every time I see someone retweet or share an episode or picture repost. It makes me very happy and helps us grow. So we can bring you more Daily Sports History and we'll see you tomorrow for more. And did you catch the answer to today's tribute question who is the first West Coast athlete to get on the All American list? And the answer was Frank Gorman of Stanford, showing the game was starting to grow nationally and it truly was an All American team.