Saturday’s Dr Pepper Big 12 Championship game will be the 1,369th official game in the history of the University of Texas football program. The very first out of all those games took place 130 years ago today.
A win on Saturday would give the Longhorns their 27th outright conference title, and possibly put them in position to gain a spot in the College Football Playoff. But long before the program’s first conference title, the four claimed national championships, the many All-Americans and hundreds of players sent to the professional football ranks, three decades before the construction of Texas Memorial Stadium, over a decade before the legalization of the forward pass, and even before the adoption of the “Longhorn” nickname itself, UT football’s history began in earnest on Thanksgiving Day in 1893 when a dozen or so young men, most of whom were new to organized football, took on a team of older and more experienced men from the Dallas Athletic Club. UT’s surprising 18-16 win over the Dallas team that day at the Dallas Exposition Grounds brought football fever to Austin and laid the foundation for all the successes and accomplishments that the program would see over the next 130 seasons.
This is the story of that team, and whether you’ve read every book on Texas Longhorn football history or if this era represents a complete blank in your UT football knowledge, I guarantee that you’ll learn something new in this post.
Football comes to the University of Texas and the first varsity team is formed
The match recognized today as the very first college football game was played on November 6, 1869 in New Brunswick, New Jersey between teams from Princeton College and Rutgers University. That game bore a much closer resemblance to what we now call soccer (“association football”) than to the American gridiron football game, which is a close cousin of rugby (“union football”). Gridiron football evolved during the last three decades of the 1800s…
Read the full article here
