“Well, the foot ball fever has struck Austin at last,” declared the Austin Statesman in December 1893. For years, local citizens had been reading newspaper and magazine articles about a game called “foot ball” that had become wildly popular in the northeastern United States. “The game has taken a high place in the affections of the American undergraduate,” reported Century Magazine in 1887. “In the three colleges in which it is played most successfully, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, the undergraduates would give up base-ball more willingly than foot-ball.” An Americanized version of the British sport rugby, spectacular contests between city or college teams drew enormous crowds. An annual Thanksgiving bout between Yale and Princeton had escalated to the point that it was played on neutral turf, at the Polo Grounds in New York City, in front of forty to fifty thousand spectators. Finally, on the sunny Saturday afternoon of December 16, 1893, the people of Austin were going to witness a genuine, bona-fide, actual-factual football game for themselves, as the University of Texas hosted the San Antonio Foot Ball Club.
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The 1893 University of Texas football team
