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1918 college football season

1918 college football season
Pitt's Tom Davies running on Georgia Tech.
Number of bowls1
Champion(s)Michigan
Pittsburgh
← 1917 · football seasons · 1919 →

The 1918 college football season was a season of college football in the United States. There was no consensus champion, with the Official NCAA Division I Football Records Book listing Michigan and Pittsburgh as national champions.[1]

World War I's impact on colleges in the country, and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 eliminated most of that year's scheduled college football games.[2] However, to boost morale of the troops, many military organizations fielded teams to play against collegiate programs. This is exemplified no more strongly than in a letter published in the Spalding Guide from US president Woodrow Wilson:

"It would be difficult to over-estimate the value of football experience as a part of a soldier's training. The army athletic directors and the officers in charge of special training schools in the cantoments have derived excellent results from the use of elementary football and other personal contact games as an aid in developing the aggressiveness, initiative and determination of recruits, and the ability to carry on in spite of bodily hurts or physical discomforts. These qualities, as you well know, were the outstanding characteristics of the American soldier." -Woodrow Wilson (1919 letter)[3]

A huge military offensive was planned by the Allied countries in the spring of 1919, so all able-bodied men of ages 18 to 20 were scheduled to be drafted in the fall of 1918. As an alternative, the men were offered the option of enlisting in the Student Army Training Corps, known as SATC, which would give them a chance to pursue (or continue pursuing) their educations at the same time as they participated in a 12-week war-training session. This was essentially an alternative to boot camp. The colleges were paid by the government to train the future soldiers, which enabled many of them to avoid closure. The program began on October 1, 1918.[4] Most of the students who were potential football players were under the auspices of the War Department's SATC program.[5]

In an early September meeting between college and War Department officials in Plattsburg, Missouri it became clear that the training regimen envisioned for the soldiers could be incompatible with participation in intercollegiate athletics.[5] On September 13, 1918 newspapers around the country reported that the War Department had asked colleges to reexamine their football schedules.[6][7] In August and September, athletics backers successfully argued that athletics training was an important part of military training, and the season was back on.[8][9][10]

The influenza outbreak was colloquially called Spanish flu. Most flu outbreaks disproportionately kill juvenile, elderly, or already weakened patients, but the 1918 pandemic predominantly killed previously healthy young adults.[11] To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States.[12][13] Papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII).[14] This created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit,[15] thereby giving rise to the pandemic's nickname, "Spanish Flu".[16] By the end of the pandemic, between three and five percent of the world population had died as a result,[17] making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.[18][19][20]

  1. ^ Official 2009 NCAA Division I Football Records Book (PDF). Indianapolis, IN: The National Collegiate Athletic Association. August 2009. pp. 76–77. Retrieved October 16, 2009.
  2. ^ "War Conditions Coupled With Epidemic Have Big Effect On 1918 Sports". February 3, 2016. Archived from the original on February 3, 2016. Retrieved February 3, 2016.
  3. ^ Camp, Walter, ed. (1919). Spalding's Official Foot Ball Guide 1919. pp. 178.
  4. ^ Shearer, Benjamin F. (August 1979). "An experiment in military and civilian education: The Student Army Training Corps at the University of Illinois". Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. 72 (3): 213–224. JSTOR 40191276.
  5. ^ a b Bushnell, Edward R. (September 8, 1918). "War Department's action makes serious problem for college athletics: Whether usual sports can be continued is question that must be threshed out; Difficult problem faces colleges on account of military training edict". Detroit Free Press. Retrieved March 26, 2019.
  6. ^ "Colleges may drop football as a sport: Suspension of all schedules requested by Washington as war measure". New York Times. September 13, 1918. Retrieved March 25, 2019.
  7. ^ "Football knockout by War Department: No elevens for colleges with training corps; Four hundred leading institutions are hit by ruling". Boston Globe. September 13, 1918. Retrieved March 25, 2019.
  8. ^ Tranter, Edward (September 13, 1918). "Sports Review". The Buffalo Enquirer. Retrieved March 25, 2019.
  9. ^ "Football season opens this week: Gridiron game will prosper in all of Uncle Sam's camps". The New York Times. September 22, 1918. Retrieved March 25, 2019.
  10. ^ "Football season in United States to open within very short time". Winston-Salem Journal. September 26, 1918.
  11. ^ "The Influenza Epidemic of 1918". Archives.gov. National Archives and Records Administration. Retrieved March 31, 2016.
  12. ^ Valentine, Vikki (February 20, 2006). "Origins of the 1918 Pandemic: The Case for France". National Public Radio. Archived from the original on April 30, 2009. Retrieved April 13, 2020.
  13. ^ Anderson, Susan (August 29, 2006). "Analysis of Spanish flu cases in 1918–1920 suggests transfusions might help in bird flu pandemic". American College of Physicians. Retrieved October 2, 2011.
  14. ^ Porras-Gallo M, Davis RA, eds. (2014). "The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919: Perspectives from the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas". Rochester Studies in Medical History. Vol. 30. University of Rochester Press. ISBN 978-1-58046-496-3 – via Google Books.
  15. ^ Barry JM (2004). The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Greatest Plague in History. Viking Penguin. p. 171. ISBN 978-0-670-89473-4.
  16. ^ Galvin J (July 31, 2007). "Spanish Flu Pandemic: 1918". Popular Mechanics. Retrieved October 2, 2011.
  17. ^ "Historical Estimates of World Population". Archived from the original on July 9, 2012. Retrieved March 29, 2013.
  18. ^ Patterson KD, Pyle GF (1991). "The geography and mortality of the 1918 influenza pandemic". Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 65 (1): 4–21. PMID 2021692.
  19. ^ Billings M (1997). "The 1918 Influenza Pandemic". Virology at Stanford University. Archived from the original on June 27, 2009. Retrieved May 1, 2009.
  20. ^ Johnson NP, Mueller J (2002). "Updating the accounts: global mortality of the 1918-1920 "Spanish" influenza pandemic". Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 76 (1): 105–15. doi:10.1353/bhm.2002.0022. PMID 11875246. S2CID 22974230.
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