Wet Football Games No New Thing at University--Every Man in 1892 Cornell Game Picked Up 25 Pounds of Mud

Newspaper critics have been loud in proclaiming the fact that the weather conditions of the "Battle of Mud" of two Saturdays ago were the worst under which a Harvard team has ever played football. A consultation of the football archives, however, shows that there have been other battles of mud in the past which were quite as muddy.

In one of the earliest games with Yale, on November 12, 1881, the records speak of a "cold driving storm which soon wet the players to the skin," in spite of the fact that "the Yale team all wore long blue caps knit like a stocking with a blue tassel.

Over ten years later, on November 5, 1892, Harvard met Cornell on a muddy field with rain falling constantly. At this game, "someone had the sensible thought to weigh the players in uniform before they went on the field and again after the game. It was found that there was an average increase of twenty-five pounds in contrast to an average loss in weight on a dry day."

In 1898, the last year in which P. D. Haughton '99 played on a Harvard team, the Yale game was played in "rain, pools of water and mud," and in 1912, the chronicler speaks of a Princeton game played in the "worst sea of mud imaginable," thereby proving conclusively that the expression "sea of mud" was not used by sport writers for the first time two weeks ago.