Clemson just became the first FBS-level team to go 15-0 since Penn.
Guys, 15-0 Clemson might be even better than the 1897 Penn Quakers!
Let’s remember the last team before Clemson to go 15-0 in FBS-equivalent college football.
No, not Penn State. Penn. Like, Ivy League, Penn Quakers, Penn. Back in 1897.
College football was just a teensy bit different back in 1897. Like, field goals were worth five points kind of different. Like, Penn was a national power kind of different.
Who was more dominant? Let’s take a closer look at Penn’s achievements.
- Penn’s defense was dominating, even by the standards of the era. The Quakers recorded a whopping 12 shutouts, and never gave up more than 10 points in a single game. Their defense only gave up an average of 1.3 points per game. That’s outrageous, but that was also only good for second-best in the country. Princeton only gave up .5 points a game. By contrast, the 2018 leader, Mississippi State, gave up an average of 13.2 points a game.
- Penn was the only team to finished undefeated and untied that season.
- The Quakers scored an average of 30.9 points a game, which lead the country. In 2018, that would be sixth...in the Big 12.
- Sure, not every single one of Penn’s 15 wins was over a powerhouse program. They beat schools like Franklin & Marshall, Gettysburg, and Bucknell twice. But they also clobbered Virginia and Penn State, along with Ivy powers like Dartmouth, Harvard and Cornell, along with Carlisle, one of the most innovative offensive programs in the country.
- One of the tackles on this team? John Outland, the namesake for the Outland Trophy. He transferred to Penn from Kansas so he could study medicine. Relying on a big-time transfer? Pfft. How original.
- Another member of the team? A dude named Truxtun. He was awesome. Clemson has no players name Truxtun.
- Their reward for winning the title? A performance by something called the Mask and Wig club, which I assume was better than Imagine Dragons
the philadelphia inquirer
Anyway, sure, going 15-0 and winning the College Football Playoff and obliterating an undefeated Alabama is cool, but did Clemson shut out 12 teams? Did they beat Brown by 40 ... on the road?
No. Because they’re scared. Honor your true 15-0 champions.
We haven’t had other 15-0 teams for a lots of good reasons
Going undefeated when you’re only playing 11 teams is pretty hard, even if some of those games were against like, local high schools or YMCA groups, which actually happened in the 1800s. There was no NCAA or centralized authority to mandate uniform scheduling, so even playing 15 regular season games at all was uncommon, let alone winning all of them.
Around the turn of the century, conference leaders with the Western Conference (now known as the Big Ten) pushed to dramatically shorten schedules to try and reign in the excesses of the sport, and other new conferences followed with similar reforms. Nobody would get a chance to win 15 regular season games until recently, with the new college football playoff. And who knows when we might see it again?
Anyway, go Quakers.
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