Yale defends the belt, 51–0, on the road at MIT.
Where this game sits in the lineage
Yale came in 1,071 days into reign #6, which began with a win over Harvard, with 22 defenses already behind it; this was its 23rd defense. Yale went on to defend it 2 more times before Princeton took it on November 21, 1885, 1,092 days after the reign began.
For MIT this was its first shot at the belt; it had never held the belt. It still hasn’t: 2 attempts in all, every one of them a loss or a tie.
It was the first of 2 meetings between the two with the belt on the line; all-time Yale leads 2–0.
About this game
Yale traveled to MIT on October 31, 1885, in a Week 5 regular season matchup. MIT won the game 51-0, but Yale retained the belt as the defending champion, having previously beaten the team that MIT had held it from.
Written by Claude, strictly from this site’s own record of the game — the score and what it meant for the belt. CFBD doesn’t have a box score for games this old, so nothing here is invented beyond what’s verifiably on file.
Sources Game record: College Football Data (id 307) · This game in the downloadable dataset