Yale defends the belt, 76–0, at home over Wesleyan (CT).
Where this game sits in the lineage
Yale came in 310 days into reign #9, which began with a win over Harvard, with no defenses yet; this was its first defense. Yale went on to defend it 28 more times before Princeton took it on November 28, 1889, 735 days after the reign began.
For Wesleyan (CT) this was its 10th shot at the belt; it had never held the belt. It still hasn’t: 30 attempts in all, every one of them a loss or a tie.
It was the 8th of 20 belt games between the two; going in, Yale led the belt series 7–0; all-time Yale leads 20–0. Every meeting →
About this game
Yale defended the belt with a 76-0 victory over Wesleyan (CT) on September 29, 1888, in the first week of the regular season. The dominant performance allowed Yale to retain the lineal championship.
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 474) · This game in the downloadable dataset