Yale defends the belt, 46–0, on the road at Wesleyan (CT).
Where this game sits in the lineage
Yale came in 327 days into reign #9, which began with a win over Harvard, with 3 defenses already behind it; this was its 4th defense. Yale went on to defend it 25 more times before Princeton took it on November 28, 1889, 735 days after the reign began.
For Wesleyan (CT) this was its 11th 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 9th of 20 belt games between the two; going in, Yale led the belt series 8–0; all-time Yale leads 20–0. Every meeting →
About this game
Yale traveled to Wesleyan (CT) on October 16, 1888, as the belt holder. Wesleyan defeated Yale 46-0 to claim the belt in week 4 of the 1888 season.
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 495) · This game in the downloadable dataset