Yale defends the belt, 63–5, on the road at Wesleyan (CT).
Where this game sits in the lineage
Yale came in 685 days into reign #9, which began with a win over Harvard, with 15 defenses already behind it; this was its 16th defense. Yale went on to defend it 13 more times before Princeton took it on November 28, 1889, 735 days after the reign began.
For Wesleyan (CT) this was its 14th 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 12th of 20 belt games between the two; going in, Yale led the belt series 11–0; all-time Yale leads 20–0. Every meeting →
About this game
Yale traveled to Wesleyan (CT) on October 9, 1889, in a week 3 regular season matchup. Wesleyan won the game 63-5, but Yale retained the College Football Belt as the defending champion.
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 582) · This game in the downloadable dataset