Yale defends the belt, 5–0, on the road at Crescent A.C..
Where this game sits in the lineage
Yale came in 712 days into reign #9, which began with a win over Harvard, with 22 defenses already behind it; this was its 23rd defense. Yale went on to defend it 6 more times before Princeton took it on November 28, 1889, 735 days after the reign began.
For Crescent A.C. this was its 3rd shot at the belt; it had never held the belt. It still hasn’t: 10 attempts in all, every one of them a loss or a tie.
It was the 3rd of 8 belt games between the two; going in, Yale led the belt series 2–0; all-time Yale leads 8–0. Every meeting →
About this game
Yale traveled to face Crescent A.C. on November 5, 1889, in the seventh week of the regular season. Crescent A.C. won 5-0 at home. Yale was the defending belt holder and retained the championship with the victory.
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 632) · This game in the downloadable dataset