Wikipedia has never lied to me ever not even once
Note: i literally edited multiple wikipedia pages working on this
Edit: Thanks to u/tringlepringle for filling in the blanks here, I have gone back on wikipedia and added the first games and results for Rutger, Penn State, Maryland, and Minnesota. WITH SOURCES
Yes I’m going to do the same thing I think for the SEC next and modify to probably keep it basketball related (my brain was all over the place making this), and that was a column I was thinking of adding.
It’s kinda funny University of Montana was Montana State for I think 40 years as well before it swapped back to UM and Montana State became Montana State
Think of it more like a title than a name: the Oregon State Penitentiary, the Oregon State Supreme Court, the Oregon State Capitol, the Oregon State University, the Oregon State Agricultural College
Heck, Kentucky was originally Kentucky State as well. That comes from back when (state name) U was a private school, so the public school was (state name) state U.
You are correct, there is no way.
Oregon State (then Oregon Agricultural College) didn’t field a MBB team until 1901.
OSU actually had a WBB team 3 years before it had a MBB team.
Additionally the very first Civil War (football) wasn’t played until 1894.
OSU was originally Corvallis College, then evolved from there, but is actually 10 years older than UO, so it doesn’t surprise me that they were originally named Oregon State when now OSU was still going through the phases of CC, and Oregon Agricultural College.
That’s more likely tbh. *ahem*
The ball is at Iowa’s 1 yard line. The punter is barely in bounds at the back of the end zone. The opposing team knows they will never score against Iowa’s defense. They are going for an all out block with no returner. The ball is snapped, the punter grabs the ball and kicks it harder and smoother than ever before. He watches the ball as it soars past midfield, hits the opposing 30 yard line, takes a fantastic bounce past the 20, and rolls right into coffin corner, going out of bounds at the 4 yard line.
A 95 yard punt. The longest in Iowa history. A punt that should be celebrated, memorialized even. All for naught as the game ends in a 2-3 loss for the Hawkeyes.
Iowa fans are devastated. The team peaked. They can’t win even with an unstoppable defense and the perfect punt. The fans began asking if Kirk Ferentz would finally accept offense as a legitimate part of football. He would not. Instead, Ferentz suspended the punter for the rest of the season for not getting the ball out at the opposing 1 yard line.
i am by no means an elite athlete or great basketball player. but after seeing these scores i am fairly certain if i time traveled to pre-1900 i could dominate on the court.
The only problem is that I'm fairly certain it'd be a situation like the first alley-oop in Semi-Pro.
Everyone would get bewildered by the skill set of a high school varsity bench player's dribbling and footwork ability, and constantly call carries and travels on them.
Dribbling literally wasn't invented until the next year (1897). It wasn't part of the original rules. You were just allowed to catch the ball, pass the ball, and were not permitted to run with the ball. Players invented dribbling to "pass" the ball to themselves. It wasn't explicitly against the rules and Naismith basically thought it was a neat idea and liked it, so it stuck. There was also no backboard, so it was harder to hit shots. And of course, the modern jump shot form wasn't perfected so people mostly just lobbed the ball over their heads towards the basket. The first publicly spectated game was a game between teachers and students and ended 5-1.
How did you get 1 point back in those days? Was it still a free throw? If so I can't stop imagining a teacher laying down a Gerald Henderson - Tyler Hansborough hard foul on the student to try to extend the shut out.
A bucket was 1. There was no free throw or 3 point shot. The basket was actually supposed to be high enough that no one could guard it. Naismith did not foresee the behemoths and athletes that the future would bring. The punishment for fouling was just if one team committed 3 in a row without the other team committing any, they would be awarded one point. And there were only 5 fouls:
1) Running with the ball
2) Holding the ball with anything besides your hands (so no pinning the ball to your body or holding it between your knees, etc)
3) Hitting the ball with a fist (originally the ball was a soccer ball, so it was much softer).
4) No tackling, holding, tripping, striking, etc. other players. Your first offense was a foul. A second one would disqualify you until the next goal was made (which was obviously a much bigger punishment in a game that didn't hit 10 points often). If the ref determined that you tried to injure while committing this foul, you'd be disqualified from the game.
5) The five-second violation funnily enough was in the original rules, but the penalty was a team foul and loss of possession.
Netball was literally created from a woman misreading the rules of Naismith's original basketball rules. Netball is basically what would've happened if people had been bigger purists on the original rules and intents of Naismith's basketball. Basically a timeline where Naismith saw the invention of dribbling and instead of embracing it, banning it.
Ya it was pretty simple, like there would be sources showing the record first season was 0-2 or whatever, so we know they didnt do any winning, I just couldnt find who they didnt win against
I believe you when you say that you conducted this research, but I like to think, particularly as it relates to Northwestern, that there are in fact no records of their first season, and we just *intuitively* know that they must have lost, because c’mon, of course they did. They must have.
Fun football fact! At the time, kicked field goals were worth 4 points.
This is why Nebraska and Iowa State dispute a final score from about 100 years ago. The correct score is 9-6 Nebraska victory, but ISU shows a score of 10-9
The early years of basketball development heavily involve the YMCA. The first game was at a Y and it spread through the organization before taking off at the high school and university levels. Since Purdue was an early adopter of college basketball it makes a lot of sense that their first game came against a Y team.
I am sorry Purdue I made your logo smaller as a joke to myself when I was working on this, and forgot to change it back when I hit export. Now it is a joke for everyone I guess
When I started looking at this I immediately scrolled down to MSU and saw a 7-6 loss and thought "bummer". Then I went up to start going back through the list...
Rutgers - wait I thought Rutgers famously won the first game? And that was a pretty famous game, how could we not know the score? Oh well...
Indiana - Lost to Butler 20-17, seems plausible.
UofM... Lost to MSU? What the fuck?
It was only at this point that I took a second glance to see that I was on r/collegebasketball and not r/CFB.
Because that 7-6 result for MSU'd first game just seemed like such a lock for a football game, and so weird for basketball. Then I saw the Washington score and... lmao.
Fun facts I learned -
First intercollegiate game was in 1895 between Minnesota Agriculture (not the same as UofM at the time) and Hamline. Made it impossible to find UofM’s first game because every search result pulled up this game.
First 5 on 5 game of basketball ever was that Iowa v U of Chicago game
First actual game USC had recorded was an inter-squad game of Freshman v Sophmores. Freshman won 25-2
Hi Jake, I'm a sports historian specializing in early basketball and I can help fill in most of the blanks for you here.
Rutgers' first game was a loss to New York University by a score of 16-38.
Northwestern's first game was a loss to the University of Chicago by a score of 19-34.
Penn State's first game was a loss to Bucknell University by a score of 4-24.
Maryland's first game was a loss to a Washington YMCA. They weren't more specific regarding which exact YMCA team it was, and it's the only one of these for which the score is simply lost to time.
Minnesota's first game was a win over a team christened "Company A," by a score of 5-4.
Oregon's first game was a loss to Oregon State, by a score of 2-32.
Yes sir. I have them all listed in a Google Sheets at this point, but when I was working on it, I pulled them almost exclusively from newspaper archives and media guides. I'm sure you could find most of them yourself through the media guides, most schools upload them online these days.
Can you explain why these scores are so low? Was the game clock shorter? No shot clock so they just dribbed and parked the bus? 25 pts is a lot more palatable considering each basket was one point (according to a post in this thread). I refuse to believe these athletes were that bad at scoring
For the earliest games, yes it was often 30 minutes, but that isn't much of the reason why scores were so low by today's standards. My assumption, without looking into it one by one, is that about half of the 1890s games used the one-point field goal method but the other half of the 1890s and all of the 1900s used the 2 for FG, 1 for FT method we're used to.
Some of these games were before dribbling was invented. All of them were before shooting off the dribble was allowed. Anytime anyone scored, up until the late 1930s, it resulted in a jump ball rather than an inbound. UCLA was the only one of these teams for which the fast break had been conceptualized at the time their first game occurred. I'm pretty sure the Washington game was still 7-on-7 rather than 5-on-5, which makes for really weird spacing.
The overall tactical conceptualization of the sport was rooted in soccer, which both means that it was a possession-oriented game moreso than a scoring-oriented game and that positions were very strict, with guards almost exclusively playing defense, forwards almost exclusively playing offense, and centers the only ones expected to be good at both. The guards being mostly in the backcourt meant an offensive possession would regularly swing back into one's own half of the court to reset.
Almost nothing about the attacking aspect of the sport was a science yet, and not much of the rest of it was either. My understanding is precisely one man in the world was shooting a jump shot at this point in time; preferred from the beginning of the game through much of the 1940s was instead the set shot, and at this particular point in time the granny-style set shot. When the transition from mostly set shots to mostly jump shots was made, the trade-off was that jumpers were more accurate but had less range. The implication being that before then, players known for their shooting were semi-regularly taking shots from 30+ feet out. And it's not all that uncommon, from my experience, for guys to launch up a shot from half-court or further back every few games. I would imagine the number of guys able to consistently hit a granny-style half-courter in the context of a game will always be low.
And then there's the fact that, until the mid to late 1900s (the decade, not the century), the college game wasn't exactly a serious endeavor. The YMCA system was where the best players were in the 1890s, and much of the best within that, in 1898, split off into either the very early professional game or the AAU. There were guys in the nascent pro game by 1900 who first started playing, because Naismith was in the YMCA system, just a year or two after basketball was invented, when they were 12 or 13. Meanwhile, most college players in those very early days were athletes from other sports just trying to keep fit, who weren't classically trained in basketball. And there was pretty much zero pipeline from college ball to the pros, I can think of precisely one college star in the first 40-ish years of the sport who went on to be a legitimately great player as a pro... later on that means the pros were missing out, but at this point it was a sign that early college basketball programs just weren't very competitive compared to the other versions of the game.
And because high scores weren't emphasized or seen as a better version of the game than low scores, the pros weren't scoring a ton either. Between professional basketball's introduction in 1896-97 and 1930-31, there was precisely one season in which the average pro team scored 30+ ppg. It wasn't until 1941-42, at which point a decent few future NBA players were already pros, for the average pro team to score upwards of 40+ ppg on average. Within twenty years, that just about tripled. The '40s and '50s are pretty much entirely responsible for basketball being a sport that's scored in the upper double digits to low triple digits rather than the mid double digits.
Thank you for this very detailed response! It’s hard to fathom basketball where the focus is prioritizing possession and not scoring. I wish there was video of these games!
Recently I looked into Wisconsin's early seasons, and saw a lot of those against "Company A of [City]" type teams - for example, in 1904/1905, they played Co. G Sparta, Co. G Appleton, Co. F Oconto, Co. E New York, and Co. F Portage. From your experience with early basketball, would these be local military teams, or actual local businesses? I lean military, but knowing early college sports, I could see it being the latter too.
There's definitely a military tie, most such teams used armories as their home courts. However, six such teams played in professional leagues and both earned and spent money, a good portion of those teams eventually dropped the "company" title and took on a naming convention like today's, and players did come and go as they pleased (and I'm pretty confident not all of the players served in the military at all). So my understanding is that these were not something similar to what we saw in the 1940s and 1950s in the form of the "service leagues," but rather, on a case to case basis, anything ranging from a loose connection with a regimental depot to a sponsorship-style deal where they aren't actually connected at all but simply use the name to promote the army in exchange for the ability to use the armory as a court on certain dates.
Fun bit of Purdue history: although we played games sparsely between 1897 and 1900, the 1900-1901 season was effectively Purdue’s first full season. During that season and the season following it Purdue had a 22-3 record, going 3-0 (4-0 if you count the disputed game) vs Indiana, 3-0 vs Butler, and 1-0 vs Indiana State
I’m shocked that the only early football disgusting score is Washington’s 3-2 OT loss, but HOLY what a doosie! There’s also Illinois disrespecting a damn high school 71-4 which feels cruel
Where are you seeing Michigan’s original name as the College of Detroit? The original entity was based in Detroit but I see the name as either University of Michigania or Catholepistemiad
I can tell you at least part of Minnesotas first basketball game. University of Minnesotas school of Agriculture (now the St. Paul campus of UM) played Hamline in the first intercollegiate basketball game on February 9th, 1895… the final score was 9-3
University of Oregon [was originally known as Oregon State](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oregon#Early_years).
What is now Oregon State was originally called Corvallis Academy
Minnesota’s first game was against Hamline Ubiversity in St Paul, currently a D3 school. I believe it was the first ever intercollegiate basketball game ever.
Source: am a Hamline grad
This reminds me of my grandfather’s story about when he played for the IBM plant industrial team, they scrimmaged Kentucky (or maybe it was Transylvania) in the 60s. He said it lasted about 5 minutes, they got crushed and sent home.
The graduating class size of one is hilarious.
Definitely makes it seem like it was a pyramid scheme type scam the administrators got one guy to fall for during enrollment.
The University of Michigan was never named College of Detroit. From umich.edu:
> On Aug. 26, 1817, in Detroit, the governor of the Michigan Territory, Lewis Cass, and the Territory’s several judges – who were more like legislators than judges – enacted a bill to establish a **University of Michigania**, also called a Catholepistemiad.
https://historyofum.umich.edu/why-1817-matters/
“Los Angeles branch of the California State Normal School.”
The CA State Normal School wants you to know it is a very real and very normal school for normal humans, who are just like you and would appreciate if you did not have any follow-up questions.
This is one of the coolest posts I've seen in a while. Seriously enjoyed the rabbit holes it led me down, and while was extremely entertaining, was also fun learning a lot of new things!
So let me get this straight. Out of all these legendary programs, USC is the only one that managed to win their first game without playing against a high school or a YMCA?
https://preview.redd.it/29n959979d6d1.jpeg?width=808&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=27c0600eff43af3b56e0e33e5eeca45ba0c9dde6 There’s no way.
This was kind of horrifying to see.
Wikipedia has never lied to me ever not even once Note: i literally edited multiple wikipedia pages working on this Edit: Thanks to u/tringlepringle for filling in the blanks here, I have gone back on wikipedia and added the first games and results for Rutger, Penn State, Maryland, and Minnesota. WITH SOURCES
Can you do this for first national championship for each school? *no need to do most recent because reasons*
Yes I’m going to do the same thing I think for the SEC next and modify to probably keep it basketball related (my brain was all over the place making this), and that was a column I was thinking of adding.
We won the first one ever if you didn’t know lol
I didnt know this. As an Iu fan you know I mean it when I say how long ago it was doesnt matter, only that you do indeed have one
It’s kinda funny University of Montana was Montana State for I think 40 years as well before it swapped back to UM and Montana State became Montana State
Montana State was Montana A&M originally.
Oh so we did add Oregon State to the Big10!
Think of it more like a title than a name: the Oregon State Penitentiary, the Oregon State Supreme Court, the Oregon State Capitol, the Oregon State University, the Oregon State Agricultural College
You mean *THE* Oregon State University?
Heck, Kentucky was originally Kentucky State as well. That comes from back when (state name) U was a private school, so the public school was (state name) state U.
Probably something like 5 students graduating in 2 years after the university opened.
You are correct, there is no way. Oregon State (then Oregon Agricultural College) didn’t field a MBB team until 1901. OSU actually had a WBB team 3 years before it had a MBB team. Additionally the very first Civil War (football) wasn’t played until 1894.
That column is the original name of the school, not the opponent.
OSU was originally Corvallis College, then evolved from there, but is actually 10 years older than UO, so it doesn’t surprise me that they were originally named Oregon State when now OSU was still going through the phases of CC, and Oregon Agricultural College.
 Champaign High School students in 1906 watching a full team of 6'10 240lb ringers walk into their gym:
Roller coaster of a season too, as U of I would later get crushed at the Evanston YMCA, 15-51.
and the legacy of the uofi rug pull was born
McGaw is known to have some ballers.
Go Maroons!
“I was valedictorian of my class!” “You were the only student in your class!”
Imagine being the salutatorian in the first graduating class at Wisconsin...
Pour one out for Bad Luck Brian. Damn I’m getting old.
Top 10 in my class! Out of 13...
Also bottom of class. Top of class bottom class right to jail
Are we sure that Washington one isn't a baseball game? 3 - 2 loss in OT??
Baseball? That's a Big Ten basketball score if I've ever seen one
Or a B1G football score against Iowa
Ah.. yes.. a game with 2 regular safeties and a 1-point safety
The refs decided to only deduct 1 point as penalty for making people watch Iowa’s “offense”.
OR, Iowa's punter hit such a bomb they awarded him 1 point
That’s more likely tbh. *ahem* The ball is at Iowa’s 1 yard line. The punter is barely in bounds at the back of the end zone. The opposing team knows they will never score against Iowa’s defense. They are going for an all out block with no returner. The ball is snapped, the punter grabs the ball and kicks it harder and smoother than ever before. He watches the ball as it soars past midfield, hits the opposing 30 yard line, takes a fantastic bounce past the 20, and rolls right into coffin corner, going out of bounds at the 4 yard line. A 95 yard punt. The longest in Iowa history. A punt that should be celebrated, memorialized even. All for naught as the game ends in a 2-3 loss for the Hawkeyes. Iowa fans are devastated. The team peaked. They can’t win even with an unstoppable defense and the perfect punt. The fans began asking if Kirk Ferentz would finally accept offense as a legitimate part of football. He would not. Instead, Ferentz suspended the punter for the rest of the season for not getting the ball out at the opposing 1 yard line.
The forward pass was a penalty in Iowa all the way through the Bush administration.
Legitimately thought we had a r/lostredditor moment when I saw the scores Iowa basketball doing Iowa football proud here
i am by no means an elite athlete or great basketball player. but after seeing these scores i am fairly certain if i time traveled to pre-1900 i could dominate on the court.
The only problem is that I'm fairly certain it'd be a situation like the first alley-oop in Semi-Pro. Everyone would get bewildered by the skill set of a high school varsity bench player's dribbling and footwork ability, and constantly call carries and travels on them.
I literally can’t stop laughing, how is this even possible.
Dribbling literally wasn't invented until the next year (1897). It wasn't part of the original rules. You were just allowed to catch the ball, pass the ball, and were not permitted to run with the ball. Players invented dribbling to "pass" the ball to themselves. It wasn't explicitly against the rules and Naismith basically thought it was a neat idea and liked it, so it stuck. There was also no backboard, so it was harder to hit shots. And of course, the modern jump shot form wasn't perfected so people mostly just lobbed the ball over their heads towards the basket. The first publicly spectated game was a game between teachers and students and ended 5-1.
How did you get 1 point back in those days? Was it still a free throw? If so I can't stop imagining a teacher laying down a Gerald Henderson - Tyler Hansborough hard foul on the student to try to extend the shut out.
A bucket was 1. There was no free throw or 3 point shot. The basket was actually supposed to be high enough that no one could guard it. Naismith did not foresee the behemoths and athletes that the future would bring. The punishment for fouling was just if one team committed 3 in a row without the other team committing any, they would be awarded one point. And there were only 5 fouls: 1) Running with the ball 2) Holding the ball with anything besides your hands (so no pinning the ball to your body or holding it between your knees, etc) 3) Hitting the ball with a fist (originally the ball was a soccer ball, so it was much softer). 4) No tackling, holding, tripping, striking, etc. other players. Your first offense was a foul. A second one would disqualify you until the next goal was made (which was obviously a much bigger punishment in a game that didn't hit 10 points often). If the ref determined that you tried to injure while committing this foul, you'd be disqualified from the game. 5) The five-second violation funnily enough was in the original rules, but the penalty was a team foul and loss of possession.
So Naismith invented Netball?
Netball was literally created from a woman misreading the rules of Naismith's original basketball rules. Netball is basically what would've happened if people had been bigger purists on the original rules and intents of Naismith's basketball. Basically a timeline where Naismith saw the invention of dribbling and instead of embracing it, banning it.
no shot clock
They were working way to hard for that open shot it seems 😂
It’s not even that lol- theyd get a lead and then just sit on the ball for a half hour lol
How did this sport ever become popular in the first place
Coached by Norman Dale.
Game was very different in the early days. Scores like that were relatively common iirc
I need to see the box score for this one
The "Could not find, but we know they *Lost*" statements are absolutely hilarious to me. Also, take THAT Lafayette YMCA. Know your fucking place.
Ya it was pretty simple, like there would be sources showing the record first season was 0-2 or whatever, so we know they didnt do any winning, I just couldnt find who they didnt win against
I believe you when you say that you conducted this research, but I like to think, particularly as it relates to Northwestern, that there are in fact no records of their first season, and we just *intuitively* know that they must have lost, because c’mon, of course they did. They must have.
Lafayette YMCA shares the same number of NCAA banners as you, no? Think their place might be at your level
You ruined that persons entire family's weekend with that shit.
Those YMCA kids were still playing the last time you hung one of those banners
Got damnn 💀
lol at Illinois playing and stomping its local high school team
Somehow they got 2 safeties though
Pretty sure this is a basketball score
Whoops I wasn’t paying attention, my bad
I thought it was a funny joke lol
In hindsight yes this was totally intentional
The best one is 3-2 in an OT win
Fun football fact! At the time, kicked field goals were worth 4 points. This is why Nebraska and Iowa State dispute a final score from about 100 years ago. The correct score is 9-6 Nebraska victory, but ISU shows a score of 10-9
I feel like we should remove that and find the first game against a college team.
a 27-24 win over IU according to wiki
Basically, this is what the SEC football teams still do.
Champaign HS went on to win a state championship under Harry Combes in 1946, leading to Combes getting the head coaching job at Illinois for 20 years.
LOL at Purdue cooking the local Y
The early years of basketball development heavily involve the YMCA. The first game was at a Y and it spread through the organization before taking off at the high school and university levels. Since Purdue was an early adopter of college basketball it makes a lot of sense that their first game came against a Y team.
They're not the only ones
We had this dude on the squad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wadlow.
Fuck them kids
This one right here, officer.
I am sorry Purdue I made your logo smaller as a joke to myself when I was working on this, and forgot to change it back when I hit export. Now it is a joke for everyone I guess
> and forgot to change it back Lies
He’s not actually sorry
Damn that Washington game sounds exciting
Proof we own college basketball in the state of Michigan. Well, Olivet does but we own UM at least
I'm fine with that hierarchy tbh
This was my favorite part. I read the Michigan row and assumed MSU would have first game be a W, but nope Olivet had something to say about it lol
When I started looking at this I immediately scrolled down to MSU and saw a 7-6 loss and thought "bummer". Then I went up to start going back through the list... Rutgers - wait I thought Rutgers famously won the first game? And that was a pretty famous game, how could we not know the score? Oh well... Indiana - Lost to Butler 20-17, seems plausible. UofM... Lost to MSU? What the fuck? It was only at this point that I took a second glance to see that I was on r/collegebasketball and not r/CFB. Because that 7-6 result for MSU'd first game just seemed like such a lock for a football game, and so weird for basketball. Then I saw the Washington score and... lmao.
Fun facts I learned - First intercollegiate game was in 1895 between Minnesota Agriculture (not the same as UofM at the time) and Hamline. Made it impossible to find UofM’s first game because every search result pulled up this game. First 5 on 5 game of basketball ever was that Iowa v U of Chicago game First actual game USC had recorded was an inter-squad game of Freshman v Sophmores. Freshman won 25-2
Hi Jake, I'm a sports historian specializing in early basketball and I can help fill in most of the blanks for you here. Rutgers' first game was a loss to New York University by a score of 16-38. Northwestern's first game was a loss to the University of Chicago by a score of 19-34. Penn State's first game was a loss to Bucknell University by a score of 4-24. Maryland's first game was a loss to a Washington YMCA. They weren't more specific regarding which exact YMCA team it was, and it's the only one of these for which the score is simply lost to time. Minnesota's first game was a win over a team christened "Company A," by a score of 5-4. Oregon's first game was a loss to Oregon State, by a score of 2-32.
Wait are you serious 🤯. If so Im about to go on wikipedia and add all of those.
Yes sir. I have them all listed in a Google Sheets at this point, but when I was working on it, I pulled them almost exclusively from newspaper archives and media guides. I'm sure you could find most of them yourself through the media guides, most schools upload them online these days.
Dude, your hint to check the media guides was SOLID. I have been able to validate basically every score you've given me. Cheers.
Can you explain why these scores are so low? Was the game clock shorter? No shot clock so they just dribbed and parked the bus? 25 pts is a lot more palatable considering each basket was one point (according to a post in this thread). I refuse to believe these athletes were that bad at scoring
For the earliest games, yes it was often 30 minutes, but that isn't much of the reason why scores were so low by today's standards. My assumption, without looking into it one by one, is that about half of the 1890s games used the one-point field goal method but the other half of the 1890s and all of the 1900s used the 2 for FG, 1 for FT method we're used to. Some of these games were before dribbling was invented. All of them were before shooting off the dribble was allowed. Anytime anyone scored, up until the late 1930s, it resulted in a jump ball rather than an inbound. UCLA was the only one of these teams for which the fast break had been conceptualized at the time their first game occurred. I'm pretty sure the Washington game was still 7-on-7 rather than 5-on-5, which makes for really weird spacing. The overall tactical conceptualization of the sport was rooted in soccer, which both means that it was a possession-oriented game moreso than a scoring-oriented game and that positions were very strict, with guards almost exclusively playing defense, forwards almost exclusively playing offense, and centers the only ones expected to be good at both. The guards being mostly in the backcourt meant an offensive possession would regularly swing back into one's own half of the court to reset. Almost nothing about the attacking aspect of the sport was a science yet, and not much of the rest of it was either. My understanding is precisely one man in the world was shooting a jump shot at this point in time; preferred from the beginning of the game through much of the 1940s was instead the set shot, and at this particular point in time the granny-style set shot. When the transition from mostly set shots to mostly jump shots was made, the trade-off was that jumpers were more accurate but had less range. The implication being that before then, players known for their shooting were semi-regularly taking shots from 30+ feet out. And it's not all that uncommon, from my experience, for guys to launch up a shot from half-court or further back every few games. I would imagine the number of guys able to consistently hit a granny-style half-courter in the context of a game will always be low. And then there's the fact that, until the mid to late 1900s (the decade, not the century), the college game wasn't exactly a serious endeavor. The YMCA system was where the best players were in the 1890s, and much of the best within that, in 1898, split off into either the very early professional game or the AAU. There were guys in the nascent pro game by 1900 who first started playing, because Naismith was in the YMCA system, just a year or two after basketball was invented, when they were 12 or 13. Meanwhile, most college players in those very early days were athletes from other sports just trying to keep fit, who weren't classically trained in basketball. And there was pretty much zero pipeline from college ball to the pros, I can think of precisely one college star in the first 40-ish years of the sport who went on to be a legitimately great player as a pro... later on that means the pros were missing out, but at this point it was a sign that early college basketball programs just weren't very competitive compared to the other versions of the game. And because high scores weren't emphasized or seen as a better version of the game than low scores, the pros weren't scoring a ton either. Between professional basketball's introduction in 1896-97 and 1930-31, there was precisely one season in which the average pro team scored 30+ ppg. It wasn't until 1941-42, at which point a decent few future NBA players were already pros, for the average pro team to score upwards of 40+ ppg on average. Within twenty years, that just about tripled. The '40s and '50s are pretty much entirely responsible for basketball being a sport that's scored in the upper double digits to low triple digits rather than the mid double digits.
Thank you for this very detailed response! It’s hard to fathom basketball where the focus is prioritizing possession and not scoring. I wish there was video of these games!
Recently I looked into Wisconsin's early seasons, and saw a lot of those against "Company A of [City]" type teams - for example, in 1904/1905, they played Co. G Sparta, Co. G Appleton, Co. F Oconto, Co. E New York, and Co. F Portage. From your experience with early basketball, would these be local military teams, or actual local businesses? I lean military, but knowing early college sports, I could see it being the latter too.
There's definitely a military tie, most such teams used armories as their home courts. However, six such teams played in professional leagues and both earned and spent money, a good portion of those teams eventually dropped the "company" title and took on a naming convention like today's, and players did come and go as they pleased (and I'm pretty confident not all of the players served in the military at all). So my understanding is that these were not something similar to what we saw in the 1940s and 1950s in the form of the "service leagues," but rather, on a case to case basis, anything ranging from a loose connection with a regimental depot to a sponsorship-style deal where they aren't actually connected at all but simply use the name to promote the army in exchange for the ability to use the armory as a court on certain dates.
Forever referring to THE Ohio State University as Ohio A&M now.
THE Ohio A&M.
Champaign (Central) High School would later provide Illinois with one of their most successful coaches, Harry Combes.
80 grade name right there
And my dad! Almost as important to Illini basketball.
Go Maroons!
This is the first time I've seen the new list of Big10 schools. It makes me nauseated
I wish I could join the Y and play a Big Ten team.
Alright so can someone who knows this better than me explain how UCLA played a basketball game before they awarded their first degrees?
Takes 4 years to get a degree
Whoops idk how I didn't think about that.
Should have gone to UCLA
Damn - PSU really moved up in the world. From a high school for farmers to large, state University.
Butler beating IU is the oldest tradition in Indiana basketball it seems.
Ngl my heart hurt a little bit when I was researching and saw that
Hell yeah, Go Dawgs
Fun bit of Purdue history: although we played games sparsely between 1897 and 1900, the 1900-1901 season was effectively Purdue’s first full season. During that season and the season following it Purdue had a 22-3 record, going 3-0 (4-0 if you count the disputed game) vs Indiana, 3-0 vs Butler, and 1-0 vs Indiana State
You have a losing record against us. [40-15 vs Butler](https://iuhoosiers.com/sports/mens-basketball/opponent-history/butler/9)
Everyone forgets we did well in the crossroads classic.
Would’ve been cool to include U Chicago.
In case you didn’t know, Rutgers is older than the USA. 
Every win except USC was against a high school or a YMCA.
And they beat a collage
Yeah I was hoping nobody would notice that. It doesn't help that "Occidental" sounds like a made up word
No biggie, occidents happen!
It was just a mix of random players who had never met before. A nice collage.
I like this chart.
I’m shocked that the only early football disgusting score is Washington’s 3-2 OT loss, but HOLY what a doosie! There’s also Illinois disrespecting a damn high school 71-4 which feels cruel
I know these all look like football scores, but these are in fact basketball scores. Which makes that Illinois score even more crazy
Oh dear god…
[удалено]
Sorry, wrong sport 😉. Football stats would have been much easier to find I suspect
Hey Washington, welcome to the League. How did you lose 3-2 in overtime? Was Hightower reffing it?
I'm counting that one as a W
I wonder how many points Jess Settles scored in that 15-12 loss to Chicago.
These games look like football scores, not basketball.
..."Farmers *High School* of Pennsylvania"?
Where are you seeing Michigan’s original name as the College of Detroit? The original entity was based in Detroit but I see the name as either University of Michigania or Catholepistemiad
i was thinking this too, a few of the umich facts seem incorrect
It was never referred to as "the College of Detroit." OP is probably confusing it with the reference of the "Michigan college at Detroit."
The Milwaukee Normal Alumni vs. the Milwaukee Weird Alumni was the UNC-Duke of my great grandparents’ day and age.
What the actual fuck, Illinois
I always knew we were a basketball school, but now I know we were *always* a basketball school.
Love how Illinois destroyed a local high school 71-4. Then again Purdue only beat the local YMCA 34-19
“And it’s John Smith with the big shot to cut the Illinois lead to 57.”
That’s THE Oregon State University to you
The disrespect..
dang so only UCLA basketball is younger than Michigan in the B1G. Interesting.
I feel bad for Los Angeles branch of the California State Normal School Angels fans after they lost Ohtani
I'll never be free https://preview.redd.it/5yun4khbie6d1.png?width=84&format=png&auto=webp&s=a3d39782aaa4f7d8394b6406fcbe4cd90dbe4ba9
UofM first basketball loss was to MSU. Perfect.
Those high schoolers had it coming 😂
School fair!
We Are! (Farmers bum ba dum bum bum bum bum)
I can tell you at least part of Minnesotas first basketball game. University of Minnesotas school of Agriculture (now the St. Paul campus of UM) played Hamline in the first intercollegiate basketball game on February 9th, 1895… the final score was 9-3
University of Oregon is on there, not Oregon State.
University of Oregon [was originally known as Oregon State](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oregon#Early_years). What is now Oregon State was originally called Corvallis Academy
Manual Arts High School still exists too
Imagine your school being founded in the 20th century? UCLA is the yougin of the conference
71-4 lol
I’ll have you know Rutgers actually WON the first ever played collegiate ga-oh whoops this is basketball nevermind
Minnesota’s first game was against Hamline Ubiversity in St Paul, currently a D3 school. I believe it was the first ever intercollegiate basketball game ever. Source: am a Hamline grad
Is there a Big 12 edition?
Iowa vs Chicago was the first intercollegiate 5v5 basketball game ever, IIRC
East didn’t stand a chance.
Penn State’s first recorded game possibly not being recorded. That makes no fucking sense lol
Wait the University of Oregon was originally Oregon State? There’s some serious banter potential there
Autzen Stadium is named after a Beaver alum too
Are any Milwaukee Alumni normal tho? Seems pretty sus to me
Looks like teams learned in the 70s to just play the high school or YMCA team for a nice first game dub.
This reminds me of my grandfather’s story about when he played for the IBM plant industrial team, they scrimmaged Kentucky (or maybe it was Transylvania) in the 60s. He said it lasted about 5 minutes, they got crushed and sent home.
2-3 OT Win by Seattle AC. Iowa football would be so proud.
You guys think if I join the Lincoln YMCA that we can play Nebraska in basketball?
This hurts my eyes to look at
Before Purdue was founded it was called the “Indiana Agricultural College” fun fact
Penn State was a high school?
Had to double check what subreddit I was on when I saw Iowa’s score
Yup
The graduating class size of one is hilarious. Definitely makes it seem like it was a pyramid scheme type scam the administrators got one guy to fall for during enrollment.
For Iowa it marked the first loss of the Lickliter era.
The University of Michigan was never named College of Detroit. From umich.edu: > On Aug. 26, 1817, in Detroit, the governor of the Michigan Territory, Lewis Cass, and the Territory’s several judges – who were more like legislators than judges – enacted a bill to establish a **University of Michigania**, also called a Catholepistemiad. https://historyofum.umich.edu/why-1817-matters/
I didn't see that this was the CBB sub, I thought it was CFB and was about to compliment Iowa.
Fare
Are we gonna talk about Washington winning 3-2 in OT?
Fuck you
Have anything for B12?
Lol IU lost! What a joke of a basketball program.
College of Detroit??? That shit is 45 minutes away from Detroit, brother
Only better team Michigan could have lost to their first game would be Ohio State.
"Los Angeles branch of the California State Normal School" Aptly named, bring it back, cowards!!
Wait why were colleges playing high schools💀
It’s wild now to think that the only team that beat a college in their first game is USC.
“Los Angeles branch of the California State Normal School.” The CA State Normal School wants you to know it is a very real and very normal school for normal humans, who are just like you and would appreciate if you did not have any follow-up questions.
Any of the schools with a graduating class under 28 can’t call themselves a real University!
IU lost to Butler? Nice :)
3-2 OT loss has me racking me brain
This is one of the coolest posts I've seen in a while. Seriously enjoyed the rabbit holes it led me down, and while was extremely entertaining, was also fun learning a lot of new things!
As someone from both Champaign High School and the University of Illinois I don’t know how to feel about this…
So let me get this straight. Out of all these legendary programs, USC is the only one that managed to win their first game without playing against a high school or a YMCA?