A Yahoo story about sports during the1918 Spanish flu pandemic (LINK) begins with this background:
That pandemic lasted 15 months and killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people worldwide, including approximately 675,000 Americans. ... More than 500 million people — about one-third of the population— were infected around the world.
The story then asks the questions, What did MLB look like during the 1918 Spanish Flu, and Was there a college football season in 1918?
While the Yahoo piece underplays the effect of World War I on the season, here's how it answers the second question:
Games didn’t start until October and November and teams played a condensed season. At least 18 teams did not play college football that season. Charity games were also popular.Here's the Dartmouth schedule and results from the 1918 season:
Oct. 19 – at Dartmouth 20, Norwich 0
Nov. 2 – Syracuse 34, Dartmouth 6 (at Springfield, Mass.)
Nov. 9 – at Dartmouth 26, Portsmouth Marines 0
Nov. 16 – at Dartmouth 26, Middlebury 0
Nov. 23 – Brown 28, Dartmouth 0 (Braves Field, Boston)
Nov. 28 – at Penn 21, Dartmouth 0
Of note is that Oct. 19 is the latest Dartmouth had started a season since 1888 and six is the fewest games the Big Green had played since 1891. Dartmouth played traditional nine-game seasons in 1917 and again in 1919.
Around the rest of the Ivy League in 1918:
Brown played five games including Camp Devens and League Island Navy Yard
Cornell did not play
Columbia went 5-1, captained by a Penn State player
Harvard went 3-0 against Tufts, Boston College and Brown
Penn 5-3
Princeton went 3-0 against Navy Pay School, Government Aero School and Camp Upton
Yale did not play citing the war
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Graduating Dartmouth senior Micah Croom, a onetime "four-star" Utah commit (LINK) whose career never took off with the Big Green, sat out last fall, entered the transfer portal and will give football another shot at USC in 2020. From the Orange County Register:The safety played three seasons for Dartmouth from 2016 to 2018. After spending the first two years on the program’s junior varsity squad, the Cerritos native and La Mirada High School alum played nine games in 2018 primarily on Dartmouth’s special teams, recording seven tackles and one fumble return.
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Mrs. BGA and the kids will tell you I've got a little bit of geek in me when it comes to computers. (When I was building up BGA Premium and when things go wrong with the website I wish I had a lot of geek in me but that's a story for another day.)
Anyway, someone dug up this classic 1978 collection of computer games written in BASIC, the breakthrough programming language born at Dartmouth, and after typing in one of the games made a video about it.
The video isn't much to look at but if you have some geek in you grab a copy of the book and see if you can have a better outcome than the fellow in the video who plays a text-based version of college football and has Hawaii defeating Dartmouth, 13-0!
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EXTRA POINT
I was doing my walk to the post office the other day and picked up a bottle cap on the side of the dirt road. Even here in rural Vermont people toss too much trash out of their car windows (an old neighbor in Etna used to refer to Budweiser as "The litterers' beer of choice" ) but you don't see as many bottle caps as you would have years ago.When I was a kid I used to collect metal caps from soda bottles. I kept them in a paper bag and loved the sound they made when I reached into the bag and dug through my collection to find one of my favorites. While I had a soft spot for Royal Crown Cola caps my favorite was the yellow Squirt cap, which was a little rarer than most. I probably only had 20 or 30 of those -)
