Return to the 1897 season page

What is purported to be the last game of NC A&M's football season was a game between Davidson College and the Farmers. Though it is not recorded what day the game took place, it was supposedly after the matchup against UNC, and the last game that A&M played for the 1897 season. Most modern sources, including Thad Mumau and NC State's current athletics website (and media guides) claim NC A&M won the game, 19-0 (Mumau, p. 27; 1897 NC State Football Schedule).

Bill Beezley, author of The Wolfpack: Intercollegiate Athletics at North Carolina State University, did mention the game, but likely accidentally mixed up the score of the game with the Tar Heels and the purported Wildcats game, writing that A&M won 40-0 (Beezley, p. 9). Douglas Herakovich did not mention a game against Davidson at all (Herakovich, p. 3).

Though three-to-four histories of NC State's football history claim there was a game against Davidson in 1897, there is some doubt about the veracity of this claim. For starters, the vagueness: no historian cites the date of the game. Second, no newspaper articles describing the game could be found. Third, Davidson's yearbook, Quips and Cranks, did not mention the game in their end-of-year calendar, but did sarcastically note that on September 31st, "Faculty gives the foot-ball team permission to play two game [sic] off the hill. Dates October 32nd and November 31st" (Quips and Cranks, 1898, pp. 171-174). Perhaps the most important piece of evidence, however, comes from Davidson's Archives and Special Collections website. Their page writes that though Davidson had club football in the late 1880s and had a school-organized football schedule for the 1897 season, the (then) Pink and Blue of Davidson played only "area club teams"; the Wildcats weren't allowed to play intercollegiate matches until October of 1898 (Football, Davidson College). A final reason that this game was unlikely is because of the final score; a score of 19-0 would have been fairly difficult to reach using the scoring system used in 1897, which counted touchdowns for 4 points, the kick after for 2 points, the 1890s equivalent of field goals as 5 points, and safeties as 2 points. In order for the Farmers to reach 19 points, they would have had to to have drop kicked the ball from some point on the field and kicked it through the goal posts, a feat not recorded elsewhere in the Red and White's 1897 season. On top of the field goal, the Red and White would have had to score 3 touchdowns and missed two of the point-after kicks. While Davidson's team was new, they were not that bad.