NC State Football - 1900

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Date Opponent Ranking Location Result Attendence Time Length Event Comments
10/5/1900 William Bingham School - Fair Grounds - Raleigh, NC N/A N/A 4:15 PM N/A Called off
10/6/1900 at North Carolina * - Campus Athletic Field - Chapel Hill, NC N/A N/A N/A UNC refused NC AA rules
10/10/1900 vs Guilford - Central Carolina Fair Grounds - Greensboro, NC (N) L, 0 - 5 40 min. Central Carolina Fair
10/11/1900 at Oak Ridge Institute - Playing Fields - Oak Ridge, NC W, 17 - 5 Game ruled out: ineligible A&M players
10/26/1900 Virginia Tech * - Fair Grounds - Raleigh, NC L, 2 - 18 5,000-10,000 3:15 PM 40 min. North Carolina State Fair
11/2/1900 Guilford - Pullen Park - Raleigh, NC L, 5 - 11 3:30 PM 40-50 min.
11/10/1900 at South Carolina * - College Park - Columbia, SC L, 0 - 12 4 PM 45 min. First forward passes against NCSU
11/12/1900 vs Davidson * - Latta Park - Charlotte, NC (N) L, 0 - 17 3:30 PM 50 min.
11/17/1900 North Carolina * - Fair Grounds - Raleigh, NC N/A N/A N/A UNC refused NC AA rules
11/19/1900 Georgia * - Fair Grounds - Raleigh, NC W, 6 - 5 3:30 PM 50 min.
11/23/1900 Oak Ridge Institute - Fair Grounds - Raleigh, NC W, 21 - 0 3:30 PM 40 min.
11/29/1900 South Carolina * - Fair Grounds - Raleigh, NC L, 5 - 17 3 PM 50 min. Thanksgiving Day

  * Non-conference games


The 1900 football season was an interesting one for the entire state of North Carolina. With the creation of a new-league called the North Carolina Athletic Association, which created some fairly forward-looking rules in an effort to help keep the game fair and sportsmanlike, most of the school-based football programs in the state had closer ties and a better claim to state champion than ever, but the fact that the association prohibited playing against teams who would not obey some of their strict rules about player eligibility, especially that of graduate students, kept A&M from continuing their series against the Tar Heels. The association would fold a few years later, but was reportedly instrumental in helping formalize the organization of athletics at A&M.

The campus field, which was on the grounds formerly belonging to Pullen Park, saw its first use in a formal match game in 1900. The grounds, which before 1900 had primarily been used for practices, had been contructed hastily late in the 1898 school year just before baseball season. In January of 1900, convicts from the nearby prison graded the land and sowed new grass in the ground, at the start of the season the field was "not as yet in good shape." The main reason the field looked bad was apparently because the grass had "set itself very irregularly" (New Berne Weekly Journal, January 2nd, 1900, p. 1; The Raleigh Times, September 22nd, 1900, p. 1; The Greensboro Evening Telegram, September 24th, 1900, p. 2). The Pullen Park field was used for the November 2nd game against Guilford due to the North Carolina Colored Fair being held on the Fair Grounds at the time of the game.

An additional challenge facing the A&M team regarding practice was the late formation of their "scrub" or practice team. As late as September 22nd, the Farmers and Mechanics had not assembled a scrub team (The Raleigh Times, September 22nd, 1900, p. 1). The College as a whole was facing some logistical errors of the opposite scale; rather than having too few men, the college was bursting at the seams. The enrollment broke 300 for the first time in school history; to house the students, President Winston was renting "all available houses in the neighborhood" in an attempt to accomodate all the students needing housing. Additionally, the school faced the logistical issue of proferring sufficient uniforms. Though early reports estimated the uniforms would come within a fortnight, the students were still without uniforms as late as mind-November (The Raleigh Post, September 6th, 1900, p. 10; The Wilmington Messenger, September 23rd, 1900, p. 3; The Wilmington Messenger, November 18th, 1900, p. 3).

Though retrospective reports wrote that the football team "was weaker than it was the year before," hopes abounded early in the season. Before the first game, Dr. Joel Whitaker (the man who made the previous quote) was reported as saying the team was "exceptionally strong this year" and that the team "will be a winner." Other reports at the time shared similarly cheery views, saying the team was "practicing often" and was "in very good shape" (Red and White, Vol. IX, No. 4 (December 1907), p. 156; The Raleigh Times, October 10th, 1900, p. 1; The (Raleigh) Morning Post, October 4th, 1900, p. 8).

One large bright spot in the year was the flourishing late in the season of O. Max Gardner, future governor of North Carolina and Under Secretary of the United States Treasury. Described as "an awkward double-jointed mouthy kind of Freshman" who "[worked] his mouth all the time," Gardner moved around from tackle to guard and finally to fullback, the position he found the most success in (Red and White, Vol. IX, No. 4 (December 1907), p. 156).

The Farmers had an up and down season, starting the season in hot water for breaking some of the new Athletic Association's eligibility rules. Though A&M claimed they fully believed that the students were eligible, their use of the men in their first win of the season against Oak Ridge later disqualified the victory, bringing the teams final record down to 2-6 instead of the 3-6 it could have been, though this is assuming that the Red and White would have played a second game with Oak Ridge without the game being removed from the record. The year also saw an increased presence of out-of-state competitors, with 4 games against inter-state matches, which matched the number of inter-state football games played every year before the 1900 season. Though she lost all of those games save a narrow win against a historically-weak Georgia team, the trend would continue, and a rivalry with VPI was developed over the course of the coming decades.

Football as a whole had an interesting year in North Carolina. While all newspapers periodically carried news of a football-related death or associated violence, this year the impact hit closer to home: William D. Price, a cadet of the Robert Bingham School in Asheville, North Carolina, who died of a broken spine during a practice scrimmage in late October. News of the death circulated widely in North Carolina, and even made it to Montana, though the state's governmental organizations do not appear to have taken any actions to ban the game in the state, as was the case with the infamous Von Gammon death of 1897 in Georgia (Asheville Citizen, October 22nd, 1900, p. 1). On the other hand, Raleigh-based HBCU Shaw University was named the "colored champion foot ball team of the United States" after defeating Howard University 5-0 on December 1st. Howard had reportedly held the title for the previous 10 years (The (Raleigh) Morning Post, December 2nd, 1900, p. 5).

Last updated: 4/14/2024