Tennessee's 'Lost Game' Begets Its 'Lost Seasons'

NC A&M beat Tennessee, 12-6, in 1893 for the first victory over a college opponent in school history.

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By TIM PEELER, © 2024

The first game the North Carolina School of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts—NC State College’s original name—played against another college squad happened on Nov. 7, 1893, against Tennessee at the Raleigh Athletic Field, on the edge of downtown just across from Oakwood Cemetery.

It’s a game that Tennessee does not recognize in its record books, though it does acknowledge the three other games it played during a brutal five-day trip to play football games against North Carolina’s Big Four schools.

In those five days, the Volunteers played games against North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Trinity (now Duke) in Durham, Wake Forest in the town north of Raleigh by the same name and NC A&M in the state capital.

The boys of A&M had just taken up the sport a year earlier, on March 12, 1892, when it faced the Raleigh Male Academy, a prep school located on the present site of the North Carolina Governor’s Mansion, only a couple of miles away from A&M’s west Raleigh location. Coached by University of North Carolina student Perrin Busbee, the inexperienced team from A&M won the ragged contest, 14-6, in front of about 200 spectators, including students from Raleigh’s three all-female institutions.

“The game was played most pleasantly, being free from any disputes or injury,” reported the Raleigh News & Observer.

In the intervening 18 months, NC A&M shifted to intra-class games between freshmen, sophomore juniors and seniors. Shortly after the school’s first commencement in June 1893, however, the school started up its first true varsity squad sponsored by the nascent athletics association: a football squad of 18 students, coached by Raleigh native Bart Gatling, a UNC- and Harvard-educated lawyer. (In his N&O obituary, Gatling was identified as Raleigh’s one-time postmaster, its longest-serving barrister and a member of the Raleigh Chess Club, but not as a former football coach at A&M.)

Tennessee, which did not have a coach at the time, scheduled a barnstorming tour of North Carolina in November 1893, with games played against Trinity, North Carolina, Wake Forest and the Asheville Athletic Club, a collection of former college football players led by former Trinity player named Stringfield.

In the hopes of improving their fortunes, Tennessee wired Robert “Bobbie” Winston, a former English rugby player who had starred in football at Yale, to become the school’s first trainer, or in the nomenclature of the day, “coacher.”  Winston met the team in Raleigh to assess their prospects.

It was a difficult trip for the earliest version of the Volunteers. On Friday, Nov. 3, they traveled to Trinity Park in Durham, where the Trinity football team built a 70-0 lead in the first half and called the game before intermission ended. (The pre-Dukes did the same thing the next weekend against Virginia in a game played at Lynchburg, Virginia, citing bad officiating; Trinity was leading 60-0 at the time.)

The next day, Tennessee played on the university’s Chapel Hill campus, and fared no better. They lost 60-0 in two 30-minute halves.

“We don’t expect our University boys to beat trained football teams, but we had ventured the faint hope they would score one point or two,” wrote the Knoxville Sentinel on Nov. 4, 1893. “The goose eggs are growing monotonous.”

After a day off to celebrate the Sabbath and maybe say a few much-needed prayers, Tennessee’s team came to Raleigh to play Wake Forest on the school's old campus north of Raleigh. The results were similarly humiliating, a 64-0 loss to the Baptists.

Already in town, the Tennessee team sent a telegram to club officials in Asheville, saying they would not be able to make their scheduled Tuesday afternoon game. Instead, they scheduled a game to play the NC A&M at Athletic Field. Sensing it could beat North Carolina’s newest school, which had never faced a college opponent, Tennessee was hopeful it could at least score a touchdown, which it had not been able to do in its first five games as it was out muscled by a combined 250-0.

Prospects were good, in fact, through the first half of the 4 p.m. contest, for which spectators paid the huge amount of 25 cents for a ticket (modern value: $8.74). The two teams played to a scoreless tie in the first 30 minutes, with neither mounting a serious scoring threat as A&M fumbled the ball away once and Tennessee twice.

In the second half, A&M fullback William Henry Hughes Jr. of Raleigh scored the game’s first touchdown (worth five points at the time), going around the end and into the end zone. Hughes then kicked the point-after to give A&M a 6-0 lead.

Then Tennessee did something it had not done in its first five games that season: It found the goal line. Quarterback Howard Aiken Ijams scored on a center run and Barches kicked the extra point to tie the game.

Later in the second half, NC A&M halfback George Daniel Williams of Gatesville broke the 6-6 tie with a run around the end and Hughes kicked the extra point, assuring the home team of its first victory ever over another college, its first win against an interstate opponent and its first victory under Gatling.

The game was summed up in the next day’s Raleigh News & Observer this way: “The teams were pretty nearly matched, and a very good game was played. This is the first time the college has ever played a regular college team and her hard-fought for victory should be much appreciated by all.”

Things in Tennessee were less forgiving, but somewhat hopeful.

“The University football team returned last night from a week’s tour through North Carolina," reported Knoxville's Journal and Review. "They visited a number of colleges in the western part of the State and played several match games of football, but each time had the misfortune to loose [sic]. The boys report a splendid time and a royal reception wherever they went.

“Their general defeat is laid to the fact that they were not in first-rate shape, some of the men being inexperienced, while their opponents were all old men at the game and in first-class practice. The club will continue to practice almost daily and will give the visiting teams a game when they come to Knoxville.”

After the five-day trip to the Old North State, Winston took over all training  and began daily practices. His improved charges beat Maryville College (32-0) and the Asheville Athletic Club (12-6), the team Tennessee jilted in favor of playing against NC A&M.

Still, the season was so humiliating, Tennessee shut down its varsity football program for the next two years, playing the equivalent of a club schedule against neighborhood opponents. Winston moved on to Georgia, where he coached for one season.

According to Tennessee athletics football media guide:

In October 1894, the Athletic Association resolved to drop varsity football and look forward to baseball in the spring. After the humiliating 1893 season (two wins and four imposing defeats), the only two athletes willing to admit they had played on the 1893 team returned to  campus in 1894. To complicate matters, the practice field, located just west of the main entrance to the Hill, was being graded and improved.

Soon after this decision, W.B. Stokely, a UT senior who transferred from Wake Forest, persuaded a group of students to form a team. Stokely, who was elected captain, gave encouragement and direction to the other players. Even though the institution chose not to be represented officially on the gridiron, Stokely and his unofficial team kept football interest alive during this period when almost certainly it otherwise would have been allowed to lapse completely.

These unofficial games, referred to as “The Lost Years,” are not included in NCAA statistics nor in official University of Tennessee won-loss records.

It’s not uncommon for those earliest games not to be registered in modern athletic records. NC State, in fact, only has two games listed for the 1893 season, when in fact it played six contests: two against the North Carolina scrub (freshman/junior varsity) team and two against Oak Ridge Academy in Greensboro and one against the Raleigh Male Academy, the team it first played in 1892. (However, no newspaper accounts have been found to confirm the latter game.)

Some excellent research by NC State mechanical engineering grad Carter Claiborne (@cwclaiborne on X) chronicles all the earliest games in NC A&M and NC State history, game-by-game accounts with rosters, newspaper reports and scoring plays when available. Claiborne is a former member of NC State's marching band (2018-2021) from Charlotte who now lives in Raleigh and enjoys researching all things historical.

In his accounting, recorded by searching newspaper accounts of the day, he has uncovered 11 to 13 additional wins, six losses and one tie for NC State football from 1892-1901. It has also included three games that have no records of ever happening, the 1892 game against Raleigh Male Academy, an 1896 game against Guilford and a 1897 game against Davidson. This is not uncommon, which is why most sites like www.sports-reference.com begin after the turn of the century.

How can new games be added to the list of games some 135 years after the fact? Most of the original were passed down in handwritten or coarsely typewritten pages to unofficial record keepers during the first 50 years of the college. There were no boxscores or statistics and no yearbook or student newspaper reports to verify dates, scores and rosters. The names of nearly half of NC State's first 12 football coaches are spelled incorrectly in its own records.

Those things are a little easier to research in today’s world through searchable archives at newspapers.com and other internet resources, but since early publications did not have specific sports pages, it was incredibly difficult to find that information until papers began digitizing all of their editions. That's why I pay for subscriptions to multiple historical services to research stories such as this. (DM @PackTimPeeler for Venmo and PalPay accounts to help offset these costs.)

In his books Touchdown Wolfpack! (1995) and Pack Pride: An Illustrated History of NC State Basketball (1994), Raleigh author Doug Herakovich thoroughly researched many of these lost games, as did Claiborne and NC State history professor Bill Beezley.

Their efforts are huge for someone — like me — who depends on setting the record as straight as possible.