Roll Garnet Tide, Roll

“That’s alright, that’s okay, you’ll all work for us someday!” 

So went the chant from the avid fans of Swarthmore’s football team. I can imagine, dear readers, especially for those of you who are first-year students, that the absence of a football team from Swarthmore can only seem natural. Why would a rigorous academic school like ours lower itself to such crass obscenities as having a football team? Of course, the counterpoint could be made when one looks at the U.S. News and World Report University Rankings (ever a reliable list), the top five schools in the country all have football teams. However, I digress, Swarthmore curiously lacks a football team, and that fact has only been true since 2000. That’s right, the class of ’99 can fondly remember cheering the Garnet Tide all the way down the field to victory. What was Swarthmore’s proud tradition of football, and why did we abandon it? Have there been any efforts to revive our defunct football team? I will address all of these pressing questions.

American football as we know it emerged in a few schools in the Mid-Atlantic region, with the first game being played between Rutgers and Princeton in 1869, just across the river in New Jersey. Swarthmore was quick to join the fray, forming the fifteenth football program in the nation. A far cry from Swarthmore’s 28-game losing streak in the late ’90s, the longest in the nation, Swarthmore football in the early days was a powerhouse, often beating the Pennsylvania Military Academy, later Widener University, in nearby Chester, PA. The Garnet also notably scored wins against John Hopkins University and several wins (and many losses) against Swarthmore archrival Haverford College. 

Football in these early years was a game of intense brutality, as shown by this comic from 1907, in which a skeleton clad in an early football uniform holds on to a football with a death grip (pun not intended). The caption reads: “The Football Season Opens.” During a game against Dickinson College, Dickinson player E. H. Garrison was killed after being tackled by the Swarthmore quarterback. Interestingly, 1905 saw Swarthmore catapulted to the forefront of national news with Robert “Tiny” Maxwell ’07 being put on newspapers’ front pages after having his face bloodied during a brutal game against the University of Pennsylvania. During the game, Maxwell took a beating that left his nose broken and his eyes swollen nearly shut. When this picture made its way to President Theodore Roosevelt, he allegedly swore to shut down college football if the colleges did not regulate the sport themselves. Maxwell’s story represents many of the essential features of early college football.

Maxwell had started out as a football player at the University of Chicago, where he was recruited in 1902. He competed not only as a football player but also as a boxer and a member of the track and field team, where he set the record for the hammer throw. He was later personally recruited to transfer to Swarthmore by then-college president Joseph Swain who insisted he improve his studies in biology. It was also Swain who directed Maxwell’s tuition bills to a member of the Board of Managers. So emerged what Phoenix writer Sahiba Gill ’12 in 2009 described as the phenomenon where “strapping young lads would appear for the season and disappear afterward, never even venturing up the hill for classes. All sports were firmly in the hands of the alumni, who often paid the way for star athletes.” Maxwell would turn around after graduation to begin coaching Swarthmore’s team in 1909 while studying at Jefferson Medical School.

What was the reaction to all of this brutality? Well, perhaps most famous is the attempt by wealthy Quaker woman Anna T. Jeanes to eliminate sports at Swarthmore altogether. In her will, as quoted from this Phoenix article, she would conditionally “give, devise and bequeath to Swarthmore College my Coal Lands and Mineral rights in the State of Pennsylvania, together with my Five-eighths ownership in the Rebecca Steadman tract (Havel Brook Colliery) on condition that the Management of the aforesaid Swarthmore College shall discontinue and abandon all participation in Intercollegiate athletics, sports and games,” Swarthmore famously rejected this gift (see here), but not for reasons one might think. The Board of Managers determined that if “…competitive games with other colleges are on the whole objectionable, they should be abolished for that reason, and not because of the tender of a sum of money.” However, the college would turn around and abolish football for the 1908 season, determining that it played “too prominent a part of the affairs of the College.” In 1909, football was brought back with athletes paying an additional athletics fee in order to sever the team’s reliance on, and subsequent interference by, the alumni. 

Football continued on, mostly uninterrupted, until the presidency of Al Bloom. Prior to Bloom’s tenure, Swarthmore had produced Neil Austrian ’61 who served for eight years as president and chief operating officer of the National Football League (NFL). He later served as a member of the Swarthmore Board of Managers. He and Jim Noyes later resigned from the board after Bloom’s successful efforts to eliminate the football team. Austrian resigned because he saw the elimination of football as an attack on the athletics program as a whole, which he interpreted as an “ideological” threat. Before his work to eliminate the team in 2000, Bloom had been an outspoken advocate for football at Swarthmore, claiming he was a “champion of football.” The debate on whether to keep or get rid of football was fundamentally one of whether Swarthmore could maintain its academic reputation while keeping a football team. A sports comic strip parodied Swarthmore as Swinburne University where studious scholars complain that their school should drop football before “…people think we’re a public university.” Elsewhere on Swinburne’s campus, a professor applauds the school’s losing team, “Losing at football is how we here at Swinburne reject American middle-class values.” 

Swarthmore eventually abolished football in 2000, alongside wrestling, and they demoted women’s badminton to a club sport. This decision resulted in them being able to reduce the number of recruited students from 17% of an incoming class to between 10-15%. It was hoped this would aid Swarthmore in retaining its rigorous academic reputation while allowing other sports to flourish, all 21 of Swarthmore’s remaining teams would be able to recruit rather than the twelve that had previously been permitted to recruit. 

The decision to abolish Swarthmore’s football team was not without controversy. As previously mentioned, two members of the Swarthmore board quit in response to the decision. Normally the board relied on consensus to reach a decision, however, the abolition of the football team occurred after a vote, the first time the college had defied consensus since 1922. The Philadelphia Inquirer concluded in a front-page article that “the elite college [Swarthmore] repudiated one of the great symbols of modern America — not because football was too expensive, as a few other colleges have found, but because it might tarnish the academic excellence Swarthmore holds dear.” Regardless of what the right answer might be, many alumni felt that Swarthmore had made the wrong decision, and many halted their donations to the school in response to the abandonment of football. Some disaffected Swarthmore alumni formed “Mind the Light,” which lobbied for the return of football among other things. It was largely the work of President Rebecca Chopp, Val Smith’s predecessor, to reconnect with the lost alumni and bring them back into the fold. Chopp’s work, along with time, ever a good softener of emotions, reconciled the football divide. In 2010, Austrian organized an event, and invited Chopp, to discuss the reinstitution of football, but nothing ever came of it. In 2012, Phoenix contributor Andrew Karas ’15 wrote, “It’s hard to conceive of a scenario in which football might come back, given that it would still be impossible to field a sufficiently large team and because many students would rather see college funds directed elsewhere.” 

After reading this article, you may ask yourself if Swarthmore should have a football team. I would rather ask the question, should Swarthmore have ever had a football team? Imagining Swarthmore as a school with student-athletes who barely show up to class brings to mind this post on X from University of Texas at Austin bragging about the football team’s average GPA of 2.89, the highest in the team’s history. Can we consider this chapter in Swarthmore’s history an aberration and breathe a collective sigh of relief about the end of football’s tyranny? Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure. I hope that going forward Swarthmore can critically think about the role of athletics on campus and how much we care about the student part of the student-athlete equation. Anyway, I hope to see you all at the Clothier Field Stadium cheering on the Garnet. Fight, fight for the inner light! Kill Quakers, Kill!

Special thanks to Gill and Karas, whose articles proved immensely helpful in researching this topic.