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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/Leegend124 on 2026-03-29 15:12:58+00:00.
I want to be transparent: I have spent an embarrassing number of hours on this. My search history reads like someone experiencing a very specific mental breakdown. My wife found me at 2am cross-referencing the career statistics of a 150-pound man with tuberculosis who died in 1925 against a 6’5" offensive tackle who makes Instagram posts for protein powder. I don’t know what to tell you. Here is what I found.
Background:
The 1894 Yale Bulldogs went 16-0 under head coach William Rhodes, outscored opponents 485-13, shut out 13 of 16 opponents, and were retroactively named national champions by the Billingsley Report, the Helms Athletic Foundation, and the National Championship Foundation. Five consensus All-Americans. Three eventual College Football Hall of Famers. Their schedule included Harvard, Princeton, Army, and also something called the Volunteer Athletic Association of New York, about whom we know exactly three things: they existed in some capacity during the fall of 1894, they agreed to play Yale, and they lost 42-0. That is the complete historical record of the Volunteer Athletic Association of New York. We do not know who they were, what they primarily volunteered for, or whether any of them ever recovered emotionally. They showed up and played and lost by 42 and went home and lived the rest of their lives. Godspeed to the Volunteers.
Yale’s captain, Frank Hinkey, stood 5’9", weighed 150 pounds, had tuberculosis, and played every game against his doctor’s direct orders. Pop Warner, one of the greatest coaches who ever lived, called him “pound for pound, the greatest football player ever.” He had no friends and spoke to essentially no one, earning him the nickname “Silent Frank.” He was so violent that after the 1894 Yale-Harvard game, which newspapers called both the “Hampden Park Blood Bath” and the “Springfield Massacre,” in which nine players were removed by injury or ejection, one player fell into a coma for several hours, and the New York Times compared the casualty list unfavorably to French dueling statistics, the primary public debate was whether Hinkey specifically had been too rough. He was also a member of Skull and Bones, ran zinc smelting plants in Kansas after graduation, and in 1897 jumped into the ocean to personally save eight drowning people from a capsized yacht, because he was the kind of man who treated every situation, including other people’s nautical emergencies, as an opportunity to demonstrate physical dominance. He died at 54 in a tuberculosis sanatorium in North Carolina. He is one of the most fascinating people to ever step on a football field and I will not hear any disrespect about him.
The supporting cast of this Yale team is, it turns out, absolutely deranged in the most glorious way. George Adee, the All-American quarterback, later became president of the United States Lawn Tennis Association, was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, and served in both the Spanish-American War and World War I. Phillip Stillman, the All-American center, became an insurance executive.
My personal favorite though, has to be defensive end John Campbell Greenway who went on to ride with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders at the Battle of San Juan Hill, built the first large open-pit copper mine in Arizona, founded the town of Ajo, won the Croix de Guerre from France, won the Distinguished Service Cross, got a statue placed in the United States Capitol, and died of a blood clot from gallstone surgery in a New York hospital, because even the most extraordinary man of the Gilded Age was not immune to gallstones.
These are the people playing football in 1894. I want to be very clear about what kind of humans we are dealing with before we discuss what happens to them on a football field against Fernando Mendoza.
The 2025 Indiana Hoosiers went 16-0 under head coach Curt Cignetti, outscored opponents 666-187, and won Indiana’s first national championship, beating Ohio State 13-10 in the Big Ten Championship, Alabama 38-3 in the Rose Bowl, Oregon 56-22 in the Peach Bowl, and Miami 27-21 in the National Championship. Two years before this, Indiana held the distinction of having more all-time losses than any FBS program in the history of college football. Not most losses in the Big Ten. Most losses in the country. Of any school. Ever. Cignetti walked in, told reporters “It’s simple. I win. Google me” with no hesitation and complete sincerity, and then went 27-2 in two seasons and collected a national championship trophy. Google put his quote at the top of his search results page as an Easter egg. A meme circulated during the national championship run showing four identical photos of his face under the labels “Happy Cig,” “Sad Cig,” “Excited Cig,” and “Furious Cig.” He was asked directly at a press conference whether he smiles. He said, “I do smile. And I am happy. At times.”
His quarterback, Fernando Mendoza, won the Heisman Trophy, Maxwell Award, Walter Camp Award, and Davey O’Brien Award. He completed 273 of 379 passes for 3,535 yards, 41 touchdowns and 6 interceptions across 16 games. He also has a 4.7 high school GPA, a business degree from Berkeley Haas he completed in three years, a commercial real estate internship on his resume, LinkedIn and YouTube as the only two apps on his phone, a LinkedIn career update about winning the Heisman that went viral, a brand partnership with LinkedIn, an MS fundraising burger named after him in Bloomington, and he refers to his offensive linemen as “the Hoggies.” He screamed “The Hoosiers are FLIPPIN’ champs!” after the Big Ten title win and then immediately said he thought he might have been doing too much. After the national championship he dropped a single “let’s f***ing go!” on live television, which was so out of character for a person known for saying “gosh darn it” in private that the entire internet spent 48 hours discussing it. He gives his postgame interviews staring directly into the camera like a pastor who is also a very nice accountant. NFL talent evaluators have described him in pre-draft documents as “goofy.” He is the human embodiment of a LinkedIn post that goes viral because it is just relentlessly, almost painfully, sincere.
He was also, as a high school senior, briefly committed to Yale University.
The same Yale.
He decommitted, went to Cal, transferred to Indiana, matched Yale’s 131-year-old record, and updated his LinkedIn about it.
We are coming back to this.
Now. The game itself:
The first thing that needs to happen before anyone touches a football is an agreement on which rules apply, and this is genuinely funnier than people give it credit for. In 1894, a touchdown was worth 4 points. A field goal was worth 5. That’s right, a kicked field goal was worth more than a score, because football in 1894 considered running the ball into the end zone slightly less impressive than booting it through the uprights from distance, which is why the entire offensive philosophy of the era looks unhinged by modern standards. The extra point after a touchdown was worth 2 points. A safety was also 2 points. There were three downs, not four. Five yards for a first down, not ten. No neutral zone between offense and defense. Pushing and pulling the ball carrier was perfectly legal. Forward passes did not exist as a concept anyone was prepared to defend because you could not throw the ball forward, ever, for any reason, under any circumstances. This would not change until 1906, and even then established coaches called it a “sissy play” and refused to use it for years.
Indiana’s entire offensive identity is built around throwing the ball forward to people who are running away from defenders. Mendoza threw 41 touchdown passes in 2025. He threw the ball forward literally hundreds of times. Under 1894 rules, every single one of those is a turnover. This is before we discuss pre-snap motion, the zone read, the RPO, or any of the other approximately 200 offensive concepts Indiana runs that were invented between 1906 and 2025 that the Yale defense has never heard of.
So the referees would need to sit down for somewhere between 45 minutes and three hours before kickoff to agree on which rules govern this game, and they would still not fully agree by the second quarter. Indiana will throw a pass on the first play and someone in a striped shirt from 1894 is going to try to call it a penalty. Another official from 2025 will explain that it is not. This will become a whole thing. Cignetti’s expression during this delay will be indistinguishable from his expression during the rest of the game.
Then the game starts, and Indiana scores in three plays on their opening drive.
Yale’s defense, which was genuinely the best defense in the country in 1894, is built around one concept. Find the man with the ball. Hit that man very hard. You know where the man with the ball is going to be, because in 1894 he runs forward or the ball goes sideways, and there are no other options. The Yale defensive scheme requires exactly zero post-snap reads. Everyone simply runs at the ball carrier. This worked perfectly against every opponent they faced, because every opponent they faced was operating under the same constraint.
Against Indiana, the man with the ball is determined by a post-snap read that hasn’t been invented yet. On the first play, Mendoza reads the Yale linebacker, decides he’s too far inside, and throws a slant to E…
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