Factoid 226 - The 1891 College Football season.

In 1891 there were 26 teams playing college football as it pertains to the forerunners of FBS (Division 1). Yale won the National Championship retroactively with a 13 - 0 record with legendary Walter Camp as their coach. Walter Camp was the first coach to win more than one national championship (he also won a third in 1892).

Interestingly, this was the third national champion that had a coach for their team, even though 22 seasons of football had already been played. That is simply because teams did not have coaches; coaches only came along some 20 years after the start of college football.

National Champions

• Yale 13–0 Walter Camp (BR, HAF, HS, NCF, PD) *

• The Wrigley Company was founded in Chicago.
• The British steamship SS Utopia, carrying Italian migrants to New York, sank in the inner harbor of Gibraltar after colliding with the battleship HMS Anson, killing 564.
• Jesse W. Reno patented the first escalator at Coney Beach.