Thanksgiving Football in South Bend: 1896

Long before the Lions and the Cowboys, there was a Thanksgiving doubleheader in South Bend.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED NOVEMBER 22, 2025

The rain fell in South Bend the way that it often does on Thanksgiving: cold, steady, wet, miserable. The year was 1896. It was barely three decades since Lincoln made Thanksgiving official, and the holiday was still trying to establish itself in the American conscience. Dreary days like this one would seem to lend credence to the idea that Thanksgiving should be spent indoors stuffing oneself around a dining room table.

But not for South Benders. Not in 1896 anyway.

That's because there was another tradition gaining a foothold, a tradition nearly as old as Thanksgiving, and one that would become inseparable from the American feast day:

Football.

Long before there was such a thing as the NFL or a forward pass, South Bend seized on the young, brutal sport — and believe it or not, Notre Dame wasn't the only show in town.

Football was a different game back then. Touchdowns counted for four points, there was no such thing as kicking specialists, most players went both ways, and it wasn't uncommon for squads to dress — and play — the minimum number of men required to complete a game:

Eleven.

Old school football was a war of attrition — just eleven men pounding into each other relentlessly in the wet and the mud and cold, not a pad in sight. No water break. Cigarettes at half time.

With a show like that on the docket, it's no wonder so many decided that the turkey could wait. And for the fans who showed up to root on Notre Dame, they got quite a treat:

The sloppy weather slowed the scoring on that South Bend Thanksgiving afternoon, but Notre Dame prevailed over Beloit by a score of 8-0, courtesy of a pair of touchdowns and a pair of missed extra points. The contest marked the end of the football season, and it was a big win for a team that was still decades from being called the Fighting Irish. When the game ended, fans rushed the field and carried the victorious eleven off on their shoulders.

The celebration continued into the newsroom where reporters rushed to embellish the accomplishments of the day before the paper hit the press. They worked overtime to tell that Notre Dame had toppled a Beloit juggernaut that had been nigh unstoppable before arriving in South Bend, but actually Beloit finished the season with just two wins against three losses and a tie.

The newspaperman even claimed that the victory marked Notre Dame's ascendency to the “front rank of western college football”, but that was probably a little premature too. Notre Dame finished the 1896 season at 4-3, and their resume included a home loss to the Chicago School of Physicians and Surgeons.

But for the men in the newsroom, they'd only just begun with the propaganda. That's because Notre Dame wasn't the only college in town, and it wasn't the only one who'd achieved gridiron glory on Thanksgiving 1896.

 

 

Call the newspaperman a homer if you want to, but in 1896, that was just an unfortunate part of the job. Hype sold newspapers, and since there was no one on talk radio to argue with you, whatever the newspaperman wrote down was correct... so far as you knew.

If the newspaperman said that Notre Dame had ascended to the top of the heap in western college football, then it must be true. And if he said that Thanksgiving's gridiron action proved that the South Bend Commercial College was a clear number two, well then, he must have been right about that too.

After all, it had been proved on the field when the South Bend Commercialites stepped onto a frozen, muddy gridiron at Springbrook Park to face off against the lofty titan known as the Chicago Dental College.

The newspaperman gushed over the skill the boys from South Bend displayed against those aspiring dentists. They bloviated about the way they flexed their muscle against those “tooth carpenters”. The waxed enthusiastically about the determination they showed against the “mouth men.”

The game ended in a 10-10 tie.

Aaron Helman is an author, historian and adventurer from South Bend. You may have seen him around South Bend drinking coffee. Learn more about his work or check out his books at aaronhelman.com.