If one man can be blamed for college football fans’ need to rank players—to mull over how Kenny Easley compares to, say, Fernando Mendoza in their wildly different callings and eras—it’s Caspar Whitney.
Whitney, writing for Harper’s in 1889, came up with the bright idea of choosing the best 11 players at the end of the college football season for an All-American team. His selections included a descendant of a literary icon (Princeton’s Edgar Allan Poe), a future Rough Rider (Princeton’s Roscoe Channing) and a future Hall of Fame coach (Yale’s Amos Alonzo Stagg).
