1910 College Football All-America Team


The 1910 College Football All-America team is composed of college football players who were selected as All-Americans for the 1910 college football season. The only selector for the 1910 season who has been recognized as "official" by the National Collegiate Athletic Association is Walter Camp. Many other sports writers, newspapers, coaches and others also selected All-America teams in 1910. The magazine Leslie's Weekly attempted to develop a consensus All-American by polling 16 football experts and aggregating their votes. Others who selected All-Americans in 1911 include The New York Times, The New York Sun, and sports writer Wilton S. Farnsworth of the New York Evening Journal.
The 1910 Harvard Crimson football team compiled a record of 9–0–1 and outscored opponents 161 to 5. Harvard allowed only one team to score a point and played Yale to a 0–0 tie. A total of eight Harvard players were named first-team All-Americans by at least one selector. They are Hamilton Corbett, Robert Fisher, Richard Plimpton Lewis, Robert Gordon McKay, Wayland Minot, Lawrence Dunlap Smith, Percy Wendell, and Lothrop "Ted" Withington.
Only three players from schools outside of the Ivy League were selected as consensus first-team All-Americans. They are Albert Benbrook and Stanfield Wells from Michigan and James Walker of Minnesota.

Walter Camp's "official" selections

The only individual who has been recognized as an "official" selector by the National Collegiate Athletic Association for the 1910 season is Walter Camp. Accordingly, the NCAA's official listing of "Consensus All-America Selections" mirrors Camp's first-team picks. Eight of Camp's first-team All-Americans in 1910 played on teams from the Ivy League. The only players recognized by Camp from outside the Ivy League were Albert Benbrook and Stanfield Wells from Michigan and James Walker of Minnesota.
Camp's first-team selections for 1910 were:
By 1910, there was a proliferation of newspapers, sports writers, coaches and others choosing All-America teams. Recognizing the difficulties faced by any single person who could only watch one game per week, some began to seek better methodologies for selecting a true "consensus" All-America team. Leslie's Weekly sought to identify a consensus All-America team. Its team was compiled by Edward Bushnell, the editor of the official year book of the intercollegiate association of amateur athletics, by polling "sixteen men who he regards as the best experts in America." The experts polled were all associated with Eastern colleges and universities: Joseph B. Pendleton of Bowdoin, Dave Fultz of Brown, Carl S. Williams of Penn, Carl Marshall of Harvard, M.V. Bergen and James Hugh Moffatt of Princeton, Thomas Murphy of Harvard, A.C. Whiting and Charles Morice of Cornell, Clarence Weymouth of Yale, Fred Crolius of Dartmouth, Horatio B. Hackett of West Point, Walter R. Okeson of Lehigh, and Wilmer G. Crowell of Swarthmore. Eleven of the twelve players selected as consensus All-Americans by Leslie's Weekly played for Ivy League teams. The sole exception was Albert Benbrook of Michigan.
Bushnell's efforts revealed that two of Camp's picks were not truly "consensus" picks among the Eastern experts. The two players overlooked by Camp, but recognized by Leslie's Weekly, are:
The dominance of Ivy League players on Camp's All-America teams led to criticism over the years that his selections were biased against players from the leading Western universities, including Chicago, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Notre Dame. Many selectors picked only Eastern players. For example, Wilton S. Farnsworth's All-American eleven for the New York Evening Journal was made up of five players from Harvard, two from West Point, and one each from Yale, Princeton, Penn, and Brown.
The selectors were typically Eastern writers and former players who attended only games in the East. In December 1910, The Mansfield News, an Ohio newspaper, ran an article headlined: "All-American Teams of East Are Jokes: Critics Who Never Saw Western Teams Play to Name Best in Country -- Forget About Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois." The article noted: "Eastern sporting editors must be devoid of all sense of humor, judging by the way in which they permit their football writers to pick 'All-American' elevens. What man in the lot that have picked 'All-American' elevens this fall, saw a single game outside the North Atlantic States? With a conceit all their own they fail to recognize that the United States reaches more than 200 miles in any direction from New York.... Suppose an Ohio football writer picked 'All-American' teams. Ohio readers would not stand for it. But apparently the eastern readers will swallow anything."

All-Americans of 1910

Ends

NCAA recognized selectors for 1910
Other selectors
Bold = Consensus All-American