When the Bulldogs host South Carolina in Athens this October 12, it will mark the 90th anniversary of Sanford Stadium’s dedication—a 15-0 Georgia victory over the mighty Yale Bulldogs in 1929, in front of roughly 35,000 in attendance.

At the time, the initial contest played at the stadium not only offered a rare appearance for the Northern Bulldogs outside of their esteemed Yale Bowl, but the furthest—by far—Yale had traveled from home to play football. In addition, the crowd at Sanford Stadium was the largest to witness a college football game in the South. Still, for the Southern Bulldogs, the 1929 meeting between Georgia and Yale would come to signify much more—and for years to come.

To better understand the significance of the dedication game, perhaps it’s appropriate to appreciate the connection between the University of Georgia and Yale University.

“Even before there was football, the connection between the two schools goes way, way back,” says Doug Malan, a writer living near Hartford, Connecticut, who recently authored a book on the Georgia-Yale football series. “During the Revolutionary War, Yale men—namely, Abraham Baldwin—came down from Connecticut to Georgia and established the University. They started building structures, and they looked to Yale for architectural inspiration. For example, Georgia’s Old College (constructed in the early 1800s) closely resembles Yale’s Connecticut Hall.”

By the time Georgia fielded its first intercollegiate football team in 1892, Yale had not only been playing the sport for 20 years, but had already captured 13 national championships recognized by the NCAA. In time, however, the Southern Bulldogs would finally be featured on the national stage.

“By 1923, the sense was that Georgia wanted to be more than just a regional player in football, by playing games outside the South,” Malan says. “Georgia wanted to test itself against national powers. Southern schools such as North Carolina, Vanderbilt, and Virginia had already played against Yale (a combined eight times through 1922—all at the Yale Bowl, and only one resulting in a Yale defeat). So, why not Georgia?”

In 1923, Georgia began playing at Yale on an annual basis, resulting primarily in a losing effort. In six meetings through 1928, the Northern Bulldogs, who had won 18 NCAA-recognized national titles by that time, defeated the Southern Bulldogs, who had yet to even capture an outright conference championship, every time but once, while outscoring Georgia by an average of more than two touchdowns per game.

Leading up to the schools’ seventh meeting in 1929, Georgia made a special, yet seemingly dubious, request for Yale to travel South to play at newly constructed Sanford Stadium.

“At the time, Yale had an attitude that teams came to them to play,” Malan says. “Yale played in the distinguished Yale Bowl, which held over 70,000 people. Yale didn’t play away from home, except against Princeton or Harvard—and those two schools alternated each year—meaning just one road game per season for Yale.”

However, Yale decided to make a special exception for Georgia. Because of the 18th-century, brotherly-seeming connection between the two schools, the Northern Bulldogs agreed to travel the near-1,000 miles south to Athens to play in the inaugural game at Sanford Stadium which, fittingly, was largely patterned after the Yale Bowl.

Leading up to the 1929 game, Yale’s special exception for Georgia had been transformed into a truly special occasion for the city of Athens. Remarkably, more than a dozen Southern football teams moved their games back from Saturday to Friday in deference to Georgia-Yale, allowing more people to travel to the city. And people came from all over, including from Cuba. Dignitaries and politicians from all over the Southeast ventured to Athens, while dozens of trains arrived from as far away as New York City and Chicago.

“It seemed like everybody was descending on Athens. And, from all accounts, it was an absolute weekend to party,” Malan says. “Everything shut down for this huge social event. Everyone was treating the entire weekend as a massive party with the culmination being the football game.”

The culmination of Athens gone wild was the Yale players wilting in the Georgia heat in defeat. According to Malan, expecting fall-like weather, the Northern Bulldogs brought their traditional wool jerseys, only to be subjected to temperatures typical of a late summer afternoon.

“The weather might have been a factor, but you cannot take away from how Georgia performed,” Malan says. “Georgia was fast and coming strong, and Yale simply could not keep up with them.”

Still, I’ll add, in a time when the average football team substituted maybe a half-dozen players per game, as Georgia did on that October afternoon, an evidently exhausted Yale squad substituted twice that many in its 15-0 loss.

The 1929 meeting would be the only contest in the 11-game series through 1934 played in Athens. Regardless, beginning with that game, as Malan asserts, “that was it—Yale never beat Georgia again.” The Southern Bulldogs won each of the last five games against their counterparts—and by a one-sided, 80-to-28 combined score.

“And, it was around that time that a lot of the Eastern schools, like Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, which had been football powers, decided to maintain the sport as only a complementary piece of the educational experience,” Malan says. “At Yale, football soon became more of a campus activity as early as the 1930s, and certainly by the 1940s. Granted, Yale still produced good players, including two of the first three Heisman Trophy winners [in 1936 and 1937], but it soon was no longer a marquee, elite program.”

You could say the Georgia-Yale series from 1923-1934 was a microcosm of what was developing in college football in general at the time—a steady power shift from the East to the South, and somewhat to the West. And, Georgia’s 1929 victory over Yale in Athens was a pivotal point in the shift.

“It was like a passing of the torch from those Eastern powers to football programs like Georgia, Alabama, Southern California, UCLA, and others,” Malan says. “And, in the 1930s, these programs, and primarily those in the South, took the torch and ran with it. Subsequently, this handful of football programs, which undoubtedly included Georgia, in a way became what Yale had been.”

I highly recommend Malan's 164-page book on the Georgia-Yale football series—Southern Bulldog, Northern Bulldog. It can be purchased for only $10 on Amazon.