Football records

The earliest record of organized football at DePauw was in the 1877 Mirror, where members of the “Foot Ball Clubs” were listed. Its existence may have been sporadic and intramural, however. The first record of an intercollegiate game comes from a Thursday May 13, 1880 article in the Greencastle Banner that states “The Butler boys are coming here Saturday to play the Asbury boys a match game of foot ball in the morning, and baseball in the afternoon.” That game would have been played Saturday May 15, 1880. The results were not good as the June 1880 issue of the Asbury Monthly stated “Ever since their disastrous defeat by the Butlers, at foot ball, the Asbury boys have been kicking the shins of each other with vim and determination.”

In 1889, Guy M. Walker (Class of 1890) recruited three of his friends and advertised for an interest meeting on the bulletin board. "I was captain and taught the boys what little I knew -- which was indeed little," Walker remembered. Early games were played against the major university teams in the state including Indiana University, Purdue and Notre Dame with some success. The rivalry with Wabash, while tracing its start to baseball games of the 1860s, quickly became established in football. The first recorded game between the two teams was in 1890 which DePauw won by the score of 34 to 5.

The Monon Bell appeared as the symbol of the DePauw-Wabash rivalry in 1932 when Frank Lewis, general superintendent of the Chicago, Indianapolis and Louisville Railroad donated one of the railroad's locomotive bells to the winner of the annual football game. That 1932 game ended in a tie, however, so it remained for the undefeated, untied, unscored-upon team of 1933 to win the first Monon Bell prize. Numerous pranks, thefts and attempted thefts of the Monon Bell have marked the DePauw-Wabash football rivalry. The won-loss records of both teams in the Monon Bell games have been remarkably similar with the 100th meeting going to Wabash to break the 45-45-9 tie.