Sewanee could not pass the football, as per the rules of the day, and it would be no match for Alabama or Clemson. The team was also entirely white. The first African-American student to graduate from Sewanee, Nathaniel Owens, entered in 1966 and graduated in 1970. He was an outstanding football player.

Nonetheless, Norman Jetmundsen Jr., a Birmingham lawyer who is putting together a documentary on the Sewanee team, is certain today’s elite teams would be impressed with the Tigers.

“They played 35 consecutive minutes a half on both sides of the ball with no substitution, and they played with serious injuries,” Jetmundsen said. “They played five games in six days on that train trip and won them all by shutout. Who wouldn’t be impressed by that?”

In a chapter of a book on the history of Sewanee, Register wrote that the 1899 team “formed part of the university’s heritage.” The professor said that Benjamin Lawton Wiggins, the university’s vice chancellor at the time, in particular, rallied students around the notion that football should be a part of the Southern male’s identity.

At the time, the South was desperate for cheer, and Sewanee’s success was seen as a response to the aristocratic Northerners of the day, who thought they owned the game. Football was something Southerners could excel at, especially in the aftermath of defeat in the Civil War and economic depression, said George Rable, an American historian.

“The 1890s were a rough time for the nation economically, but especially for the South,” Rable said. “Football provided some comfort and sense of achievement.”