Walter Camp Walter Camp's annual "official" All-America first team had been historically loaded with college players from
Harvard,
Yale,
Princeton,
Penn, and other
Northeastern colleges. 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 (then in America the West meant the
Great Lakes region), including Chicago, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Notre Dame. Many selectors picked only Eastern players. For example,
Wilton S. Farnsworth's All-American eleven of 1910 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. In 1894,
Michigan defeated Cornell and lobbied for its center
Fatty Smith to be the first Western All-American. The resistance to selecting Smith (or any other Western player) as an All-American is reflected in the following newspaper account from December 1894:"Some of the western colleges have developed great players on their teams and this year may claim for them a position on the All American team. Notably the University of Michigan claims for their center 'Fatty' Smith the supremacy in his position. But the western institutions have not yet mastered the eastern knowledge of all the details and fine points of the game. Smith has made a great record against the west and even against Cornell, but the Ithacan center was not a master of his position. When brought to face a man like the Stillman of today or the Bulliet of last year, Smith would simply be lost and entirely out generaled. So it would be with all of the claimants for line positions from western teams. And no one claims for a moment that western back field men could play in the same class with eastern men."
Other selectors 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." and Camp's team eventually grew to accommodate Western football in a way it never did with the South. To illustrate an example of this,
Chicago punter
Clarence Herschberger in
1898 and
Michigan back
Willie Heston in
1903 made Camp's first team. By 1905, Camp said V. P. I.'s
Hunter Carpenter was probably the best football player in the United States, but he hadn’t personally seen him and refused to name him to the All-American team because he wouldn’t pick any player that he hadn’t seen. In 1906,
Owsley Manier made Camp's third-team All-American.
Buck Mayer, in
1915, was the South's first consensus All-American. In
1917, the same year as the South's first national champion team,
John Heisman's
Georgia Tech, Tech players
Walker Carpenter and
Everett Strupper were the first two from the
Deep South selected first-team All-American.
The next year Bum Day was the first player on a Southern team selected for Camp's first team. Only six southern players ever made Camp's first team before his death in 1925, Day along with:
Bo McMillin of
Centre,
Red Weaver of Centre;
Bill Fincher of Georgia Tech;
Red Roberts of Centre; and
Lynn Bomar of Vanderbilt. Therefore for many years the All-Southern team was how the south recognized its best.
Fuzzy Woodruff commenting on the 1921 composite selection of the
Atlanta Constitution and
Atlanta Journal states "This composite pick has now been recognized as the south's official football hall of fame. No southern player can receive a higher honor unless he happens to be named on Walter Camp's All-American." By 1933 as above the modern Southeastern Conference was established, and All-SEC teams took prominence in the south; but also the south's recognition on All-America teams had increased, for the
1932 College Football All-America Team featured three southern consensus All-Americans:
Pete Gracey of
Vanderbilt,
Jimmy Hitchcock of
Auburn, and
Don Zimmerman of
Tulane. ==College Football Hall of Fame==