In the annals of school history nested in the St. Edward’s University archives lay tales of the long-forgotten school football team.  

St. Edward’s football began in the early 1900’s as an intramural club team that also played games against local high schools. The team—nicknamed ‘the Edsman’—did not play at the collegiate level in the early going.

St. Edward’s eventually played their inaugural season at the collegiate level in 1919 under Head Coach James Sheffield. He was replaced the following season by Coach William Gardener, whose leadership gave the “Edsman” respectability: the team went 7-2 that year and scored 223 points on the season, which included an 88-0 win against the West Texas Military Academy.

The program’s success was short lived, however. In 1921, Gardner’s successor Jack Meagher scheduled tougher games for the 1921 season. The Edsman faced the University of Texas Longhorns in their season opener that year.

In an embarrassing start to the new season, the imposing Longhorns won with ease, 33-0. It became clear after a loss to the UT freshman team and two more losses to Southwest Texas Normal and Dallas University, that—according to university historian William Dunn—St. Edward’s just was not fit for collegiate competition.

Surprisingly, the tables turned in 1922 when the Edsman finished with an 8-2 record. The team’s unexpected success instilled a promising outlook for the ’23 season as several new players joined the program. Their hallmark performance came in a 35-7 win against the University of Tulsa Golden Hurricane, who were said to be the region’s best.

Coach Meagher was still leading the team in 1925 when St. Edwards’s began playing “home” games at UT’s Memorial Stadium. But the program again suffered through competitive lull: the Edsman posted a soft 3-3-3 record by the end of the 1927 season.

It would take another 12 years before St. Edward’s would earn their first title as Texas Conference champions in 1939. Unfortunately, the Second World War broke out in Europe and the university was no longer able to subsidize its athletic programs; the announcement was first published in the campus newspaper, “The St. Edward’s Sport.”

 “World War II was starting and there just wasn’t enough money there, and so the football team was sort of put on hold, and then it just never came back,” said Archivist and Curator of Special Collections in the Scarborough Phillips Library April Sullivan.

The St. Edwards Football teams are remembered in the aged and tattered articles inside the Scarborough-Phillips Library Archives under “Kings of the