Breaking down who truly started the long-held tradition of homecoming

STANDING ALONE IN the middle of the grassy Francis Quadrangle at the University of Missouri are six ionic-style columns. They are the last remaining features from the school's first building, constructed in 1840, and when photographed with the domed, red-brick Jesse Hall in the background, it makes for a welcoming postcard.

During campus tours, it's on The Quad where prospective students have long been given a crash course on university lore.

"There were absolutely two things that we hit on every tour," said broadcaster Kevin Gehl, a Missouri alum and former homecoming king, who guided campus tours as an undergraduate student from 2006 to 2009. "Getting the history tied in right away was always so valuable because we could say, 'Listen, we have the first and best journalism school in the world and the oldest continuous homecoming.'

"Now, sometimes that would get shortened to, 'Well, we've got the oldest homecoming.'"

For many Missouri alums, the idea the school is the birthplace of modern homecoming -- a tradition celebrated at just about every high school and college in the country -- serves as a major source of pride.

It all goes back to 1911.

That's when football coach and athletic director Chester Brewer called for alumni to "come home" to see the Tigers play Kansas in Columbia, starting a homecoming tradition on campus that over a century later remains, without question, one of the largest, most cherished celebrations of its kind. As late as the 1930s, after homecoming had become a common occurrence across the country, Brewer would perpetuate the notion Missouri started it all, and for decades the urban legend grew.

But as Mizzou's origin story spread, so did competing claims. From Illinois to Michigan to Texas and beyond, there are differing tales of how homecoming came about. After becoming aware of this incredibly low-stakes debate ahead of Missouri's homecoming game Saturday against Auburn, ESPN set out to answer what seemed like a simple question: Where did the tradition of homecoming begin?

IN EARLY 1910, two University of Illinois students sat on the steps of what was then the school's YMCA. It's there, the story goes, that they first discussed the idea for an event to bring alumni back to campus.

"They wanted to do it in the fall because they thought centering it around a football game would be a good anchor to get people to come back," said Ryan Ross, the director of history and traditions programs for the Illinois Alumni Association. "They also wanted to have other events that people could take part in. The university had been having alumni reunions and class reunions -- that sort of thing -- for a long time and so what they wanted to do was move those reunions to the fall."

One of the students, W. Elmer Ekblaw, was a reporter for the student newspaper, the Daily Illini, and used the platform to advocate for the idea during the spring. It quickly gained support and by May, an official homecoming day was scheduled for October, when the football team would host rival Chicago, coached by the legendary Amos Alonzo Stagg.

In addition to the football game, there would be a baseball game, a track meet and other reunion events for alumni that planned to attend. The school's athletic association added 5,000 temporary seats to the football stadium to accommodate an estimated crowd of 12,000, which saw the Illini win 3-0. Illinois' first homecoming was celebrated as an overwhelming success, with the Daily Illini predicting other schools would follow the school's lead.

"The echoes of the events of this great home-coming will be heard as long as the University endures, for it is now almost a certainty that it will be adopted as a permanent annual institution the like of which no other University can boast," the paper wrote. "Illinois may well pride itself on being the originator of the plan for drawing home the alumni, a plan which will undoubtedly be adopted generally."

The article was prophetic in that homecoming was widely adopted and has been held at Illinois every year since, with the exception of 1918, due to the influenza epidemic. It also likely played a role in establishing widespread belief this was where the nationwide tradition was born.

"For more than a century, there's been this idea that we created homecoming and this idea has been passed down from generation to generation and just sort of proliferated," Ross said. "Alumni from here will get into arguments with people from other universities who claim they created homecoming."

It was of such importance at Illinois that in 2005, graduate student John Franch was commissioned to conduct a research project, paid for by the University Archives Student Life and Culture Archival Program, to determine who created homecoming.

"I was hired to look into the matter and hopefully settle it once and for all," Franch told ESPN in an email. "Needless to say, the answer to the question proved to be a complicated one."

It's complicated because the concept of alumni returning to campus to watch football wasn't something that needed to be invented. It happened naturally. And many schools had alumni gatherings that were planned around -- or just happened to coincide with -- football games or other athletic events. These were common in the Ivy League during the late 1800s.

Franch's report outlined how Michigan hosted what it referred to as "Alumni Games" beginning in 1897. The current football team would play an alumni team, and there were ancillary events designed to bring alumni together. In 1900, the format changed and the team played against Purdue in the designated alumni game. The similarities to homecoming were present, but Franch found that Michigan didn't start using the actual phrase -- homecoming -- until it was printed on the cover of a football program in 1947.

Northern Illinois, then known as Northern Illinois State Normal School, traces its homecoming roots to 1906. That's when the term first appeared in the school newspaper, but the homecoming football game, like how things began at Michigan, was played against an alumni team until 1914, when it played Wheaton College. This week, NIU will celebrate its homecoming, in what has been marketed as its 117th all time.

These examples raise questions about semantics. Should Michigan get credit for homecoming if it didn't call it homecoming? Should NIU get credit if its early versions were missing an important part -- a real opponent -- of what the tradition is now?

It's all up for debate.

What's not in dispute, however, is that in 1909 Baylor hosted a "Home-Coming" weekend that featured all the elements that remain important today. It took months of planning and included a pep rally, a bonfire, a parade and, of course, a football game, in which Baylor defeated TCU, 6-3.

If history wants to remember the first, official homecoming game in college football, all the evidence suggests this was it.

An 82-page university document was published in January 1910 and went into great detail to memorialize everything that took place.

"The purpose of the Home-Coming was to give an opportunity for the joyful meeting of former student friends, an occasion when old classmates could again feel the warm hand-clasp of their fellows, recall old memories and associations, and catch the Baylor spirit again," it said.

From that perspective, not much has changed.

"Just thinking about the ways that we make meaning of things and the importance of sports and our culture and the events that happen," said Dr. Elizabeth Rivera, the university archivist and associate librarian at Baylor. "It's documented here that human nature doesn't change over time, and they were doing the same things that we still do today for meaning-making and traditions that mean so much to people."

Among the attendees was the school's oldest living graduate at the time, a man named Oscar Leland, who was born in 1826, and, notably, arrived in an automobile.

Baylor wouldn't host another homecoming until 1915 -- something Rivera said was likely due to the cost of such a large-scale event -- and it didn't become an annual tradition until the 1930s. So while Baylor likely deserves credit for being first, it didn't have as much of an impact on the early growth of the tradition as other places.

For Ross, the existence of Baylor's homecoming in 1909 serves as clear evidence that Illinois, in 1910, was not first, but he has found that facts haven't gotten in the way of a good story.

"There's still people every year who say, 'Illinois invented homecoming,' and you have to correct them. You can gently correct them or if it's a top level administrator saying it, you just kind of let it go," Ross said. "But it happens all the time. What we've sort of come down on is Illinois didn't invent homecoming, but I think we have had the longest continuous homecoming celebration with the intention of it being an annual event."

TODD MCCUBBIN, THE executive director of the Mizzou Alumni Association, isn't exactly sure how Missouri's claim to have originated homecoming grew so strong over the years.

"We're very fortunate to have the sort of buy-in that we have from our community, from our students, from our alumni around this tradition," he said. "Part of that does come from the fact that at some point we were given credit at one time for being the first in the country.

"So, I think people kind of bought into that history and tradition of it. And then, honestly, once you get past that, it has to be more about -- they're not necessarily too concerned about who's first, we just know we do homecoming really well."

Even this week, there were at least two new Reddit posts that share a quote from Brewer, indicating Missouri invented homecoming. They link back to an article originally published by MIZZOU magazine in 2011, that wades into the history.

"For years, third-party ammunition has fueled debates about which university can be credited with starting homecoming," the articles stated. "Recognition from Jeopardy! and Trivial Pursuit is often touted as supporting evidence by Mizzou fans."

As part of this fact-finding mission, ESPN reached out to "Jeopardy!" for the purpose of sharing the clue and answer relating to Missouri's homecoming claim, but the exercise didn't substantiate what was written in 2011.

In 2021, a $400 clue read: "An early version of this tradition was in Nov. 1911 when the U. of Missouri's athletic director had alumni visit for the Kansas game." The correct response: What is homecoming?

But in a statement to ESPN, Jeopardy! co-head writer Billy Wisse said: "Sorry to say that Michele Loud [the show's other co-head writer] and I looked all kinds of ways, but we see absolutely no Jeopardy! clue ever about Missouri and homecoming other than the one from 2021."

What's undeniable is that Missouri's homecoming celebration is among the best in the country. The game is always held on one of the last three weekends of October and is preceded by a parade, talent competition, spirit rally and other alumni events. There are acts of service with a food drive and what McCubbin said is one of the largest blood drives in the country.

"It's the biggest weekend of the year in Columbia, by far," he said. "Everything else pales in comparison."

When Missouri moved to the SEC from the Big 12 in 2012, homecoming didn't change much, but it led to one memorable exchange McCubbin had with a colleague at another school, who questioned why the Tigers had scheduled their school as the homecoming opponent.

"I'm like, 'So what?'" McCubbin said. "And he says, 'Well, in the SEC it's got this kind of connotation that [homecoming is] where you kind of schedule the weaker opponent."

That scheduling philosophy reaches far beyond the SEC, but McCubbin explained that at Missouri, that's not part of the thinking.

And with over a century's worth of homecoming history, during which Mizzou was instrumental in shaping an American tradition, who is it for another school to suggest how it is run?

Even if, technically, Missouri wasn't where it all began.