The August 30, 1906 NYT announces Cornell's football schedule:

1. Colgate at Ithaca
2. Hamilton at Ithaca
3. Oberlin at Ithaca
4. Niagra at Ithaca
5. Bucknell at Ithaca
6. Bowdoin at Ithaca
7. Princeton at New York
8. Western University of Pennsylvania at Ithaca
9. Holy Cross at Ithaca
10. Swarthmore at Ithaca
11. Pennsylvania at Philadelphia

There aren't a lot of 21st century football powerhouses on this list, but then we are talking about 1906. At the time many of the so-called Northeastern Independents were at or near the pinnacle of football prowess.*

How did the Big Red fare? Here are the season-end results:

       date      visitor   visitscore       home      homescore
 9/29/1906      Colgate           0        Cornell          0                 
 10/3/1906     Hamilton           0        Cornell         21          
 10/6/1906      Oberlin           5        Cornell         25             
 10/10/1906      Niagara          6        Cornell         23             
 10/13/1906     Bucknell          6        Cornell         24                
 10/20/1906      Bowdoin          0        Cornell         72                
 10/27/1906    Princeton         14        Cornell          5  
 11/3/1906   Pittsburgh           0        Cornell         23              
 11/10/1906   Holy Cross          6        Cornell         16                 
 11/17/1906   Swarthmore          0        Cornell         28               
 11/29/1906      Cornell          0   Pennsylvania          0                

Cornell finished the season with a 8-1-2 record, scoring 237 points to its opponents' 37. The Wilson retro-rating system puts Cornell fifth in the country after Yale (#1), Princeton, Harvard, and Penn State.

Out of 64 teams playing in 1906, the Northeast Independents (UMass, Holy Cross, Amherst, Williams, Dartmouth, Army, Colgate, Brown, Syracuse, Cornell, Harvard, and Yale) had an average Wilson retro-rating of 692 versus an average rating of 519 amongst the 52 other teams (statistically different with P=0.001).In 1906, the average retro-rating rank amongst the Northeast Indpendents was 17 with all but one (UMass) above the median rating.

* My original language was unintentionally misleading: "There aren't a lot of household names on this list." I was referring to the football dimension and not general name recognition. HT: Co-blogger Larry White. Larry also points out that "Western University of Pennsylvania...is now known as the University of Pittsburgh," which the historical score data reflects.