Biglow was born on February 28, 1885 in Brooklyn, New York to Lucius Horatio Biglow II and Ada Albertine Rafferty. He was raised in Morristown, New Jersey and attended the Lawrenceville School. He later enrolled at Yale University, where he graduated in 1908 and was a member of Skull and Bones. At Yale, he was the rightguard on the school's football team for three years. He also played point on the ice hockey team for two years, helping the Elis win the Intercollegiate Championship in 1908. Biglow was selected as an All-American in 1906 and unanimously elected as the captain of Yale's 1907 championship football team. He was also tapped for Yale's Skull and Bones society in 1906. A November 1907 newspaper article said of Biglow:
"Yale's captain is sturdy right tackle Bigelow.... Bigelow is typically a Yale football product. During his prep school at Lawrenceville he failed to even make a place on the minor aggregation.
Biglow was also on the Yale crew one year. Despite having "pulled the strongest oar in the varsity shell" during his one year competing on the crew, his parents opposed his rowing any longer. Biglow's parents wished for him to commence a business career upon his graduation in 1908, leading him to decline to follow the Yale tradition of having the football team captain return the following fall as the team's coach. However, in January 1908, Yale's new football team captain Robert Burch announced that he had persuaded Biglow to return in the fall as Yale's head football coach. As Yale's coach, Biglow advocated better moral standards in college athletics:
"'The time was,' says Ray Biglow, former captain of the Yale team and now its coach, 'when the best fellow in college was he who could drink all his fellows under the table. I venture to say that two-thirds of the men on the great amateur baseball and football teams now are either out-and-out Christians or morally clean.'"
Biglow served in the position as Yale's football coach for one year. In 1912, a newspaper article on the greatest football players produced by Yale referred to the "brilliant Ray Bigelow" who was "always just a little better than anyone than any who played against him." Biglow remained an active supporter of Yale football and, in 1915, created a "sensation" when he advocated hiring of Foster Sanford as the school's head football coach in a letter to the Yale Daily News. Biglow died after a long illness at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts on July 9, 1961 at the age of 76.
