Boston College Eagles (1940)

Amazingly, in the six years I’ve done this little ol’ blog, I have yet to write about one of the more legendary teams in New England football annals — the 1940 Boston College team that went undefeated and claimed (and still claims) a share of the national championship (more on that later). Which is kind of odd, considering one of my early posts was on the 1939 bunch that went 9-2 and lost to future ACC rival Clemson in the Cotton Bowl. 

As noted in that long-ago post, the ’39 Eagles, under coach Frank Leahy, introduced the basic uniform template — gold helmets and pants, maroon or white jersey — that continues to this day. The 1940 team wore similar uniforms, except for an odd-looking outfit against Temple with something more along the line of practice jerseys (check out the stenciled numbers!). As far as I know, they were worn only once. 

Boston College (in white) hosts Temple at Fenway Park.
Note the stenciled numbers on the jerseys.

The 1940 team was the most celebrated in program history, well, until Jesus-in-cleats came along in early ‘80s. 😎 There’s plenty of info on this team out there, so I’ll try to sum it up in 10 points.

1. Defeated “powerhouses” Centre, Idaho, St. Anselm and Manhattan (actually, Manhattan was a pretty decent program in the ‘30s, believe it or not) in the early part of schedule and also beat an OK Tulane team in New Orleans.
2. Edged an outstanding Georgetown team (yes, you read that right), 19-18 at Fenway Park in a battle of undefeated teams. The Hoyas finished 8-2 and No. 13 in the final Associated Press poll.
3. Crushed Auburn, another decent SEC team that finished 6-4-1, 33-7.
4. Beat a mediocre Holy Cross team, 7-0, in the regular season finale.
5. Finished No. 5 in the final AP poll, released before the bowl games. 
6. Stunned undefeated SEC champion and No. 4 Tennessee 19-13, on a 24-yard QB draw TD run by quarterback “Chuckin’” Charley O’Rourke in the fourth quarter.
7. O’Rourke and four other Eagles from this team are in the College Football Hall of Fame.
8. End Gene Goodreault was a consensus All-American. Mike Holovak later coached BC and the Patriots, with fair success. Another Eagle, Joe Zabilski, was later a longtime coach and administrator at Northeastern. 
9. Coach Leahy, who went 20-2 in two years at BC, left for Notre Dame, where he won about a gazillion national titles and about as many Heisman Trophy winners.
10. Boston College claims a national title for this team despite point No. 5.

Boston College (in dark jerseys) shocks Tennessee in the 1941 Sugar Bowl.

It’s that last point that fascinated me for years. I remember first seeing the national title claim in a football book when I was younger, in a chapter on Leahy by someone who was clearly a starry-eyed Leahy fan, since the topic of the book was … the American Football League. (Leahy was the L.A. Chargers’ general manager their first year, and one of his disciples, Billy Sullivan, was the original owner of the then-Boston Patriots, but  otherwise, Leahy’s AFL connection is rather spurious, at best.)

Boston College's 1940 title banner, snapped by yours truly 
at a game several years ago.

I salted the BC title nugget away for years, then unearthed it when I came across a 1940 poll (this is before the interwebs, kiddies) that had BC at No. 5, behind (in order) Minnesota, Stanford, Michigan and Tennessee (remember, this is a pre-bowl poll). Being more jaded by this time, I figured the national title claim was a bogus claim Boston writers and fanboys made in the afterglow of the big Sugar Bowl win, and I still felt that way until recently.

A scene from the win over Holy Cross. Note the snowbanks
in front of Fenway's center-field wall.

TipTop 25 (I know it seems I can’t go a post without referencing this site, but it’s addictive for anyone with even a passing interest in the game’s history), which attempts to fix the AP polls from 1936 to today and creates “polls” from 1901-35, compares the 1940 campaigns on BC, Minnesota and Stanford at great length. The ruling from the replay booth … Minnesota and Stanford are the top two teams, but BC has a legit claim to the title based on the Tennessee win, which TipTop proclaims the biggest win of the year by any team, and compensates for BC having only two wins over ranked teams, compared with five for Minnesota and three for Stanford. They cover it in far more detail than I can, so click on the link and read for yourself.

So there you have it. BC’s national title claim is no pile of eagle feathers, and the school can continue to fly that 1940 title banner, guilt-free.

BC running back Lou Montgomery, the first African American
to play for the Eagles. Alas, segregation laws kept him from playing 
in the 1940 Cotton Bowl, the '41 Sugar Bowl and even the 1940 Auburn game,
even though it was in Boston. Reid Oslin's Tales From the Boston College Sideline
discusses Montgomery's sad story in greater detail.

Boston College, UMass (2020)

Although most of the teams featured in this little ol’ project either delayed their seasons until the spring (CAA teams) or canned the whole thing until next fall (Ivy League, UConn), two area teams put in a fall schedule. Here’s a closer look:

Under first-year coach Jeff Hafley and featuring a ton of transfers, Boston College (6-5 overall, 5-5 ACC, declined bowl offers) put in a full 11-game slate and came out with ONE COVID-19 case, which might be college football’s most impressive stat this year. While the Eagles moved forward with their offense — ditching the ground-and-pound for bombs away — they turned to the past with the uniforms. BC used the retro home alternate as its full-time home uni, and dusted off the 2015 retro road for regular use in 2020. The Eagles also unveiled a more elaborate “Bandana Man” uniform, adding bandana-themed numbers and pant stripes beyond the more muted effort used the last few years. The special uniform was worn at home against Notre Dame, and marked the only time the Eagles wore something with the “modern” BC fonts.

And then we have UMass (0-4, independent), in its ninth year of impersonating an FBS program. As I noted last year, at least the Minutemen looked good while losing, retaining 2019’s classy design. UMass wore only two combos in its limited schedule, but one — maroon helmet, maroon jersey, white pants — wasn’t worn among its seven different looks last year.  

One other tidbit: In 1963, UMass allowed only 12 points all season. This season, the Minutemen SCORED only 12 points all season — pretty bad, even with a four-game schedule under less-than-ideal conditions.  

Dartmouth Big Green, Princeton Tigers (1935)

I recently watched the first episode of Alex Trebek’s Jeopardy! from 1984. As I’m watching the first three contestants walking on stage, making TV history, all I could think was, “I’ll bet no one believed these three whenever they told their friends they were on the first episode of a TV institution.” 

Which brings us to another story of a “sideline” athlete, following Yale’s student manager-turned-football player. On Nov. 23, 1935, Princeton defeated Dartmouth, 26-6, in a battle of undefeated teams at Palmer Stadium — with no help from a fan who ran onto the field who tried in vain to help the Big Green’s cause. 

And while the culprit was never identified, any number of people for years afterward probably claimed to be what came to be known as the “12th man game.” (All apologies to Texas A&M and the Seattle Seahawks.) 

The 1935 Princeton Tigers ...

... and the '35 Dartmouth Big Green.
Only the lettermen are showed here,
so the fan who tried to help out the Green
didn't play enough to earn a letter, apparently.

A crowd of 55,000 filled the stadium despite a snowstorm and watched Princeton score four straight touchdowns after Dartmouth took an early 6-0 lead. Up 19-6 or 20-6 in the fourth quarter, depending on your source, the Tigers drove down to the Dartmouth 2- or 3-yard line, again, depending on your source. On third down, a fan leaped out of the end zone stands and lined up between two Dartmouth linemen, shouting “Kill them Princeton bastards!” as the Tigers center snapped the ball. The fan lunged at Princeton ballcarrier Pepper Constable … and fell flat on his face as Constable advanced just short of the goal line. After the cops hauled the guy away, Princeton scored on fourth down to account for the final score.

From a YouTube video of the "12th man game":
First, an inebriated fan runs onto the field as Princeton snaps the ball ...

... Next, the poor schmuck is shoved on his derriere ...

... Then hauled away by the cops as he gives the "We're No. 1" sign ...
(or maybe "only one more shot for me today!")

... and is stopped from slipping in the snow, puking his guts out or both.

As this Sports Illustrated story, er, illustrates, a number of people claimed to be the Big Green’s 12th man, including a short-order cook and an architect, neither of whom were Princeton fans. Whomever it was, not everyone was happy to see him go. “I was truly sorry to see him leave,” Dartmouth tackle Dave Camerer told SI in 1962. “The way they were ripping through us we needed all the help we could get.”

Added Camerer, in John McCallum’s “Ivy League Football Since 1872”: “I don’t think he was a college man. At least, what he yelled was, ‘Kill them Princeton bastards.’ ”

And hey, you can see the incident for yourself right here! (The fan, whoever he was, falls flat on his arse at about the 24-second mark.)

——

Now onto the uniforms. I would have sworn up, down and around that I wrote about the 1930s Tigers before, but apparently, I have not. This was the year Princeton coach Fritz Crisler introduced the iconic winged helmet, with the orange front and orange stripes down the black shell. After going 35-9-5 at Princeton from 1932-37, Crisler took his coaching talents — and the winged helmet — to Michigan, where he went 71-16-3 from 1938-47. 

Princeton wasn’t the first school to wear such a design — my research has New Hampshire wearing something similar as early as 1933, and this site says Ohio State started wearing a winged design in 1930 — but Crisler and the Tigers made it nationally popular, since the New York Times probably wasn't covering UNH games then. A couple of Michigan men, Dave Nelson and Harold Westerman, brought the design to Maine in 1949 (Nelson was head coach, Westerman his assistant), and Nelson brought it to Delaware as head coach in 1951; the Blue Hens wear it to this day.

Some Princeton equipment guys brandishing bushels of helmets in 1937.
Oh, to go back in time and grab one or two helmets ...

Princeton eventually went to plain orange helmets, but resurrected the winged look in 1998 (good) and reversed the colors in 2012 (not good).

The ’35 Tigers finished 9-0-0, and TipTop 25’s retroactive rankings has them at No. 4 for the season, who sounds about right. (While Princeton went undefeated, its schedule was a string of cream puffs. When Williams is judged one of your better opponents, that’s not a good sign.)

That's Fritz Crisler directing the Princeton Tigers in 1937.
If you look closely, you can see he's coaching IN FULL UNIFORM.
Now that's a badass.

***

I wrote (OK, it’s more like a drive-by) about Dartmouth’s mid-30s unis here. TipTop puts the Big Green, who finished 8-2, in the “others receiving votes” category. A few other notes about this team, for those of you still reading: 😎

• This was the Dartmouth team that made history when it defeated Yale 14-6 at the Yale Bowl to end the so-called “Yale Jinx,” an 0-16-2 stretch against the Bulldogs dating back to 1884 (Dartmouth lost a 113-0 nail-biter).
• The coach was Earl “Red” Blaik, who ran up a 45-15-4 record at Dartmouth from 1934-40 before leaving for Army, where he went 121-33-10 and won three straight national titles from 1944-46 and became one of the most legendary coaches in history. 

Yale Bulldogs (1952)

The history of sports is filled with …. I don’t want to say “fringe” athletes; maybe “sideline” athletes is a better phrase. We’re talking about people who were associated with a team in some fashion, perhaps not on the roster, but eventually got into a game or two and had a moment or two of glory. Some of these people are truly inspirational (Jason McElwain), some are truly bizarre (Charlie Faust), some are still discussed today (Eddie Gaedel) and some get noticed by Hollywood (Rudy). All help make the sports world a funner place.

Into this cast of delightful oddities we can add one Charlie Yeager, a 5-foot-5, 138-pound Yale football manager who scored against Harvard in 1952 — even though he wasn’t listed on the Bulldogs’ game-day roster.

In the third quarter of a 41-14 Yale pasting at Harvard Stadium, Bulldogs quarterback Ed Molloy threw his fourth TD pass of the game to make the score 40-14. The Bulldogs lined up to kick the extra point — one of them a pint-sized player wearing No. 99 who stationed himself at right end. No player wearing 99 was listed on the program’s roster.

Molloy, the place-kick holder, took the center snap. But instead of holding the ball for kicker Bob Parcells, Molloy sprung up, darted to his right and tossed the ball to No. 99 — Yeager — who was all alone in the end zone while the Crimson blocked a kick that never came and sportswriters in the press box wondered who No. 99 was until they were informed by a Yale emissary. 

Yeager dashed off the field (“I had to get out of there so I wouldn’t get hit,” he quipped afterward) and was mobbed by teammates who acted as if he had just led Yale to the Rose Bowl title. 

Charlie Yeager: No. 99 on the field, if not in the program;

No. 1 in the hearts of Yalies.

This was no spur-of-the-moment action dreamed up that morning: Yeager, a Buffalo native whose football playing experience amounted to some six-man football as a ninth-grader at Milford Academy in New York State, had signed the necessary eligibility paperwork early in the season. When not adjusting chinstraps, lining up helmets or gathering dirty towels at practice, he’d get anyone available — including assistant coach Angelo Bertelli, a former quarterback who won the 1943 Heisman Trophy at Notre Dame — to throw passes at him. Finally, the day before the Harvard game, Yale coach Jordan Olivar told Yeager that if Yale took a big lead, the diminutive manager would get his moment in the sun (actually, the weather was dark and drizzly, but work with me here) and play in the game — excuse me, The Game.

When the game started, Yeager was in street clothes (“You can’t manage in a football uniform,” he said), but with Yale up big at the half, Olivar told him to suit up, and the rest became a part of Harvard-Yale lore.

While Harvardtonians took the play as rubbing dirt in the wounds (“Inexcusable,” former Cambridge mayor and 1955 Harvard graduate Francis Duehay said 50 years later), Yeager, who died in November 2019, insisted there were no ill intentions. “The idea certainly was not to embarrass Harvard,'' Yeager told the New York Times in 2002. ''It really was kind of a Walter Mitty fantasy thing.’’

The Associated Press named the trick play as 1952’s most humorous college football incident.

The 1952 Yale lettermen. Here's a hint: Charlie Yeager's 
the one not in uniform.

I wrote briefly about the ’52 Yale uniforms in this post. Yale wore white jerseys for one game that year (at Navy) back when the Bulldogs usually wore blue shirts both at home and on the road. Otherwise, they almost resemble the current unis, minus the iconic “Y” on the sides of the helmet. Note the bigger, blockier numbers that were coming into vogue at this time.

One final oddity: The Harvard game-day program shows an illustration of several Yale players running onto the field amid a group of Harvard fans. The number on one of the Yale jerseys? Ninety-nine, of course.

Much of the info here came from a pair of Buffalo News articles (here and here; the second piece is actually has an NYT byline), a Yale Daily News retrospective, the previously linked New York Times piece and John McCallum’s exhaustive “Ivy League Football Since 1872”, which is filled with fun anecdotes like this one and is worth tracking down.

The program from the 1952 Harvard-Yale game.
No. 99 may not be listed on the roster, but he made the cover.

 

Cornell Big Red (1915)

Cornell is not the first school you think of when it comes to football excellence, at least in the 21st century. The Big Red has won only three Ivy League titles, the last in 1990. But like many of its Ivy contemporaries, Cornell was an honest-to-God national powerhouse in the sport’s formative years, and the school claims five national titles between 1915-39.

Let’s take a closer look at the first championship team, and of course, the uniforms. The 1915 Big Red won all nine games and outscored its foes 287-50. After warm-up wins over scary foes (well, scary by Division III standards) such as Gettysburg, Oberlin and Williams, Cornell crushed Bucknell 41-0 and edged Harvard 10-0 to snap the Crimson’s 33-game winning streak and hand the Bostonians their only defeat that year. 

The 1915 Big Red.

Next was a 45-0 win over the lower-level VPI Gobblers (better known these days as the Virginia Tech Hokies), followed by a 34-7 rout at Michigan and a come-from-behind 40-21 win over Washington & Lee (a minor power during this period). The Red capped its season with a 24-9 Thanksgiving win at Penn in the season-ending rivalry game. 

The star of the team was quarterback Charley Barrett; according to TipTop25 (the source for much of the info here, as is often the case when I do writeups on these “vintage” teams), Barrett scored 22 touchdowns and 161 points in 1914-15 despite often sitting out the second half of blowout wins. Apparently he wasn’t much of a student, as when his playing eligibility expired after the season, the school decided to cut him from the classroom, too. 

The one and only Charley Barrett, c. 1914.

The one game where Barrett sat out for a half and wasn’t a blowout was the Harvard game; after he scored the game’s only touchdown in the first half, Barrett was knocked out and forced to the sidelines. He tried to re-enter the game, but three fumbles and two dropped punts later, he left the game for good. Cornell’s punting and defense took over, highlighted by a third-quarter interception of Harvard QB Eddie Mahan after he drove his team to the Cornell 35-yard line. In the season finale against Penn, Barrett scored 18 or 24 points — deepening on your source — in the Big Red’s win.

Action from the 1915 Cornell-Harvad game, in which
the Big Red snapped the Crimson's 33-game win streak.

Barrett went on to serve in World War I, where injuries sustained in a cruiser explosion led to his untimely death in 1924. A bronze tablet in his memory was erected on the Cornell campus, dedicated by the Big Red — and archival Penn.

The 1915 season also marked a pair of beginnings — Schoellkopf Field, Cornell’s stadium that still exists today — and the Rose Bowl game as an annual tradition (there was a game in 1902, but it was so one-sided it was replaced by chariot races and OSTRICH RIDING for the next dozen years). The Tournament of Roses committee wanted an Eastern powerhouse to face western champ Washington State and naturally invited Cornell to appear. But the Big Red declined, citing a policy against postseason games. Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton, Columbia, Syracuse, Michigan, Nebraska and Pittsburgh (which went 8-1 that year) also turned down offers. According to TipTop, Pitt had been angling for a game against Cornell to decide the Eastern champion, but the Big Red agains cited its “no postseason” policy. TipTop, for what it’s worth, declares Cornell the undisputed national champion based on the Harvard win and all its victories coming by more than a touchdown. 

And so the committee settled upon Brown, which went 5-3-1, with the tie coming against Trinity and one of the losses coming Amherst. Washington State easily handled the Bears, 14-0. I wrote about Brown’s 1914 uniforms in this post, and probably should write about the ’15 bunch sooner or later, which is a great story in its own right. 

A few YouTube screen grabs from the 1915 Cornell-Penn game.
The Big Red's numbers (on the white background) look fairly crisp, while
Penn's, um ... don't.

And now, the uniforms. The numbers on the Cornell jerseys are somewhat similar to Brown’s in the above link with a font somewhat resembling that of 2007-17 English Premier League soccer. Even in 1915, the Big Red had the trademark double stripes on the socks and (most of the) sleeves, a tradition that continues to this day with the latter. Check out the screen grabs above from the Penn game — I know the concept of big block numbers was years away, but the digits on the Quakers’ jerseys look like they were drawn by a 6-year-old! (My apologies if I’ve offended any 6-year-olds reading this.)

The Cornell players pose with their mascot, Touchdown the bear, in 1915.
After it chased guests at the lobby of a Detroit hotel and got loose
in a saltwater taffy shop in Atlantic City, the cub was donated to a New York zoo.
(Source: The indispensable Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession)

Columbia Lions (1933)

Over the last year, we’ve profiled some unlikely teams that reached bowl games both big — 1919 Harvard (Rose Bowl) and 1945 Holy Cross (Orange Bowl) — and small — 1955 Rhode Island (Refrigerator Bowl) and 1969 Boston University (Pasadena Bowl). Today, we look at perhaps the most miraculous team among our group of bowlers: The 1933 Columbia Lions, who stunned mighty Stanford — and the nation — in the ’34 Rose Bowl in what was widely hailed as one of football greatest upsets to that point in history.

Columbia’s football history, of course, is not a glamorous one, marked by long losing streaks, consecutive winless seasons and on-campus apathy that almost borders on passion. But under coach Lou Little — Columbia’s seventh coach in 16 years since the the school reinstated the program in 1915 — the Lions were generally competitive and often quite good. Little won 110 games from 1930-56, but two victories defined his reign at Columbia: 1947’s 21-20 win over Army that ended the Cadets’ four-year, 32-game unbeaten streak, and the other was, well, … read on. 

The 1933 Columbia Lions, wearing the striped jerseys

(for more info on the unis, read on!)

In 1930 Columbia hired Little away from Georgetown, where he went 41-12-3 over six seasons. (To this day, I see a Georgetown score and my first thought is, “You mean Georgetown has football?” And yes, I know I went to Maine and people probably think the same thing about the Black Bears.) After a 5-4 debut season, Columbia went 29-4-2 over the next four seasons, highlighted by the ’33 edition. Columbia went 7-1 in the regular season, and although the schedule was considered soft by contemporary sportswriters, the Lions beat what are considered real football schools by today’s standards: Virginia (15-6), Penn State (33-0), Navy (14-7) and Syracuse (16-0). The lone setback was at Princeton (20-0), which finished 9-0 and outscored its foes 217-8 (yes, that reads E-I-G-H-T). But Princeton declined any Rose Bowl overtures, so the folks in Pasadena went with Plan B: Columbia, which would face 8-1 Stanford on New Year’s Day. 

Columbia's lone 1933 loss was to Princeton.

West Coast sportswriters, upset Stanford and the Rose Bowl people settled for what they considered a soft opponent, made the Indians (later the Cardinals, then the Cardinal) a four-touchdown favorite. The New York Times predicted the Lions would be overwhelmed by such sights as parade floats, starlets and other trappings, treating a group of sophisticated New Yorkers as if they were country bumpkins from Hanover or Orono.

In addition to the parades and celebrities, the teams also were greeted by rainy, muddy conditions at the Rose Bowl stadium, which kept the crowd down to about 35,000. (The pervious year’s game drew 78,874; the next year’s, 84,474.) Wikipedia tells us the stadium was so muddy, the Pasadena fire department pumped water out of the stadium. 

The 1934 Rose Bowl program, which survived the ravages

of weather and time. 

Stanford and Columbia slogged through a scoreless first quarter before Little unveiled a trick play, in this curious era when a three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust offense would suddenly spring an unusual, intricate play out of nowhere. 

With the ball of the Stanford 17-yard-line, quarterback Cliff Montgomery quickly handed the ball off to running back Al Barabas, then faked a handoff to another back, Ed Brominski. While the Stanford defense chased Montgomery and Brominski, Barabas scampered to his left untouched toward the end zone for the game’s only score. Columbia won 7-0 for the mega-upset over the four-TD favorites. The play, listed in the playbook as “KF-79,” became legendary in Columbia annals. Montgomery, a future College Football Hall of Fame inductee, was named the game’s MVP.

Cliff Montgomery in 1933 ...

... and in 2003 (left), wearing the 1933 throwback jersey.

Tip Top 25 has Columbia ranked No. 5 in hypothetical 1933 postseason poll, which sounds about right. While the rest of the Lions’ schedule was considered a run of cupcakes, the win over Stanford (No. 12) was HUGE and enough to land them in the top 5. (Princeton, which didn’t go bowling, is No. 2 at 9-0, and Tip Top considers the Tigers worthy of a national title claim.) 

And now, the uniforms, where it gets a little tricky. All the preseason and team photos have the Lions wearing blue jerseys with a navy friction-stripe pattern on the front. But all the pictures I’ve seen from that season — including the Rose Bowl — shows the shirts with plain blue fronts. When Columbia honored the ’33 team 70 years later, the Lions wore throwback jerseys with the striped fronts, even though they apparently weren’t worn in the regular season. (As I think I’ve said earlier, people who whine and moan about supposedly inaccurate throwback unis rank high on my list of things I can’t stand. Life’s too short, folks.) 

In the interest of completion and in diffusing confusion (for the half-dozen people who have waded this far!), I’ve included the preseason unis in the above graphic. I prefer the striped versions, although by ’33 stripes were on the outs as front jersey numbers became more commonplace.

The basic template — Light blue shirts, navy stripes down the sleeves and around the wrists — was used from at least the late 1920s until 1946, when the Lions adopted a style resembling those other Lions in Detroit, kicking off a long, long run of uniform changes.

NOTE: Much of the information above comes from John McCallum’s wonderful “Ivy League Football Since 1872,” published in 1977, and contains tons of great details and tidbits about Columbia’s Rose Bowl run.

Maine Black Bears, Rhode Island Rams (1982)

The NCAA record for number of overtimes in a football game is seven, set five times, most recently when Texas A&M defeated LSU 74-72 in 2018. It’s easy to forget that before 1996, overtime didn’t exist in most NCAA conferences, and tie games were still the norm. (My copy of the excellent USA Today College Football Encyclopedia goes on a long harangue about the evils of overtime games, basically noting that certain games, like the 1968 Harvard-Yale 29-29 showdown, were classics because they ended in a tie.)

But before ’96, a few Division I-AA (FCS) conferences — The Big Sky, Ohio Valley and Yankee conferences — already employed OT, and on Sept. 18, 1982, Maine and Rhode Island made national headlines when they needed six overtimes to decide their game in Orono, and their rematch the next year even garnered a regional network broadcast (a real network, not some cable/satellite channel with a four-digit number on your remote or a streaming internet “network” with a one-camera setup).

“Woody Hayes nor Bear Bryant nor Red Grange nor Grantland Rice ever experienced the kind of spectacle in which the University of Maine’s Black Bears and the University of Rhode Island’s Rams remained engaged in for 3 hours and 46 minutes at Alumni Field here Saturday afternoon,” the Bangor Daily News’ Bob Haskell wrote after Rhody outlasted Maine, 58-55. (Note No. 1: This was long before basketball scores became popular in football.)

Maine six-overtime loss to Rhode Island in 1982
made Page 1 of that Monday's Bangor Daily News.

One wonders how many of the estimated 6,000 fans in attendance figured the game was over when the clock read 0:00 after Maine scored two TDs in the final 6 1/2 minutes of regulation to knot the game at 21-all, although “the possibility of overtime had the press box buzzing,” Haskell wrote. Remember: It’s unlikely anyone in attendance had ever seen a college football game go to overtime before, so this was as new and fresh as a game ball on the first day of August practice.

And so the teams returned to the field, with each team getting four shots from the opponents’ 15-yard-line for a first down, followed by four more chances to scored a touchdown or field goal.

The scoreboard reads Period 4, but the score 
was 35-35 after Period 6 (or the second OT).

The teams swapped four TDs and one field goal through the first five OTs, and Maine took a 55-52 lead in OT No. 6 on Jack Leone’s 27-yard field goal. In the bottom of the “inning,” Rhody drove the ball down to the Maine 2, and faced fourth down. The Rams could have booted a chip shot field goal and thrown the game to a seventh OT, but coach Bob Griffin had seen enough; he opted to go for the TD and the win. Rams QB Dave Grimsich faked a handoff to tailback Cal Whitfield, then flipped the ball to receiver T.J. DelSanto on an end-around, and DelSanto waltzed into the end zone  untouched at 5:16 p.m. to end a game that kicked off at 1:30. (Note No. 2: This was long before four-hour football games became a regular thing.)  

“I was starting to lose myself. I think I was ready to drop,” an exhausted Griffin told the BDN after the game. His Rams set or tied 17 team records in the win.

But Maine coach Ron Rogerson was ready to shake his fist. “That was ridiculous what went on out there,” Rogerson — who admitted he voted for the OT procedure when the Yankee Conference added it in 1981 — said. “But there should be a limit. The risk of injury is just too great.”

And then, somehow, it got worse. One week later, Maine visited Boston University and lost, 48-45 — this time in four overtimes. The Black Bears had played the equivalent of 3 1/2 games in a span of eight days (56 minutes against Rhody, 40 vs., BU), and had nothing to show for it. 

“When I walked into our locker room at BU Saturday night, it couldn’t have been any worse if somebody had dropped a bomb there,” Rogerson told the Boston Globe’s Ernie Roberts.

“I’ve been at Delaware (as an assistant) when we’ve lost the national championship, but I’ve never seen a locker room like that,” Rogerson told the BDN’s Haskell right after the game. “Everyone is crying. It’s awful.”

An exhibit at the College Football Hall of Fame
honors the Maine-Rhody 6-OT classic.

A funny thing came out of the heartbreakers, though — the Black Bears received some national attention, a rarity then or now for an FCS team. Sports Illustrated, the Washington Post and even ABC descended upon Orono to report on this little school that played two multi-OT games in two weeks. The ball, program and BDN report of the game were sent to the College Football Hall of Fame in Kings Island, Ohio. (Note No. 3: The Hall of Fame has since moved to South Bend, Indiana and later Atlanta, where it resides today.) And the Maine-Rhody rematch On Sept. 17 1983 was broadcast regionally on CBS. (According to former athletic director Stuart Haskell’s exhaustive, glorious and comprehensive “The Maine Book,” the former head of CBS’ Bangor affiliate, a UMaine alumnus, used his pull with network executives to carry the game.) Alas, Rhody took the rematch, 24-16, but at least Maine took home roughly $200,000 for its moment in the network sun.

And despite the two setbacks, Maine still finished 7-4 and won a share of the YC title — although without OT, the Bears would have been 7-2-2, undisputed champs and likely in the NCAA I-AA tournament. Quarterback Rich LaBonte was named YC offensive player of the year and Rogerson was named coach of the year.

Rhody also was 7-4 — during a rare hot run for the Rams, who shared the YC title in ’81 — and was 2-3 (fifth) in the YC. Offensive lineman Richard Pelzer was named I-AA All-American.

Merrimack Warriors (1996-2001)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I suffered a massive brain cramp when Merrimack College moved up to Division I from D-II all sports, including football. It wasn’t until late in the season when I realized I needed to add a new team to the site (which primarily covers D-I institutions), and, of course, another uniform history. While Merrimack’s gridiron history goes back to only 1996, the Warriors have worn enough uniform styles to pack Duane Stadium (their home field).  

Merrimack had a club team for about a decade before its first varsity team hit the field in ’96. As a Catholic school whose colors were blue and gold, the Warriors elected to emulate a certain other Catholic school with blue and gold, right down to the Champion numbers (although Notre Dame’s were considerably smaller). While Merrimack didn’t exactly shake down much thunder while impersonating the Fighting Irish, the Warriors still went 5-4 in their first varsity season.

Merrimack's first varsity team in action, 1996.
The only thing missing is an "ND" on the sleeves.

The 1996 Merrimack Warriors. You've got to start somewhere,
even if it means shooting your first team photo in a basketball gym.

Over the next several years, Merrimack made some small changes to the uniform; while the Warriors kept the basic Notre Dame elements (plain gold helmet and pants, blue jersey), they drifted away in other areas, particularly a change to the ugly Machine font for the numbers and the addition of a Nike swoosh on the front. 

Upon moving to the Northeast-10 Conference from the Eastern Football Conference in 2001, Merrimack added an NE-10 patch to the jersey front, and the gold pants turned blue on the road. (And talk about mixed signals — the blue pants added an “M” in the form of Notre Dame arch-rival Michigan.) By the mid-aughties, the blue pants were worn on the road, as well, and by decade’s end, the Warriors ditched gold for yellow  (which their other teams already used — BTW, do message board users still get into childish “yellow vs. gold” debates?) and added the “MC” logo that’s worn to this day.

The '98 Warriors, with Machine font for numbers. 

By 2000, Merrimack was wearing numbers on the sleeves.

The '01 Warriors added a Northeast-10 logo to the jerseys.