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.