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)