Yankee Conference 1974

These are the uniforms worn by the seven Yankee Conference teams in 1974. The teams are listed in order of how they finished in the league, which gives me an excuse to put my Black Bears on top.😎

A few miscellaneous notes:

* Maine and UMass shared the league title with 4-2 YC records ... but neither team had a winning record overall (Maine was 4-6, UMass 5-6). No tiebreakers were used in determining a single league champion -- if more than one team had the same YC record, they shared the Bean Pot, symbolic of league supremacy, regardless of how they fared head-to-head. Which probably made UMass fans really happy, since the Minutemen beat Maine in a 42-0 nailbiter in the regular season. 

* UNH and Boston University were the only league teams with winning records overall.

* This was last year Vermont fielded a team. The Catamounts won only one league game, but it was over mighty UMass, their first over the Minutemen/Redmen since 1954. UVM was the only one out of the YC's seven teams to have a losing league record, but it went 3-1 against nonleague foes. UVM quarterback Bob Bateman was first-team all-YC and received the most votes of anyone named to the first team (according to the 1975 UVM Ariel yearbook).

* Northeastern didn't join the YC until 1993 (after close to 25 years of trying -- according to  the Boston Globe archives, Northeastern had been inquiring about joining the conference as early as 1968 or so), but the Huskies played five YC teams and went 1-4.