Ivy League 1969

In a recent Facebook post, I noted that Princeton upset undeleted Dartmouth in the 1969 season finale to force a three-way tie for the Ivy League title between the Tigers, Big Green and Yale. Well, here's what Dartmouth, Yale and the rest of the Ivies wore in the fall of '69. Now, some tidbits:

• 1969, of course, was the 100th anniversary of college football (well, outside of Harvard, as noted in this post), but only Princeton — which played in the very first game in 1869 (sorry, no photographic evidence exists of what they wore) — chose to wore the “100” decal on the side of the helmet. Yale wore it on the front (the Bulldogs did wear it on the side in 1972 for the program’s centennial), while Columbia wore a tiny patch on the pants (Delaware also wore a patch, but on the jersey shoulder).
• Princeton opened its season at Rutgers, which the Tigers faced in the very first game a century earlier. The Scarlet Knights crushed the Tigers, 29-0. It’s too bad the teams didn’t play in a 150th anniversary game this year. With Princeton an elite FCS team and Rutgers by far the worst team in a Power Five conference — its only wins in '19 are over FBS wannabes UMass and Liberty — the Tigers would have more than a puncher’s chance against the Knights.
• You can read a delightful account about the 1969 game here. Rutgers wanted President Richard Nixon and/or moon man Buzz Aldrin to appear, but they declined and the Knights had to settle for TV star Ozzie Nelson -- hey, he was a former Rutgers QB -- as master of ceremonies. Oh well.
• Harvard, which had gone 8-0-1 the previous year and shared the Ivy title with Yale after the famous “Harvard beats Yale 29-29” game, slipped to 3-6.
• Dartmouth had creamed everyone in its path — its closest win was by 14 points over Harvard — and was 8-0 heading into its season finale at Princeton, which had just lost to Yale a week earlier for its first Ivy loss. The Tigers shocked the Big Green, 35-7, to create a three-way tie for the Ivy crown with Yale. 
• Speaking of the Greenies, this was the last year the home and road jerseys failed to match. In '70, Dartmouth ditched the curved-number home shirts for versions that were a mirror image of the roads, right down to the Indian logo on the sleeve.
• I always felt the late 60s-early 70s marked the Ivy League's last flirtation with big-time  college football: The '68 Harvard-Yale thriller, Dartmouth's top-20 finish in '70, Cornell's Ed Marinaro coming thisclose to winning the Heisman in '71 ... it marked the end of a glorious era for the Ivies, who within a few years had a hard team beating Yankee Conference teams.  

A Dartmouth program from '69. Yes, the Big Green
used the tree logo even then.

Ivy also-rans Penn and Columbia do battle in '69.