Dartmouth Big Green (1925)

Dartmouth College owns 18 — whoops, make that 19 — Ivy League championships, the most of any Ancient Eight school, but in 1925 the Big Green claimed a piece of something even bigger — an honest-to-god national championship. Again as with the previous couple posts, much of the info below comes from Tip Top 25.

Your 1925 national champions. Yes, really.

Under coach Jess Hawley, Dartmouth was in the middle of pretty hot run, having gone 7-0-1 in 1924 (Tip Top has the Green tied for No. 4 nationally in a hypothetical AP poll) and 8-1 in ’23 (No. 9), Hawley’s first season. Just to show that everything old really is new again, Hawley installed a spread passing attack when he took the helm of his alma mater. Yes, a spread passing attack in the 1920s, when ground-and-pound was the name of the game and continued to be for the next several decades.

The main cog in Dartmouth’s offense was Hall of Fame halfback Andy “Swede” Oberlander, who ran for 12 TDs and threw for 14 more. In a 62-13 win over Cornell, Oberlander was 11-for-14 passing for 317 yards and 6 TDs, and ran for 160 yards and two more scores. No, those are not Lamar Jackson’s numbers at Louisville. Those type of passing numbers with the fat football and a ran-first mentality (well, outside of Hanover) is just insane. I've discussed Cornell’s irascible coach, Gil Dobie, here and here; well, here's his response to the Big Red's lopsided loss: “We won the game 13-0. Passing is not football.” 

No dumb jock, Oberlander later received his MD from Yale Law School and was medical director for a number of insurance companies. 

Andy Oberlander's bio from the 1926 Aegis yearbook,
back when players of his height and weight could dominate a game.

I really can't add much to the caption already presented here.

End George Tully and guard Carl Diehl were Dartmouth’s other consensus All-Americans, in addition to Oberlander. Halfback Myles Lane, in addition to being a college football Hall of Famer, later played in the National Hockey League for the New York Rangers and Boston Bruins -- he was only the third American-born player in NHL history -- and was a New York Supreme Court justice in his post-athletic days.

Myles Lane's bio from the 1926 Aegis.

After huffing and puffing past mighty Norwich, Hobart, Vermont and Maine by a combined 199-0, Dartmouth routed Harvard, Brown, Cornell (discussed earlier) and, in the key game, Chicago 33-7 to claim the national title. The Big Green turned down a Rose Bowl invite in order to stay home for the holidays. Alabama took the spot, defeated Washington in Pasadena, and made its own claim for the national crown. … decades later. 

Tip Top 25 proclaims Dartmouth the No. 1 team, with ‘Bama acknowledged as a co-champion. The Crimson Tide had a weak schedule (this was before Southern teams caught up with the East and Midwest in terms of ability, that was about a decade away) dotted with a couple narrow wins over poor teams. Dartmouth’s schedule, as you can see above, also was pretty weak (Tip Top proclaims it the weakest of any of its mythical champs from 1901-25), but the Big Green had no narrow wins, and the two best teams it faced (Cornell and Chicago) resulted in blowout wins.

The uniforms were typical fare for the period, with the jerseys almost, but not quite, matching — some friction stripes here, some padding there, everything else plain. 

Minus Oberlander, Dartmouth slipped to 4-4 in ’26, but bounced back with a 7-1 mark in ’27.