The Ivy League: Seasons to Forget

Recently, the Ivy League announced that it will not hold any athletic events for the fall semester due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The schools that basically invented football will be on the sidelines for the first time since the 19th century (although Columbia didn’t have football from 1906-14).

The news made me want to research some of the Ancient Eight’s more victory-deprived teams, seasons that were so bad the respective schools likely wish someone had pulled the plug then, too. Every Ivy school — even the Yales and Harvards — has endured a tough stretch now and then (well, in Columbia’s case, a good stretch now and then).

In many of these cases, some of these dreadful seasons occurred before dramatic turnarounds, thus proving the old adage about things being darkest before the dawn and all that. 

What follows is a look at a sorry season for every Ivy school, in alphabetical order:

Under coach John McLaughry, Brown rarely played up to the standards set by his father, DeOrmand “Tuss” McLaughry (his 1926 “Iron Man” team is covered here). McLaughry fils went 17-51-3 from 1959-66, and the 1961 bunch market rock bottom: The Bears went 0-9 and were outscored 245-24 (that’s twenty-four, almost the 1963 UMass team in reverse), suffering five shutouts in the process. A couple losses were actually close (12-9 to Rhode Island, 7-0 to Penn), but many were more along the lines of 50-0 to Columbia, 34-0 to Dartmouth and 52-0 to Princeton. The season ended with a 30-6 Thanksgiving Day loss to Colgate in a game that “preserved its perfect record,” in the words of the Brown Daily Herald.

Amazingly, I believe this is the first time I’ve had a chance to mention the Bears’ classy uniforms from this era. Basically, they’re Princeton’s redone in seal brown and white. The team may have been awful, but at least it looked good while losing. 

I know, I know, Columbia has had dozens of seasons it wish it could wipe from the record books, so let’s pick a team from an otherwise decent era for the program. Coach Lou Little’s 1943 wartime team went 0-8 and was outscored 313-33. The Lions were shut out four times and managed more than one score only once, in a 47-13 loss to Dartmouth, one of four top-20 teams Columbia faced that year. Little missed three weeks “due to an acute sinus condition,” according to the Columbia Spectator, whose season-ending headline read “Lion’s (sic) Gameness and Courage in Defeat Make Campaign Unforgettable.” (I’ve noticed many of the old-time student newspapers/yearbooks had a lot of that “root-root-root-for-the-team-this-Saturday” aspect to them that took a complete 180 by 1968.) The Spectator also noted that Columbia’s linemen were outweighed by an average of 20 pounds per player. And remember, in an era when 200-pound players were a rarity, 20 pounds was a lot to surrender. 

Just two years later, with the war over, Little and Columbia went 8-1 and finished No. 20 in the final AP poll.

Ah, Cornell. Rarely good, rarely bad, just kinda there. But the Big Red hit a pothole in 1975-76, when it went a combined 3-15 and the head coach was let go. The coach became an assistant at Stanford and then the San Francisco 49ers, where he eventually became head coach and won two Super Bowls. His name … George Seifert.

This Los Angeles Times article by the late Chris Dufresne offers some insight into the Seifert debacle. Basically, several Cornell alumni were upset that former Ohio State and Baltimore Colt star Tom Matte (the running back who was pressed into duty at QB for a few games in 1965, you may recall) didn’t get the nod and withdrew their support. “Dick Schultz, Cornell’s athletic director at the time … told Seifert he was fired for his own good, that his gaining alumni support was next to impossible,” Dufresne wrote.

Also, check out the uniforms, which I think I’ve profiled elsewhere. How boring can you get? In Seifert’s second season, the classic wishbone “C” was removed from the helmet in favor of blank lids, and the trim from the pants and socks were removed. The unis, like the team itself, made you want to sleep. Luckily, that changed in 1977, when Bob Blackman became coach.

Dartmouth had been a powerhouse since the turn of the 20th century, but that changed after 1996, when the Big Green went 10-0 and stormed to an Ivy League title. (Basically, from what people told me when I lived in the area, Dartmouth jacked up its academic standards along the lines of Harvard and Yale, and poor coach John Lyons suddenly had a very narrow pool from which to recruit.) Not even the return of former star player and head coach Buddy Teevens to the sidelines couldn’t reverse Dartmouth’s fortunes at first, as he went 2-8, 2-8 and 3-7 over the next three years. Then came 2008 -- 0-10 debacle, its first winless season since 1883 (0-1), when it was still getting the program off the ground. The Green scored only 129 points, less than half of its total from the year before, and surrendered 343. And to make matters worse, the costume of Keggy, the unofficial beer keg-shaped mascot, was stolen before the season, which was a true tragedy, considering this was the team that made you want to drink after the game.

Even the uniforms were dreadful: A dated template with fat, blocky letters and numbers. The whole thing screams mid-2000s. Thankfully, the unis were dumped after the season.  

The good news: Dartmouth has four pieces to the puzzle.
The bad news: It's a 1,000-piece puzzle that won't be solved for another seven years.

Despite his 7-33 record from 2005-08, Dartmouth opted to keep Teevens, who rewarded his alma mater’s faith in him and won Ivy titles in 2015 and ’19. (In addition to the titles, you have the other things Teevens brought to the program, such as contactless practices, a robotic tackling dummy, etc., which made national headlines. As a Dartmouth fan, I'm glad the Greenies kept him.) The Green has had only two losing records since that 2008 disaster. 

A while back, I wrote about Harvard’s late-1940s trials and tribulations under coach Arthur Valpey, who went 5-12 and outfitted his teams in bizarre black pants, decades before black returned to prominence on the Crimson’s uniforms. In ’49, the Crimson went 1-8, low-lighted by a season-opening 44-0 loss at Stanford (Harvard’s first cross-country trip since the 1920 Rose Bowl), in which “several starters were injured playing with the wrong size cleats,” according to Mark F. Bernstein’s excellent “Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession.” After the season, Harvard opted to phase out the Armys and Stanfords from its schedule and concentrate on smaller, more like-minded foes in what athletic director James Conant called “Operation: Strictly Amateur,” according to Bernstein, and the seating capacity at Harvard Stadium was reduced by 19,000 seats.

Valpey’s replacement, Lloyd Jordan, didn’t have much better luck at first, going  24-31-3 from 1950-56, including a 1-7 debut season in ’50, but the days of dreadful football eventually ended under John Yovicsin, Joe Restive and Tim Murphy … and haven’t really returned.

Penn’s back-to-back winless seasons against national powerhouses while wearing white helmets were covered here. The 1970s, under coach Harry Gamble, brought some success at first, but that petered out and eventually hit rock bottom with an 0-9 disaster in 1979, part of a 17-game winless streak (16 losses and a tie) from 1978-80. Gamble, who was popular with his players at the time, was given the dreaded vote of confidence by Penn officials, but stepped down after a 1-9 season in ’80, when the Daily Pennsylvanian reported that a Quaker player circulated a petition calling for Gamble’s retention, but only 30 of 53 players signed it. Penn’s AD gave Gamble one of two options: Fire four of his assistants or take a pencil-pushing job in the athletic department. “He chose none of the above,” the DP wrote.

Jerry Berndt took over as coach in ’81 … and led the Quakers to an Ivy crown in ’82, their first in 23 years.

The uniforms of the early Gamble years were sleek and flashy, but had become bogged down by the late 70s (which I also wrote about here: The “P” inside the football was replaced one the helmet by a “Penn” that looked as it were scrawled on by a 6-year-old (apologies to all 6-year-olds reading this if you’re offended), the “PENNSYLVANIA” wordmark and numbers on the jerseys looked less professional and the navy pants look awful when worn with maroon jerseys.

Princeton enjoyed several years of success under Fritz Crisler, who gave the Tigers their winged helmets (which, amazingly, I haven’t written about) and took the style with him to Michigan in 1938. But in 1931, the year before Crisler took over, Princeton went 1-7 under one-and-done coach Albert Wittmer, who experienced far better results on the basketball court, where he went 115-86 from 1922-32 and remains the third-winningest men’s coach in program history. He also found time to serve in the New Jersey state legislature. 

Wittmer’s cause wasn’t helped when his predecessor, Bill Roper (career record: 89-28-16), criticized the current coaching staff in a Philadelphia Evening Bulletin column that ran following Princeton’s season-ending 51-14 pasting at Yale. “The game reminded me of a battle between two armies,” Roper wrote, “one equipped with modern inventions of warfare and the other using antiquated equipment but fighting with flaming courage despite its handicap.”

Two years later, Crisler guided the Tigers to an undefeated season.

Princeton’s uniforms weren’t too different than what it had worn since at least the early 1920s, right down to the padded variant.

We wrap up with Yale, which was a well-regarded program in the 1930s and ’40s under coaches Ducky Pond and Howie Odell (combined record with the Bulldogs: 65-40-4). But in between, there was another one-and-out coach, Spike Nelson — the first non-Yale graduate ever to lead the Bulldogs — who went 1-7 in 1941. The Bulldogs edged Virginia (!) on opening day, 21-19, then lost their last seven games, scoring only 33 points the rest of the way. On December 22 — just 15 days after the Pearl Harbor attack — Nelson resigned to join the U.S. Engineer Corps. In 1944, Odell led the Bulldogs to a 7-0-1 season. 

One oddity with the uniforms: The helmets in 1940 and ’42 were blue on the bottom and white on top, with a winged pattern in the middle. The Spike Nelson helmets, however, were plain white. As you can see, Yale used differing number fonts.