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)