New Hampshire (1924)

As I've probably noted ad nauseam in earlier posts, most college football teams used one jersey for home and away until the 1940s. If teams with similar color schemes faced each other, it could make for a rough time identifying your teammates; a QB throwing to someone he thinks is his receiver turns out to be a defensive back for the bad guys, running the pass back for a pick-six. 

Some teams did make an effort to diffuse the confusion. In the 1920s, normally blue-clad UConn wore orange jerseys. New Hampshire, a frequent foe of UConn, took a different tact, wearing white vests over their blue jerseys. Think of them as the 1920s equivalent of those smelly pinnies you wore at soccer practice or in gym class.

UNH takes on Maine in 1924; note the white vests on the UNH players.
This is from the 1926 Granite yearbook; click on the links below for better photos.

UNH (the "Wildcats" nickname didn't come until 1926) donned this DIY look for at least two games, against Maine in '24 and UConn in '25 (guess the team didn't get the message about UConn's orange duds). Some of the white jerseys had friction strips, as was the custom in the 19320s. This link will lead you so some more photos of the '24 team in the "regular" unis, some of which had bulky squares on the front, whose material helped keep the football nice and snug when carrying it.

Cy Wentworth, one of the early legends of UNH football.

New Hampshire went a combined 11-3-2 in 1924-25, winning the semi-official New England Conference in '25. The star of the team was senior Shirley "Cy" Wentworth, a running back/end who scored 11 touchdowns and 85 points in '24 (eye-booing numbers even today), and finished his career with 166 points, including 37 against Lowell Tech in 1923, a single-game record that still stands. (Funny bit: The link on the 1924 team's Wikipedia page takes you to another Cy Wentwoth, an NHL star from the 1930s.) 

Cy went on to play for the Providence Steam Roller and the Boston Bulldogs, two teams from the NFL's Mesozoic era, and was a charter member of the UNH Hall of Fame in 1982.

One last bit: The helmet color in the graphic above is a wild guess. I have them as tan/brown, but they may very well have been blue. The answer is likely lost to history.

Penn Quakers (1916)

A while back, I wrote about the 1915 Cornell team that claims a national title, and also posted some images from the Thanksgiving game against Penn, which wore some, ahem, very unusual numbers on the back. Well, let's hit the FF button a year to 1916, when the Quakers still wore those uniforms en route to their first and only Rose Bowl appearance.

The 1916 Penn Quakers.

As noted in that previous post, Penn's numbers look very primitive, as block-style numbers were still a few years away. Thus, the graphic above has numbers that look like they were drawn with MacPaint in 1991. The rest of the uniform, however, looks like good ol' Penn, with striped sleeves and socks. It appears the helmets and pants were of a brownish-tan hue, but since we lack color pictures from that season, we may never know for sure. 😎

A smattering of Penn players, from a 1916 program. 

The Quakers had several notable players. The quarterback was Bert Bell, who later became commissioner of the NFL and guided the league to steady growth in the 1950s, setting the stage for its world dominance in the '60s. Bert's dad, a Penn grad, was the Pennsylvania attorney general; legend has it that when asked where his son would go to school, he replied, "Bert will go to Penn, or he will go to hell." 

The one and only Bert Bell, as a Penn assistant
in the early 1920s.

The right tackle was Lou Little, a transfer from Vermont (!) who went on to coach Columbia for many years, highlighted by a Rose Bowl win over Stanford. Halfback Joe Berry was a two-time All-American who played a bit for the New York (baseball) Giants in the early 1920s. Another All-American, end Heinie Miller, later played in the early NFL and was a longtime college coach.

The head coach was Bob Folwell, a former Penn halfback who compiled a 109-31-9 record as a college coach. He later became the answer to a trivia question: Who was the first head coach in the history of the New York (football) Giants? After leaving Penn in 1920, he was replaced by some guy named Heisman. 

Despite the array of talent, it was the Quakers' fate to be on the wrong side of history. Penn went 7-2-1 in the regular season, with the only blemishes being a tie with Dartmouth and losses to Swarthmore (undefeated since 2001, if you catch my drift) and Pittsburgh. According to TipTop 25, the New York Times ranked Penn fifth among all Eastern teams in a December poll. But the Quakers still earned a Rose Bowl invite, only to lose to the underdog Oregon Webfoots (yes, that's what they were called -- someone needs to bring that back), 14-0, in a game that established the West as a major football region. You can read more about this landmark game here.

Penn improved to 9-2 in 1917, its highest win total until the 1986 team went 10-0. But until the Ivy League decides to get into modern times and enter the NCAA FCS tournament, this remains the only Quaker team to play in the postseason.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Bert Bell's son Upton Bell,
who had a colorful career in the front offices of the Baltimore Colts and
New England Patriots before a long career in talk radio. He even owned a team in
the old World Football League!