Bridgeport Purple Knights (1948, 1974)

Halloween has come and gone, but that won't stop us from taking a trip to the football graveyard, will we?

The University of Bridgeport in Connecticut fielded a football team from 1948-74, playing as a College Division/D-III independent. The program was fairly nondescript until the late 1960s, when it won 8-plus games four times in a five-year span, capped by an 11-0 1972 season and a win over Slippery Rock in something called the Knute Rockne Bowl in Atlantic City (also the site of the Boardwalk Bowl, where UMass and Delaware played at different times). The Purple Knights went 9-2 in '73 and reached the newly created Division III semifinals. In '74, Bridgeport went 6-4 and ... and ...

The school pulled the plug on the program, citing a lack of student support for a program that hogged two-thirds of the athletic budget. (Vermont also dropped football after the '74 season.) This article from 2012 (warning: tons of ads, popup videos and spam) gives a good summary of the team's final years, and for a small program, it had some decent star wattage: Defensive coordinator Dave Campo later coached the Dallas Cowboys, linebacker Joe Mack later was a Canadian Football League general manager, and Tim Rosaforte became a golf writer/TV analyst. 

The first Bridgeport football team, 1948.
Miss Kick-Off?!?

The uniforms featured here are from the program's first and last seasons. The 1948 team, which seemed do pretty well for a first-year lot, went all-purple, a la Holy Cross of the 1950s. Home games were played at Candlelite Stadium, a baseball facility that also hosted the minor-league Bridgeport Bees, an affiliate of the Washington Senators.

The '74 Purple Knights uniforms at home (top)
and on the road (above, background).

The '74 bunch wore one of the more unique unis for that era, recalling the old Chicago College All-Star Game and the late-'40s Holy Cross teams. The helmet logo -- a "B" squeezed into a football shape -- is similar to what Penn wore in the 1970s. And check out the block "B" on the socks; Delaware had something similar for years. By this time, the Knights were playing at 12,000-seat John F. Kennedy Stadium, which is still in use today.

JFK Stadium. Look closely for the Bridgeport Jets sign.
They were a New York Jets affiliate during the all-too-short
heyday of minor league football in the 1960s and early '70s.

Despite the program's abrupt end, Bridgeport football may have new life -- the university recently announced the addition of several sports, including a sprint football (178 pounds of less) program. Knights fans, rejoice!