The 1925 Project (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this series, we looked back at the six New England state schools that played college football in 1925. Today, the spotlight shines on the non-Ivy, non-Moo U Division I teams. Part 3 will look at the Ivy League, back when Ivy football meant big-time football.

Boston College

High point: The Eagles ended the season with a 17-6 win over hated rival Holy Cross in front of 47,000 fans at Braves Field, back when BC-Holy Cross was one of the highlights of the New England sports calendar.

Low point: After a 5-0 start, BC fell to (distant) future Big East rival West Virginia to spoil any dreams of an undefeated season.

Other trivia: BC played its entire eight-game schedule at Braves Field. … Left halfback Jack Cronin went to play for the NFL’s Providence Steam Roller, who are the answer to a trivia question: What was New England’s only NFL championship team before Belichick and Brady came along?

Uniforms: Check out the Princeton-style striping on the sleeves. Otherwise, pretty basic stuff here.

Boston University

High point: The Terriers (or Pioneers; I’ve seen both names used for this season) defeated Providence 14-6 on Nov. 14 for their only win of the year.

Low point: All five BU losses were one-sided, but I can’t imagine a 51-7 loss to city rival Boston College was very fun.

Other trivia: The season was the fifth and final one for head coach Charles Whelan (three straight one-win seasons will do that to you). Whelan, a graduate of the Tufts School of Medicine, had been a chief radiologist and head of x-rays at multiple hospitals when not coaching.

Uniforms: I discussed the Terriers’ uniforms in this post. Note their use of white helmets when most other teams wore varying shades of tan and brown. Like their Commonwealth Avenue rivals, BU used Princeton-esque stripes on the sleeves.

Colgate

High point: On Nov. 14, Colgate defeated arch-rival Syracuse 19-6 in front of 30,000 fans at rain-soaked Archbold Stadium en route to its first undefeated season since 1892. All-American halfback Eddie Tyron scored two touchdowns and added a PAT.

Low point: A pair of ties against Lafayette (7-7) and Brown (14-14) were Colgate’s only blemishes on the season. 

Other trivia: Tyron, a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, scored 15 touchdowns and 21 PATs in 1925. Two years earlier, he scored seven TDs (still a school record) against Niagara. He was later a teammate of Red Grange on the New York Yankees of the original AFL and lead the one-and-done league in scoring in 1926.

Colgate was one of the powerhouses of this era, as touched upon in this post, especially after Andy Kerr became head coach in 1929. Dick Harlow, the coach from 1922-25, went 24-9-3 before leaving for something called Western Maryland (now McDaniel, a D-III school). He also coached Harvard from 1935-42 and 1946-47, going 45-39-7.

Uniforms: Pretty basic stuff here. Nary a front patch or friction strip to be found.

Delaware

High point: The Blue Hens defeated Upsala 24-7 on the strength of two blocked kicks for touchdowns. (Upsala, which closed in 1995, sounds like the name of a place you'd be sent to without a paddle.)

Low point: Delaware ended the season with back-to-back shutout losses.

Other trivia: Frazer Field, the Hens’ home field in 1925, opened in 1913 and I believe is still used today in some capacity or another. ... Delaware may be jumping to FBS in 2025, but the 1925 schedule was littered with decidedly small-time fare, including Ursinus, St. John's of Maryland, Juniata, Haverford and Dickinson.

Uniforms: Again, very basic, but easy to figure out from my end.

Holy Cross

High point: Holy Cross’ 7-6 win over Harvard on Oct. 17 marked the Crusaders’ first-ever win over the Crimson after nine losses dating to 1904.

Low point: BC’s high point, of course, would have to be Holy Cross’ low point.

Other trivia: This was the first Holy Cross team to bear the “Crusaders” moniker. As I noted in the last post, Vermont and New Hampshire added their current nicknames in 1926; I get the impression that the concept of schools having an official mascot took off during this period. According to Wikipedia (which means you know you’re getting the straight dope), Crusaders won a student poll over Chiefs and Sagamores.

Look at those numbers! They look perfect!

Uniforms: I noticed looking through photos how professional the numbers look on Holy Cross’ jerseys — big, sharp block digits. So many other teams in this period had a decidedly amateur look.

Providence

High point: Yup, Providence College — better known for its feats in basketball and hockey — once had a football team. On Oct. 17, the Friars beat St. John’s — another future basketball power — 14-6 at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, speaking of entities not known for football.

Low point: PC lost to New England Jesuit rivals Boston College and Holy Cross by a combined count of 73-0.

Heck Allen is all like, "Helmets are for wimps, brain cells be damned."

Other trivia: PC was the anti-BC in another regard — the Friars played all nine games on the road. … Halfbacks Joe McGee, Junie Bride and Heck Allen are members of the Providence College Athletic Hall of Fame. 

Uniforms: I discussed them in the BU post linked above. All the Friars appeared to have friction strips and front patches to help grip the football better..

Boston College, UConn, UMass (2024)

We wrap up our look at the uniforms of 2024 with New England's three FBS teams. Frankly, nothing really new to report here, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Boston College changed a combo or two from 2023, but that was about it. 

UConn was in the same boat as BC, although the Huskies had some fun with a couple helmet designs. One, designed to honor America's armed forces, used a half-dozen different seals depending on the branch of the military (the example above uses the United States Army). Another, used as part of a cancer awareness promotion, used a multitude of ribbons, each capped with the UConn "C" (pink is used above).

I feel like I say this every year, but as bad as the on-field product has been for the last dozen years or so, at least UMass looks good while losing. The Minutemen, who will be rejoining the Mid-American Conference in 2025 with a new coach (Joe Harasymiak — if he can lead Maine to an FBS final four berth, he could very well give this program a pulse), revived the black alternate jersey and it fit in perfectly with the rest of the ensemble (bonus points for altering the helmet trim to make it match the jersey). Sadly, the '90s alternate logo was put on the bench.

Iconic (or at least long-lasting) helmet logos and designs (Part 1)

Some college teams change helmet logos more frequently than they do head coaches. (Check out the histories of Columbia or UConn sometime and you'll see what I mean.) Others have designs that have endured for decades. 

Today, we're going to look at some first-year styles of popular — or at least unique — helmet logos and/or designs.

Let's lead off with a team that has never even used a helmet logo — Boston College. It may be plain, but there's no denying that the Eagles' plain gold helmet is distinctive (well, as long as they're not playing Notre Dame or Navy). After several years of plain maroon lids and one year with a Michigan-style design, BC introduced the gold helmet in 1939, Frank Leahy's first year as coach. Leahy stayed only two years before he left Notre Dame, but he left behind a "design" that remains to this day.

There were a few alterations that came and went: For a couple seasons (1958, 60), BC had numbers on the sides, and in 1991 it added a maroon stripe down the middle, which was removed in 2020. From 2011-13, the Eagles wore maroon and white helmet stripes for road games only. And in 2012, BC sported a star-spangled look as part of Under Armour's Wounded Warrior uniform.

After several seasons of helmets adorned with numbers or a block "C," Colgate took a different route in 1977. The Raiders put an abbreviated version of the school name on the sides, a cursive "'gate" that appears to have been scrawled by a middle-school student still practicing penmanship. It's weird, silly and definitely stands out. (I always thought Syracuse should have a helmet with "CUSE" on the side.) 

While Colgate briefly ditched the logo for other designs for a few years, the beloved 'gate refused to go away and returned in 1996, albeit in a more streamlined form. The logo was modified again for the 2021 spring season.

True, Cornell's "C" logo may not be considered iconic, but it's definitely exhibited some staying power since the Big Red unveiled it in 1983. While the rest of the helmet has undergone some tinkering every few years, the white "C" on the red helmet has remained fairly consistent.

The 1983 uniform shown above is a bit of a Frankenstein design. They jersey and pants still have the wide stripes and oversize numbers from Bob Blackman's time as coach, when the helmets had "CORNELL" in an arc across the side. The rest of the uniform was gradually toned down as the 1980s went on.

And speaking of Blackman. ... After he became Dartmouth coach in 1955, he outfitted the Big Green in white helmets with two green stripes down the front. But after a decade, he was looking for something different. Check out this entry from the 2001 Dartmouth media guide:

In 1965, Bob Blackman, Dartmouth's innovative Hall of Fame coach, sought a unique source of pride that would immediately identify Dartmouth's successful football team.
He found the answer in a helmet design that became as much a trademark for Dartmouth football as the famed "winged" helmet design that Fritz Crisler brought with him from Princeton to Michigan in 1938.

Unusual step No. 1: Blackman added the classic Dartmouth "D," but he placed it on the front of the helmet instead of on the sides. Unusual step No. 2: The stripes, which normally go down the front of the helmet, were situated at about a 45-degree angle down the sides. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when Blackman was sketching possible designs.

As you can see from the above graphic, Dartmouth went undefeated in 1965, so the new helmet must have worked. (What, you thought it was all talented, hard-working athletes and smart game plans? Ha!) The Big Green went on to win seven of the next nine Ivy titles. 

The cover of the December 1965 Dartmouth Alumni Magazine
shows the Big Green in action with their new helmets.
Football has been reinvented about a thousand times since then,
but the iconic Dartmouth helmets remain.

Dartmouth kept the helmet until 1987, when new coach Buddy Teevens "sought a 'fresh start' after four losing seasons," again quoting the media guide. (I also wrote a little about that here.) John Lyons, Teevens' successor, revived the classic helmet in 1999 ("with his team's unanimous endorsement," according to the media guide), and the Green has kept it ever since. (We won't talk about the tree helmet from a few years back.) 

You'll notice the media guide excerpt above mentioned Michigan's winged helmet. Dave Nelson, who took over as Delaware's coach in 1951, was a Michigan man, so it's probably no shock he outfitted his Blue Hens in uniforms that paralleled those of the Wolverines. Nelson previously had coached Maine, where he also introduced a winged helmet in 1949. The Hens have worn them without fail ever since, although the shades of blue and yellow have changed slightly.

Wartime Football (Part III)

It's time for Part III of our look at how select college football programs handled World War II. Parts I-II can be found here.

This time, we're going to check out four programs that operated throughout the war, but on a decidedly limited basis. They may have played, but they certainly didn't have visions of bowl games or national titles dancing in their heads. And let's start with a team had gone bowling in recent seasons.

Despite a run of three bowl appearances in four years (a pretty amazing feat back when there were five bowl games, tops), Boston College opted to dial down the program during the war. Holy Cross and Clemson were replaced with the likes of Camp Hingham, Rome Air Force Base ... and Harvard, which also went informal. (True fact: BC and Harvard have played each other only four times in football, twice in WWI and twice in WWII. Hopefully they won't play again for a LONG time.) Quarterback and future Holy Cross coach Ed Doherty was the lone Eagle from the '42 team that lost to Alabama in the Orange Bowl.

Yup, BC once faced Harvard on the gridiron, and
this page from the Sub Turri yearbook has the info. 

BC's uniforms kept the pace from recent seasons, and for some reason in '45 the Eagles unearthed the maroon pants from the late '30s. 

Unlike its Ivy brethren, Harvard opted to dial it down during the war. Yale and Dartmouth were dumped for gentler foes such as Tufts and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in addition to BC. Weird to imagine D-III Tufts hosting FCS Harvard today, but it happened. With the war over in August 1945, still-informal Harvard decided to add full-speed ahead Yale to its schedule. Yale prevailed 28-0 on Dec. 1, one of the latest dates in The Game's history.

As you can see from these photos, Harvard's varsity rosters
were tiny during WWII. (The second photo appears to be just a starting lineup,
however, and not a full roster.)

Harvard's helmets were a little odd, as the back top half of the crimson helmets were painted white. The jersey numbers were identical to the ones used by the Boston Red Sox, as noted here.

Maine barely qualifies for this post by virtue of a 1943 game against a prep school — a 20-6 loss to Phillips Andover that served as the Black Bears' entire schedule. In '44 Maine played New Hampshire and Norwich (Vt.) twice, and in '45 it faced UMass and UConn twice and Rhode Island once; I believe it was the last season Maine and UNH didn't face off until the truncated Spring 2021 season. 

The season summaries in the UMaine Prism yearbooks note that many team members had not previously played football, and if you look at the photo below, you can tell. Because most of the players were too young to serve Uncle Sam, it looks more like a high school team than a college team.

The 1944 Black Bears, who appear to wearing practice uniforms.
What photos I've seen of them in action are in the all-blue versions.

Wisecracks aside, the fact that these schools were able to put a football team on the field amid depleted manpower was a victory in itself.

Princeton is an odd case. The Tigers went 1-6 in 1943 as a "full speed ahead" team and retreated to informal status in '44, defeating Muhlenberg before losing to Swarthmore and Atlantic City Naval Air Station. (The NAS team was known alternately as the Corsairs, Hellcats, Sailors and Tars. Tars?) But in '45, Princeton reverted to a full-blown schedule and went 2-3-2, playing mostly against Ivy League foes.

I'm not 100% on the uniforms, but it appears the Tigers had orange numbers on the front and white numbers on the back. The traditional tiger stripes adorned the sleeves and socks.

Boston College, UConn, UMass (2023)

Enough procrastinating. (There's no nation like Procrastination, where the next game is always tomorrow.) Let's wrap up the uniforms of 2023 with New England's three FBS representatives.

Remember when Boston College was going to dump Jeff Hafley as coach and bring in Bob Chesney from Holy Cross? Instead, the Eagles had a winning record capped by a bowl win. BC made no changes from previous seasons, except for the all-maroon ensemble worn for the Fenway Bowl.

There might not be a more complicated team to keep track of than UConn. Even though the Huskies have only two jerseys and two pants, they trotted out seven different helmet designs, many of them with very minute differences; some weeks the helmets had stripes, some weeks they didn't. UConn also had two specialty helmets — a "Husky Heroes" lid with a red-white-and-blue logo and a cancer awareness helmet with the "C" logo in a variety of colors. 

I've said a million times before and I'll say it again: UMass may be bad, but at least the Minutemen look good while they're losing. The uniforms remained the same as in previous seasons, although UMass fiddled around with the facemark color a couple times. I wonder what it's like to be the equipment people, having to swap out 100-plus facefasks on short notice?

Boston College Eagles (1933)

Our latest random team takes us waaaay back to the Depression years with a Boston College team that was hardly depressing. 

The Team: The Eagles went 8-1 in '33, but don't look for them in any national title discussions. Most of the wins were against small Jesuit schools such as Saint Anselm, Loyola (Md.), Georgetown, Villanova and Holy Cross. The other victories were against Centre (a short-term power in the 1920s out of Kentucky), Boston University and Western Maryland (which was rebranded McDaniel College in 2002 and plays a Division III schedule).

Maybe the foes weren't so great, but the nicknames were. Centre was known as the "Praying Colonels" (just plain Colonels today) and Western Maryland/McDaniel goes by the "Green Terror."

The lone loss was 32-6 to Fordham at the Polo Grounds in BC's only road game; Vince Lombardi was a Rams freshman.

BC punts away during its only loss of the season, 
to Fordham at the Polo Grounds.

The Players: It appears the Eagles' big star was Flavio Tosi, whom the Sub Turri yearbook claimed was the best end in the East; according his BC Hall of Fame profile, he registered TEN sacks in a season-ending 13-9 win over Holy Cross. After the season, he signed with the Boston Redskins, becoming the first Eagle to play in the NFL.

Star end Flavio Tosi, wearing the older BC uniform.
Check out the socks!

Among the other stars:

* Quarterback Johnny Frietas, who also was a pretty fair punter and kicker, with a 40-yard drop-kick field goal (!) in a season-opening win over St. Anselm. 

* Paul Flaherty also played some QB and his passing led BC to a 25-0 win over BU. 

The caption says it all. The official on the left appears
to be wearing pants about six sizes too large.

* Bobby Ott and Johnny Dougan handled the running chores, and Ott also was a standout linebacker. 

* Frank Maloney, the captain, was described the the Sub Turri as "our greatest defensive bulwark, his blocking ability and inspiring leadership paved the way for a successful season."

Tosi and Frietas are in BC's Varsity Club Hall of Fame.

The Coach: Joe McKenney also is a BC Hall of Famer. As a player, he quarterbacked the Eagles to an undefeated season in 1926 and also was a track and baseball standout. As coach, he led BC to a 44-18-3 mark from 1928-34. McKenney later served as the director of physical education for the Boston school system and was a linesman for college football, the NFL and AFL. And on top of all that, he led the fundraising drive for the construction of Alumni Stadium in 1957.

This cartoon from the Sub Turri touts Joe McKenney while 
he discusses his team's accomplishments.

The Uniforms: Keeping in mind that there may be mistakes in the above graphic thanks to dark, murky photos, it appears BC wore two different jerseys in '33 with maroon helmets and gold/tan pants. According to Reid Oslin's excellent Boston College Football Vault, the Eagles debuted maroon jerseys with gold stripes in '32. Against Fordham (which also wore maroon), BC sported gold jerseys with maroon shoulder panels and numbers on the back, but not the front. By '34, numbers were added to the front of the gold shirts and the maroons followed suit in '35.

The Fallout: BC fell to 5-4 in '34 in McKenney's last season. Two different coaches guided the Eagles in '35 before personal favorite Gloomy Gil Dobie arrived in '36.

From Football to Baseball (Part I)

After last week's post on the 1967 Holy Cross team, which noted that defensive back Pat Bourque went on to win the World Series with the 1973 Oakland A's, I decided to round up a list of other college football players from teams covered on this site who went to play Major League Baseball. Part 1 takes us from the early 1920s through the early '50s. Part 2 will come ... eventually. 😎 

I've written about some of these teams before, and chances are I've missed a few guys along the way. The numbers in the uniform graphics are the ones worn by the profiled athletes (Harry Agganis wore 33 at Boston U, etc.).

Let's save the best for first, as in first base. Lou Gehrig (Columbia) is a legend for his Hall of Fame career with the New York Yankees, his consecutive-games streak and his death in 1941 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (or was it something else?) Before the Yanks came calling, Gehrig was a two-sport athlete at Columbia, where he was a starting fullback and defensive tackle on the football team. With pro football in its relative infancy, though, his odds of playing football for a living were between slim and none, and slim just went out for a bathroom break. 

Lou Gehrig plows through Wesleyan's defense in 1922.

The uniform graphic above is a rough estimate, especially the font of the number on the back. It appears some, but not all, of the helmets had white stripes on the front and sides.

At the University of Vermont, football and baseball are just rumors (football was canceled in 1974, while baseball was dumped twice — in 1971 and 2009). But in the winter of 1941-42, Winooski's Ralph LaPointe was a star on the Catamounts' freshman football, basketball and baseball teams. In the fall of '42, LaPointe joined the football varsity and was on the the receiving half of the "Goal Dust Twins" with quarterback Norm Beaulieu. LaPointe scored a TD in every game that season, including one in the season-ending 18-7 won over Middlebury. (Thanks to World War II, it was UVM's last game until 1946.) 

After World War II, LaPointe signed with the Philadelphia Phillies' organization and made his major league debut on April 15, 1947 — the same day Jackie Robinson debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers — as a defensive replacement at second base. While LaPointe's MLB career was short (he his .266 in 143 games), he established his legend as UVM's baseball coach from 1952-67, going 216-127 in a region not exactly hospitable to baseball in the early spring. He also served as an assistant on the football team during that time.

As you can see by the caption, Ralph LaPointe
got married after the 1942 season.

UVM's uniforms were heavy on the yellow (color rush before color rush was cool), with slightly darker shades used for the jerseys and socks, which had matching green stripes. 

I noted the achievements of UConn end-turned-Red Sox first baseman Walt Dropo in this post. Suffice to say, he was an amazing athlete during a period when multi-sport athletes weren't uncommon. Something was lost when specialization became the norm in college sports; when you play different sports, it forces you to use body and your mind in different ways.

The uniform pictured is from 1946, Dropo's senior year. During this period, UConn mixed and matched their helmets, jerseys and pants something fierce. In '46, UConn wore white helmets and blue pants throughout but trotted out three different jerseys, each with contrasting shoulder panels and stripes on the lower sleeves. 

Growing up as a Red Sox fan in the 1980s, I knew the tale of Harry Agganis very well, even though he had died more than 30 years earlier. Lynn, Mass., native; two-sport star at Boston University; spurned an offer from the Cleveland Browns to sign with his hometown Sawx; played solidly as a rookie first baseman in 1954; got off to a strong start in '55; got sick and shockingly died from a pulmonary embolism. To this day, he and Tony Conligliaro are the ultimate "what might have beens" among the Sox faithful. 

At BU, Agganis set single-season school records for TD passes in 1949 (15!) and passing yards in 1951 (1,402 in only seven games, pretty impressive in that era). He missed the 1950 season when the U.S. Marine Corps came calling. Somehow, the '51 team was ranked No. 16 in the final AP poll despite a 6-4 record, which would be like a 7-5 MAC team landing in the top 25 today. Apparently, the writers were blown away by those wins over Camp Lejeune, NYU and Wichita State.

A 1950 magazine article notes Harry Agganis'
 induction into the U.S. Marine Corps.

BU's uniforms were pretty basic: White helmets, red jerseys and white pants; I believe the white jerseys were worn only at Louisville and Temple, which also wore red at home.

Boston College didn't have much to write home about in the early 1950s (other than a mega-upset of nationally ranked Holy Cross in 1951), but the Eagles did have a super end in Mike Roarke, who was known as "Mr. Captain" for his role as captain of the baseball and football teams. His career totals of 49 catches and 12 touchdowns won't cause Zay Flowers to lose sleep, but they were pretty darn good in those passing-challenged times. 

In baseball, he was a star catcher who after BC toiled for many years in the minor leagues before spending parts of four seasons with the Detroit Tigers (1961-64) as a backup. He went on to become a pitching coach for MLB several teams, most notably Whitey Herzog's 1980s Cardinals. (Much of the info here on Roarke was taken from his BC Hall of Fame bio.)

Mike "Rourke" was as adept at catching a football as a baseball.

BC's uniforms didn't change much during this era, with plain gold helmets, a maroon jersey with gold numbers at home and a white version with maroon numbers on the road, all with gold pants. On at least one occasion, the Eagles broke out striped socks to match the road jersey sleeves.