1925 Project (Part 3)

It's strange to think, but as I've mentioned here a hundred times before, the teams that now comprise the Ivy League was once among college football royalty, right up there with the Michigans and Notre Dames of the world. Part 3 of the 1925 Project (here are parts 1 and 2) looks at the four of the eight Ivies, which were actually independents until formal league play commenced in 1956.  

Brown

High Point: The Bears opened their brand-spanking new Brown Stadium with a 33-0 shellacking of Rhode Island State.

Low Point: The Bears were shut out three times, by Penn, Dartmouth and Harvard (keeping in mind that football games were lower-scoring in those days and shutouts were more common).

R.J. Payor scores the first touchdown in Brown Stadium history on Sept. 26, 1925.
Note the sweater-clad official signaling touchdown on the far right.

Other Trivia: Brown played its entire 10-game schedule at home. ... Brown Stadium was built at a cost of $500,000, or $9.1 million in 2025 dollars. Wonder if included wi-fi, a retractable roof and craft beer options? ... Halfback and Michigan transfer Jackson Keefer was a third-team All-American. He was later named a member of the school's 125th anniversary team.

Uniforms: For many years, Brown wore white helmets with brown jerseys, tan pants and brown socks. Some jerseys had friction patches and stripes; others went plain.

Columbia

High Point: The Lions roared loudest against Army, winning 21-7 on Nov. 14 in front of nearly 50,000 fans at the Polo Grounds to hand the Cadets one of their only two losses in '25. Quarterback George Pease, who scored two TDs, earned a second-team All-America nod. (It was from the New York Sun, so I sense a possible hometown bias here.)

Low Point: Columbia lost 9-0 to a mediocre (4-3-1) Ohio State team on Oct. 17. 

Columbia takes on Syracuse at the Polo Grounds
— one of college football's hotbeds back in the day — in 1925.

Uniforms: As had been the case when one Lou Gehrig played for them a few years earlier, the Lions wore dark blue jerseys and socks. Like with Brown, some jerseys had friction strips/patrhes on the front and sleeves.

Other Trivia: Columbia's only "traditional" icy opponent was Cornell, which won 17-14 on Halloween. ... The Lions' schedule included lambs such as Haverford, Johns Hopkins and Alfred. ... First-year coach Charlie Crowley, a former teammate of Knute Rockne's at Notre Dame went 26-16-4 over five seasons. Legend has it that Crowley was Columbia's second choice after their first pick — Rockne — elected to stay in South Bend.

Cornell

High Point: Frederick Wester's fourth-quarter touchdown gave Cornell a come-from behind 17-14 win over Columbia on Halloween and give the Big Red — which went undefeated two seasons earlier — a 5-0 record.

Low Point: After a 5-0 start, the Big Red lost two of its final three games, including a 62-13 humiliation at pass-happy Dartmouth one week after the Columbia triumph. (This was the game where legendary Cornell coach Gil Dobie said the score should have been 13-0 Cornell because, in his words, "passing isn't football.")

Cornell tackle Frank Kearney, left and coach "Gloomy Gil" Dobie.
I'm not sure if that helmet could even protect anyone from sunburn.

Uniforms: Very similar to Columbia's, only with red instead of navy blue.

Other Trivia: Cornell fell 7-0 to Penn in the rivals' annual Thanksgiving tussle in Philadelphia.

Dartmouth

High Point: I wrote about the Big Green — the honest-to-god, co-national champions — a while back in this post. The 33-7 season season-ending win over Chicago (coached by Amos Alonzo Stagg, a man who literally helped invent the game) wrapped up the undefeated season and, ultimately, a share of the title with Alabama. 

Low Point: Well, somehow they allowed 29 points all season. That's the best I've got.

Uniforms: Green, gray and tan. I'm honestly not sure if the Greenies wore green helmets or not; that's probably lost to history.

The champs.

Other Trivia: My favorite college football rabbit hole, TipTop25, said this: "If there had been a Heisman Trophy in 1925, Dartmouth's Hall of Fame halfback Andy 'Swede' Oberlander would have easily won it, despite this being Red Grange's senior season at Illinois." The site goes on to note that Oberlander was a consensus All-American and Grange was not (Red's big season was 1924 anyway). Oberlander accounted for 26 touchdowns in '25 — 12 through the air and 14 on the ground. In the aforementioned Cornell game, Oberlander amassed at least 477 yards in total offense (per TipTop) and tossed six TDs — ho-hum today, but in 1925, when 20-14 games were considered shootouts, this must have made Sunday newspaper readers spit out their coffee and eggs. Oh, and Oberlander was a tackle on Dartmouth 1923 team that went 8-1.

George Tully (end) and Carl Diehl (guard) also were consensus All-Americans.

Ivy League (2024)

This isn't your parents' Ivy League. Nor your grandparents'. Maybe not even your great-grandparents'.

Not one, but two monumental events happened this year that shook the Ancient Eight and their fans to the core:

1) Columbia earned a share of the league title for its first crown since 1961;

2) The Ivies agreed to participate in the NCAA FCS Tournament starting in 2025.

It's perhaps fitting that the last Ivy school to play a postseason game was Columbia, which upset Stanford in the 1934 Rose Bowl. Brown, Harvard and Penn also have tasted postseason action, all in the Rose Bowl. that's been it ... but wait 'til next year.

After the '61 title, Columbia plunged into decades of irrelevance until the arrival of Penn legend Al Bagnoli as head coach in 2015. After a couple rough years, Bagnoli guided the Lions to four winning seasons over the next five years. Although Bagnoli retired before the '23 season, successor Jon Poppe finally brought Columbia to the top.

OK, on to the uniforms. There were very few changes from 2023, so I'm just going to step aside and list them in alphabetical order. I'll add two points:

1) Penn wore nine different designs in nine weeks before using a repeat design in Week 10 (spoilsports!).

2) Cornell added a black alternate jersey, leaving Penn and Yale as the only Ivy teams to have not gone to the dark side at some point in their history.

Wartime Football (Part IV)

We wrap up our look at World War II football with the eight teams programs by this site that went "full steam ahead" during the war. No shutdowns, no cutbacks, no games against smaller schools like Tufts — their schedules were dominated by big-time schools, at least by the standards of that era.

You can find Parts I-II here and Part III here.

The surprising thing about these eight schools is that six are from the future Ivy League — which, of course, shut down entirely during the 2020 COVID pandemic. (Someday, there will be nostalgia for 2020, which frankly gives me the shudders.) But in the 1940s, the Ivies, while not as prominent as they had been earlier in century, hadn't completely marginalized themselves from the big time — yet.

Onto the teams ...

Brown played a few smaller schools and service teams during the war, but the Bears also faced Army twice, losing by a combined count of 118-7. (Thanks to the war, Army was able to assemble a virtual all-star team and crush everyone in its path.)

Brown mostly wore white jerseys, but occasionally broke out the brown jerseys when facing another team that wore white at home, such as Penn.

Colgate also got to face Army (a 42-0 loss in 1943) in addition to traditional eastern powers such as Syracuse, Penn State, Holy Cross and the Ivies. 

As far as I know (it's hard to figure out because many school yearbooks were suspended or minimized during the war), the Raiders wore only the maroon jersey both home and road to go with the white helmet and gray pants.

WWII was the best and worst of time for Columbia, which put up a goose egg on 1943 (discussed more in this post) and dropped only one game (a 32-7 loss to Penn) in '45. Maybe dropping wartime powers Army and Navy from the schedule had something to so with it. 

The Lions' uniforms always had an off-kilter quality to them, and these are no different, with navy stripes down the sleeves and snaking their way around the wrists. Tan pants were largely a thing of the past by this point, but Columbia carried on.

Cornell did all right for itself, posting winning seasons all three "war" seasons. Most of the games were against Ivy/Patriot League-level teams, with t he occasional Syracuse/Navy/Penn State tossed in.

The uniforms were rather plain, but the helmets are consistently inconsistent. I thought maybe this was a wartime thing, but a search through old photos shows the Big Red's mix-and-match pattern started in the late 30s.

Dartmouth had its shares of ups and downs. Thanks to the addition of solid players provided by the V-12 naval training program in 1943, the Big Green came within one point (a 7-6 loss to Penn) of an undefeated season. In '44, the V-12s were gone and Dartmouth fell to 2-5-1, including a 64-0 loss to Notre Dame, a game the Green "hosted" at Fenway Park (discussed more in this post). In' 45, Dartmouth slipped to 1-6-1 despite the return of coach Tuss McLaughry from the war. (One thing I forgot to mention: Many teams during the war had interim coaches as the regular guys were in the service.)

For '44 and '45, Dartmouth added green pants so the Big Green could wear something green against Notre Dame, which insisted on wearing its green jerseys. By '46, they were gone.

Holy Cross' run to the Orange Bowl during the 1945 season was discussed in this post. The Cross was no slouch during the other war years, either (6-2 in '43, 5-2-2 in '44). A perusal through the school's Tomahawk newspaper reveals the Crusaders didn't make a decision on football until the summer of '43. As was the case with Dartmouth, Holy Cross received a boost from the V-12 program.

Penn was the last of the Ivy schools to play big-time opponents on a regular basis, so it's no shock that the Quakers went full speed ahead during their war. Penn went 17-7-1 fro 1943-45 and was ranked No 20 in the final AP poll in '43 and No. 8 in '45. A fun bit of trivia: Penn played ONE road game during that whole period, and that was in New York. Franklin Field was one of the largest stadiums in America (73,000 capacity) at the time and thus was a destination for schools large and small that wanted to play in front of a big crowd in a big city. So strange to think Philly was once a college football hotbed.

Penn's uniforms were largely unchanged throughout the 1940s. I love those striped sleeves because they screamed PENN, going back to the 19th century.

The highlight of Yale's World War II run was in 1944, when the Bulldogs went 7-0-1 but went unranked anyway — most of their wins were very narrow and none of their foes were close to being ranked. Like Penn, Yale played in a huge stadium and hit the road only twice (Columbia and Princeton) during the three-year span.

Like Cornell and Penn, Yale's helmets had more than one pattern. I wonder if depended on the brand the players used, or if different patterns were made available?

Ivy League (2023)

OK, enough procrastination, it's time to kick off the uniforms of 2023. We start with the Ivy League, and we'll look at each team in alphabetical order.

In a nice touch, all eight teams wore a green-and-white "BT" decal on the back of their helmets in honor of former Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens, who passed away in September.

Brown made no real changes from 2022 other than mixing up a combo or two. I made this comment last year, and I'll repeat it here: I still say there either needs to be some red trim on the shirts or ditch red from the helmets and pants entirely; the uniform just looks mismatched otherwise. 

Cornell added a new home jersey to match the ones the Big Red wear on the road, and also introduced black alternate pants, which, like the NBA In-Season Tournament and the Boston Bruins' new lemon-meringue sweaters, is an answer to a question that nobody asked.

Columbia, alas, wore "only" eight combinations after having 10 each of the last two seasons. But the Lions made up for it by restoring light blue as the primary home jersey color after years of black and navy shirts. (Navy was still used for a couple games.) I prefer the white helmets to the navy version, but nothing about this uniform is actively bad.

Dartmouth, like Brown, made no changes other than a combo change or two. Why change the best helmets in the Ivy League?

Harvard made no changes, other than the addition of a patch celebrating the 150th anniversary of the football program. (I personally thought the Crimson should have worn a helmet with the slogan "The REAL Football Sesquicentennial," in the style of their 100th anniversary helmets in 1974.) One other note: With the decreased use of knee pads, many players wear their pants super-short these days. Take a look at this photo gallery; is it me or has Harvard taken the biker-shorts look to eleven? 

Penn introduced new home and road jerseys, with the most notable difference being a switch to white numbers at home and blue on the road after previously using red on both versions. The white helmets and red alternate shirts (a personal favorite of mine) returned for another run.

Princeton made some interesting alterations this season. The Tigers introduced a new alternate uniform with black tiger stripes on white shirts and pants, a la the Cincinnati Bengals. They also hauled the orange pants, last worn in 2017, out of retirement, giving Princeton more than passing resemblance to Oregon State.

Yale kept things pretty simple except for the homecoming game, where the Bulldogs broke out blue helmets and pants. You may recall they wore a blue 150th anniversary helmet in 2022; this one is kinda similar, except the stripes and the "Y" on the sides are white.

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.

Ivy League (2022)

Time to look back at the uniforms of 2022, starting with the Ivy League! Teams are presented in descending order of finish, which means we lead off with the most intriguing bunch, a team as prone to change as much as its baseball brethren in the nearby Bronx  ...

Outright champion Yale, the longtime winner of the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) award for its reliable white helmets and plain blue jerseys and white pants, tossed tradition like a penalty flag and embraced it at the same time. First, the Bulldogs switched to big, curved numbers not unlike those the Los Angeles Rams use. Next, they added a special alternate uniform to celebrate 150 years of football at the university: A cream-colored jersey with faux stitches down the middle to simulate a 19th-century jersey, with a navy blue helmet and navy pants. You can read more about this uniform, which has several subtle elements that honor the team's history, here. The blue pants were worn again later in the season, and hopefully they see more game time, along with the blue helmet, in 2023.

Other than some mixing and matching here and there, Penn kept the same playbook from 2021: Two helmets, three jerseys and two pants. This is a good uniform, although I wish the Quakers would bring back the 1970s-style helmet from 2019 in some capacity.

Princeton made some small modifications to the black home jersey and the black pants (the "P" was replaced by a "Princeton Football" logo in Week 2), but nothing much changed from 2021. The upper back of the black shirts has the "old" Ivy League logo, which was phased out in 2019, but I guess refuses to die. I ranted a little about the Ivy logo change here.

Harvard, which overhauled its uniforms in 2021, revived the black alternate shirt in the new design. I dunno, I still prefer the classic numbers to the Star Trek font, but then I also pine for the return of the triple option, so what do I know?

Columbia did it again, and I don't mean putting up a winning record for the second straight year, although the Lions did that, too. A year after wearing 10 different designs over 10 games, Columbia pulled off the feat again in 2022. As I did last year, I organized the uniforms by week rather than by home/road/alternate. As for the unis themselves, the Lions added a navy blue helmet, which has a "C" on one side and a number on the other (grrr ...). The white helmet does the same thing, only with a lion in lieu of the "C." A new blue alternate jersey was added; its design was more in line with the black and white jerseys. The light blue alternate shirt also returned.

Cornell made a few minor changes. The Big Red replaced the block numbers on the road jersey with curved versions, kinda like those on the short-lived 2019 alternate, and the white pants now mirror the red versions. For the last game of the season, the iconic (well, iconic to me, at least) "C" was replaced with a tiny script "Cornell." Hopefully, this was just a one-shot experiment. 

Geez, Dartmouth, I didn't expect to find you down here. The Big Green made some minor changes to the pants and the white and black jerseys, which now lack shoulder numbers. (If you've watched the NFL lately, you'll see those "TV numbers" are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.) The new(er) Ivy logo is now on the jersey fronts, as is a patch celebrating the 50th anniversary of Title IX. (I believe 1972 also was the year women were first admitted to Dartmouth.)

We wrap up with Brown, which made a few changes from last year. The Bears dumped the classy ivy-in-the-B logo for a plain block "B." The brown alternate helmet, which was blank last year, now has a "B" on one side and a bear outline on the other. I still say there either needs to be some red trim on the shirts or ditch red from the helmets and pants entirely; the uniform just looks mismatched otherwise.