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.

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 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.

I like the cartoons! They make me laugh!

A long time ago, long before memes or YouTube videos with thumbnails featuring shocked faces, emojis and arrows, athletes and sporting events were regularly portrayed in newspaper cartoons. (For those reading in 2053, this is what a newspaper was.) Papers big and small supplemented their articles, box scores and photos with illustrations of everyone from Joe DiMaggio to high school swimmers. They added a welcome dimension to the sports pages, and unfortunately the concept seemed to die with the '60s.

New England college football was no stranger to the cartoonists' pen and ink, so let's look at some vintage 'toons, shall we?

Perhaps New England's most famous sports cartoonist is Phil Bissell, who designed the New England (nee Boston) Patriots logo in 1960 and was recently revived for a couple of throwback games. Bissell drew for a number of newspapers from 1949-87, including the Boston Globe from 1953-65. His work also illustrated classic American Football League programs and media guides for Boston University and the University of New Hampshire.

The three cartoons above served the preview the weekend's college action. The first and third illustrations are from 1954; the second is from '55. About 4-5 games were typically highlighted, with the secondary games (Bridgeport-Brandeis?!?) written at the bottom on something resembling a royal scroll. The mascots and their natural habitats often made for easy subject matter. (Some, like Dartmouth and UMass's long-discarded Native American mascots, wouldn't fly today.) Boston University's terrier lives in a dog house, Princeton's tiger resides in the jungle, Boston College's eagle hangs out in a nest ... you get the idea.

After the game, a cartoon naturally wrapped up the weekend's action, often focusing on one game. Case in point, this Boston College win over Miami from 1958. (BTW, 6-2 wasn't BC's record, it was the final score. Old-time football, baby!) A cartoon would try to give a summary of the game for those who couldn't bothered to read the game story or watch the highlights on the nightly news, not that game highlights were a common thing in '58. Anyway, Bissell manages to squeeze in six key points in just a few columns of space, no small feat.

During the week, cartoons might focus on one or two players. This example from 1954 focuses on BC's Tom Magnarelli, who won the O'Melia Trophy for the MVP of the annual Boston College-Holy Cross game (once one of the highlights of the New England sporting year).

Let's take a gander at some other cartoonists. Frank Lanning was a longtime illustrator for the Providence Journal whose artwork for Brown and Rhode Island football (and their opponents) graced the paper's pages for decades.

This one highlights a Rhody win over Boston University in 1945. Eight key moments are shoehorned into one cartoon, anchored by Sal Vento, the "scatback from Saugatcuk."

Lanning goes off the board for this cartoon, which previews the 1965 Maine-East Carolina Tangerine Bowl. Linebacker John Huard, a two-time Little All-America, is generally considered the G.O.A.T. of Black Bear football players. 

Hubert Bushey's illustrations of University of Vermont sports appeared in the Burlington Free Press for years, and he even designed the old Charlie Catamount mascot (since replaced by Rally Cat). His most famous work might be from 1974, when the school pulled the plug on football after 77 seasons. The "30" was old-time newspaper jargon marking the end of a story, and, well, the Catamounts got hit with the "30" on the gridiron. (Baseball, which got the ax in 1971, was revived in 1978 and canceled again in 2009.)

From somewhat happier times, this cartoon previews UVM's '69 season. Bob Clifford, the head coach, resigned after a 3-6 season and threats of a player revolt.

And now, some miscellaneous cartoons:

This one is actually from Dartmouth's 1942 media guide. Dartmouth's "hometown" paper, the Valley News (where I worked for many years), wasn't born until 1952 and I don't think they ever did any Big Green cartoons.

Not sure where this one came from, but it illustrates Dartmouth's legendary "Fifth Down" game against Cornell in 1940. (Long story short: Cornell trailed 3-0 late in the game and threatened near the Dartmouth goal line, got an inadvertent fifth down from the refs and scored a walk-off TD to win 6-3. The Big Red "forfeited" the game a couple days later after reviewing the film, expecting Dartmouth to decline the forfeit. Of course the Big Green accepted and was declared a 3-0 winner.)

Not sure who drew this, but it highlights 1960s UMass stars Milt Morin and Bob Meers; Morin later was a star tight end for the Cleveland Browns. 

From The New Hampshire student paper, 1947 Glass Bowl coach Biff Glassford is profiled. I presume Vern Hall is the author.

I think this is from Daily Princetonian, but it illustrates Princeton's 14-0 win over Brown in 1964, when the Tigers went 9-0 and outscored their foes 216-53.

And last but not least, this piece of irreverence from the Yale Daily News in 1985, when Yale and Dartmouth played to a 17-17 tie. Alas, the Big Green's iconic Keggy was a long ways away.