The 1925 Project (Part 4)

A while back, we looked at four Ivy League teams as part of our tribute to New England college football of a century ago, including co-national champion Dartmouth. (Yes, you read that right.) Today, the rest of the not-yet Ancient Eight takes the snap. You can find more teams here and here.

Harvard

High Point: For a team with a winning record, I can't find any real high points. Three of the Crimson's four wins were over non-conference foes RPI, Middlebury and William & Mary. The fourth was a 3-0 win over Brown on Nov. 14, and even then Harvard was thoroughly outplayed if this article is to be believed. The big "victory" might be a scoreless tie with heavily-favored Yale in which the final whistle blew just as the Bulldogs lined up on Harvard's 3-yard line. (Remember, there were no digital scoreboards keeping time then, and only the officials knew the "real" time, kinda like soccer officials today.)

Low Point: Harvard was blown out by powerful Princeton and Dartmouth by a combined scored of 68-9.

Harvard opened the 1925 season against RPI;
today, the schools play in the same hockey conference.
Check out the RPI player with the letter "I" on the back!

Uniforms: Like many other teams of the era, Harvard had moleskin patches stitched on some jerseys in order to help the ballcarriers better protect the ball.

The Harvard brain trust had plenty to smile about
after a strong end to the season.

Other Trivia: Head coach Bob Fisher was 43-14-5 over seven seasons at Harvard, highlighted by a win in the 1920 Rose Bowl. As a player, he was a two-time All-American for the Crimson.

Pennsylvania 

High Points: There were 2: 

1) On Oct. 17, Penn beat Yale 16-13 for the Quakers' first-ever victory over the Bulldogs after 12 losses. Fullback Al Kruez led a bruising ground attack, stopped Yale's running game on defense, and his field goal proved to be the difference on the scoreboard.

Penn makes history against Yale.

2) The Quakers capped a successful season with a 7-0 Thanksgiving Day win over archival Cornell at Franklin Field. Penn's touchdown came on a Charlie Rogers 42-yard scoop-and-score in the final quarter. The Philadelphia Inquirer, using enough purple prose to drown a printing press, referred to Rogers as "The Camden Comet" (he was from Camden, New Jersey) and "the doughy scion of Jersey." The article later said Rogers "galloped like some elusive spectre, some ghost of the gridiron." Which leads us to ... 

Low Point: It might be unfair to call Penn's 24-2 Halloween loss to Illinois a "low point," since the main attraction wasn't so much the host Quakers as it was the Philly debut Red Grange, the Illini's "Galloping Ghost." Number 77 did not disappoint, running for 320 yards on 32 carries, including a 55-yard TD run on his first carry.

Red Grange, far right, leaves Penn in the dust. Or mud.

Oddly enough, the game drew "only" 60,000 fans to Franklin Field, 11,000 less than the Turkey Day turnout for Cornell. And probably 600,000 fans went on to tell their friends they were there when Red ran up, down and around the Quakers.

Uniforms: Even then, the Quakers had a recognizable look. Penn without the alternating red-and-blue stripes on the sleeves is like Ben Franklin without his bifocals. It's just not right. Going back to the 19th century, probably the only notable changes the Quakers had made to this point were the addition of helmets and numbers on the back. Notice the patches of the jersey fronts to help the ballcarriers. (I wonder if those actually worked?)

Other Trivia: Joseph Wilson, the captain, went on to serve 45 years as a United States district judge in Pennsylvania. ... Head coach Lou Young was 49-15-2 over seven seasons. It's interesting the note how successful coaches such as Young and Harvard's Fisher walked away from the game despite terrific records. My guess is that even then, coaching was a stressful profession.

Princeton 

High Point: It's always good to beat those traditional rivals, right? Princeton topped Harvard and Yale by a combined score of 61-12. The 36-0 win over Harvard was Princeton's most dominant victory in the rivalry to date.

Low Point: A 9-0 loss to Colgate in driving rain on October 24 cost the Tigers an undefeated season. Eddie Tyron, who I wrote about in this post, scored the Raiders' lone touchdown and bottled the Tigers on their half of the field with his booming punts.

Princeton and Navy face off in 1925. As is often the case,
good luck figuring out which team is which.

Uniforms: Like Penn, Princeton's basic design dates back to the 19th century with those gorgeous tiger stripes. From what I've been able to gather, some jersey numbers were orange and some were white. But with those grainy 1920s photos, you can never quite tell.

Other Trivia: Center Ed McMillan was a consensus first-team All-American. Like many Ivy players, his post-playing career differed from his contemporaries, as he served as an examiner for the Pennsylvania Securities and Exchange Commission. ... Fullback Jacob Slagle was a non-consensus All-American at fullback. ... Coach Bill Roper remains the Tigers' all-time winningest coach; the William Winston Roper Trophy, the school's highest individual honor for a male athlete, is named in his honor.

Yale

High Point: I'm tempted to say a 35-7 win over Georgia on Oct. 10, but a) Georgia was 4-5 that year; b) Southern football was on the rise (see Alabama's co-championship that year), but it wasn't quite SOUTHERN FOOTBALL yet, with Sammy Baugh and Davey O'Brien and those guys. There was a 28-7 win over Army on Halloween, but the Cadets' 7-2 record was deceiving (among their victims: Detroit, Knox, Saint Louis, Davis & Elkins and Ursinus). I'll pencil in a 20-7 win over Brown over October 24, by default of nothing else. (Yale's other wins were over Middlebury and Maryland; the Terps were kinda in the same camp as Georgia.)

Good seats were still available at the Yale Bowl
for the Bulldogs' 35-7 win over those other Bulldogs from Georgia.

Low Point: If Harvard's scoreless tie with Yale was the high point of the Crimson's season, I'm guessing it was a low point of the Bulldogs' season. Another downer was the aforementioned  16-13 loss to Penn.

Uniforms: Basic stuff. I'm not sure if the helmets are blue as in the above graphic; I'm guessing that's lost to history.

Other Trivia: Guard Herbert Sturhahn was named to the first of two straight All-America teams. ... Tackle Johnny Joss, who was named to the New York Sun's All-America team, later coached college football in Mexico.

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 2)

Time for Part 2 of our look at first-year logos that became popular, or least stuck around a while. Part 1 is right here.

I discussed Princeton's 1935 uniforms in this post about the time an imbibed fan ran onto the field during a Dartmouth-Prineton game. Suffice to say, it's one of the most iconic designs in college football, at least if you're fan of Michigan or Delaware.

Princeton ditched the design in 1938, frequently going with plain orange helmets for the next 60 years. In '98, the Tigers revived the design to coincide with their move into brand-new Princeton Stadium. The result was once of the classiest uniforms I've ever seen. In 2012, Princeton reversed the colors and the design — at least to these eyes — seemed to lose its magic. 

Any team called the Rams damn well better have rams' horns for a design, right? Rhode Island debuted the horns in 1955, as discussed in this post on the Rams' Refrigerator Bowl team. After only two seasons, however, the horns were replaced by numbers, In '62, the horns returned and remained there in a variety of shapes combinations until 1993. In 2000, with a new coach, Rhody re-embraced the horns (as part of another classy uniform) and remain to this day. In 2011, Rhody adopted the current light blue-on-navy design.

I don't know if you can call a logo whose original run was a mere decade iconic, but if you lived in New England in the 1990s, you'll remember the UMass logo from the Minutemen's widely successful men's basketball program. (I always called it the "Calipari logo" as a result.) The swooshing "U," the "Mass" that looked like it came out of the 70s — it was hard to forget. I think the basketball teams used it a few years before football adopted it in 1993, but I could be wrong. In 2012, 2019 and 2021-23, the logo was revived as an alternate.

These appeared in the William & Mary student paper "The Flat Hat,"
in 1994-95. Two things: 1) "The Flat Hat" is dumb name for a paper;
2) "Dumb-ass Yankees?" You lost the Civil War in 1865, I'd suggest you get over it.

———

After many years of using plain white helmets with numbers on the side, New Hampshire unveiled its first helmet logo in 1976, an interlocking "NH" that was rounded on the top and bottom, almost giving it the shape of a football. Amazingly, the helmet stuck around until 2000, when the Wildcats replaced it with another long-lasting logo. I wrote more about the 1976-77 Wildcats here and here. And best of all, the logo made a (more-or-less) full-time return in 2024!

Long before Oregon and other schools made a plain letter logo iconic, the Ivy League schools had already mastered the art. A plain serif "Y" is dull as dishwater anywhere else — but on a Yale helmet it's a classic. The Bulldogs first wore it in 1966, Carm Cozza's second year as coach. I first wrote about the '66 Bulldogs here; this uniform lasted for three decades.

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?