Columbia Lions (1933)

Over the last year, we’ve profiled some unlikely teams that reached bowl games both big — 1919 Harvard (Rose Bowl) and 1945 Holy Cross (Orange Bowl) — and small — 1955 Rhode Island (Refrigerator Bowl) and 1969 Boston University (Pasadena Bowl). Today, we look at perhaps the most miraculous team among our group of bowlers: The 1933 Columbia Lions, who stunned mighty Stanford — and the nation — in the ’34 Rose Bowl in what was widely hailed as one of football greatest upsets to that point in history.

Columbia’s football history, of course, is not a glamorous one, marked by long losing streaks, consecutive winless seasons and on-campus apathy that almost borders on passion. But under coach Lou Little — Columbia’s seventh coach in 16 years since the the school reinstated the program in 1915 — the Lions were generally competitive and often quite good. Little won 110 games from 1930-56, but two victories defined his reign at Columbia: 1947’s 21-20 win over Army that ended the Cadets’ four-year, 32-game unbeaten streak, and the other was, well, … read on. 

The 1933 Columbia Lions, wearing the striped jerseys

(for more info on the unis, read on!)

In 1930 Columbia hired Little away from Georgetown, where he went 41-12-3 over six seasons. (To this day, I see a Georgetown score and my first thought is, “You mean Georgetown has football?” And yes, I know I went to Maine and people probably think the same thing about the Black Bears.) After a 5-4 debut season, Columbia went 29-4-2 over the next four seasons, highlighted by the ’33 edition. Columbia went 7-1 in the regular season, and although the schedule was considered soft by contemporary sportswriters, the Lions beat what are considered real football schools by today’s standards: Virginia (15-6), Penn State (33-0), Navy (14-7) and Syracuse (16-0). The lone setback was at Princeton (20-0), which finished 9-0 and outscored its foes 217-8 (yes, that reads E-I-G-H-T). But Princeton declined any Rose Bowl overtures, so the folks in Pasadena went with Plan B: Columbia, which would face 8-1 Stanford on New Year’s Day. 

Columbia's lone 1933 loss was to Princeton.

West Coast sportswriters, upset Stanford and the Rose Bowl people settled for what they considered a soft opponent, made the Indians (later the Cardinals, then the Cardinal) a four-touchdown favorite. The New York Times predicted the Lions would be overwhelmed by such sights as parade floats, starlets and other trappings, treating a group of sophisticated New Yorkers as if they were country bumpkins from Hanover or Orono.

In addition to the parades and celebrities, the teams also were greeted by rainy, muddy conditions at the Rose Bowl stadium, which kept the crowd down to about 35,000. (The pervious year’s game drew 78,874; the next year’s, 84,474.) Wikipedia tells us the stadium was so muddy, the Pasadena fire department pumped water out of the stadium. 

The 1934 Rose Bowl program, which survived the ravages

of weather and time. 

Stanford and Columbia slogged through a scoreless first quarter before Little unveiled a trick play, in this curious era when a three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust offense would suddenly spring an unusual, intricate play out of nowhere. 

With the ball of the Stanford 17-yard-line, quarterback Cliff Montgomery quickly handed the ball off to running back Al Barabas, then faked a handoff to another back, Ed Brominski. While the Stanford defense chased Montgomery and Brominski, Barabas scampered to his left untouched toward the end zone for the game’s only score. Columbia won 7-0 for the mega-upset over the four-TD favorites. The play, listed in the playbook as “KF-79,” became legendary in Columbia annals. Montgomery, a future College Football Hall of Fame inductee, was named the game’s MVP.

Cliff Montgomery in 1933 ...

... and in 2003 (left), wearing the 1933 throwback jersey.

Tip Top 25 has Columbia ranked No. 5 in hypothetical 1933 postseason poll, which sounds about right. While the rest of the Lions’ schedule was considered a run of cupcakes, the win over Stanford (No. 12) was HUGE and enough to land them in the top 5. (Princeton, which didn’t go bowling, is No. 2 at 9-0, and Tip Top considers the Tigers worthy of a national title claim.) 

And now, the uniforms, where it gets a little tricky. All the preseason and team photos have the Lions wearing blue jerseys with a navy friction-stripe pattern on the front. But all the pictures I’ve seen from that season — including the Rose Bowl — shows the shirts with plain blue fronts. When Columbia honored the ’33 team 70 years later, the Lions wore throwback jerseys with the striped fronts, even though they apparently weren’t worn in the regular season. (As I think I’ve said earlier, people who whine and moan about supposedly inaccurate throwback unis rank high on my list of things I can’t stand. Life’s too short, folks.) 

In the interest of completion and in diffusing confusion (for the half-dozen people who have waded this far!), I’ve included the preseason unis in the above graphic. I prefer the striped versions, although by ’33 stripes were on the outs as front jersey numbers became more commonplace.

The basic template — Light blue shirts, navy stripes down the sleeves and around the wrists — was used from at least the late 1920s until 1946, when the Lions adopted a style resembling those other Lions in Detroit, kicking off a long, long run of uniform changes.

NOTE: Much of the information above comes from John McCallum’s wonderful “Ivy League Football Since 1872,” published in 1977, and contains tons of great details and tidbits about Columbia’s Rose Bowl run.

Maine Black Bears, Rhode Island Rams (1982)

The NCAA record for number of overtimes in a football game is seven, set five times, most recently when Texas A&M defeated LSU 74-72 in 2018. It’s easy to forget that before 1996, overtime didn’t exist in most NCAA conferences, and tie games were still the norm. (My copy of the excellent USA Today College Football Encyclopedia goes on a long harangue about the evils of overtime games, basically noting that certain games, like the 1968 Harvard-Yale 29-29 showdown, were classics because they ended in a tie.)

But before ’96, a few Division I-AA (FCS) conferences — The Big Sky, Ohio Valley and Yankee conferences — already employed OT, and on Sept. 18, 1982, Maine and Rhode Island made national headlines when they needed six overtimes to decide their game in Orono, and their rematch the next year even garnered a regional network broadcast (a real network, not some cable/satellite channel with a four-digit number on your remote or a streaming internet “network” with a one-camera setup).

“Woody Hayes nor Bear Bryant nor Red Grange nor Grantland Rice ever experienced the kind of spectacle in which the University of Maine’s Black Bears and the University of Rhode Island’s Rams remained engaged in for 3 hours and 46 minutes at Alumni Field here Saturday afternoon,” the Bangor Daily News’ Bob Haskell wrote after Rhody outlasted Maine, 58-55. (Note No. 1: This was long before basketball scores became popular in football.)

Maine six-overtime loss to Rhode Island in 1982
made Page 1 of that Monday's Bangor Daily News.

One wonders how many of the estimated 6,000 fans in attendance figured the game was over when the clock read 0:00 after Maine scored two TDs in the final 6 1/2 minutes of regulation to knot the game at 21-all, although “the possibility of overtime had the press box buzzing,” Haskell wrote. Remember: It’s unlikely anyone in attendance had ever seen a college football game go to overtime before, so this was as new and fresh as a game ball on the first day of August practice.

And so the teams returned to the field, with each team getting four shots from the opponents’ 15-yard-line for a first down, followed by four more chances to scored a touchdown or field goal.

The scoreboard reads Period 4, but the score 
was 35-35 after Period 6 (or the second OT).

The teams swapped four TDs and one field goal through the first five OTs, and Maine took a 55-52 lead in OT No. 6 on Jack Leone’s 27-yard field goal. In the bottom of the “inning,” Rhody drove the ball down to the Maine 2, and faced fourth down. The Rams could have booted a chip shot field goal and thrown the game to a seventh OT, but coach Bob Griffin had seen enough; he opted to go for the TD and the win. Rams QB Dave Grimsich faked a handoff to tailback Cal Whitfield, then flipped the ball to receiver T.J. DelSanto on an end-around, and DelSanto waltzed into the end zone  untouched at 5:16 p.m. to end a game that kicked off at 1:30. (Note No. 2: This was long before four-hour football games became a regular thing.)  

“I was starting to lose myself. I think I was ready to drop,” an exhausted Griffin told the BDN after the game. His Rams set or tied 17 team records in the win.

But Maine coach Ron Rogerson was ready to shake his fist. “That was ridiculous what went on out there,” Rogerson — who admitted he voted for the OT procedure when the Yankee Conference added it in 1981 — said. “But there should be a limit. The risk of injury is just too great.”

And then, somehow, it got worse. One week later, Maine visited Boston University and lost, 48-45 — this time in four overtimes. The Black Bears had played the equivalent of 3 1/2 games in a span of eight days (56 minutes against Rhody, 40 vs., BU), and had nothing to show for it. 

“When I walked into our locker room at BU Saturday night, it couldn’t have been any worse if somebody had dropped a bomb there,” Rogerson told the Boston Globe’s Ernie Roberts.

“I’ve been at Delaware (as an assistant) when we’ve lost the national championship, but I’ve never seen a locker room like that,” Rogerson told the BDN’s Haskell right after the game. “Everyone is crying. It’s awful.”

An exhibit at the College Football Hall of Fame
honors the Maine-Rhody 6-OT classic.

A funny thing came out of the heartbreakers, though — the Black Bears received some national attention, a rarity then or now for an FCS team. Sports Illustrated, the Washington Post and even ABC descended upon Orono to report on this little school that played two multi-OT games in two weeks. The ball, program and BDN report of the game were sent to the College Football Hall of Fame in Kings Island, Ohio. (Note No. 3: The Hall of Fame has since moved to South Bend, Indiana and later Atlanta, where it resides today.) And the Maine-Rhody rematch On Sept. 17 1983 was broadcast regionally on CBS. (According to former athletic director Stuart Haskell’s exhaustive, glorious and comprehensive “The Maine Book,” the former head of CBS’ Bangor affiliate, a UMaine alumnus, used his pull with network executives to carry the game.) Alas, Rhody took the rematch, 24-16, but at least Maine took home roughly $200,000 for its moment in the network sun.

And despite the two setbacks, Maine still finished 7-4 and won a share of the YC title — although without OT, the Bears would have been 7-2-2, undisputed champs and likely in the NCAA I-AA tournament. Quarterback Rich LaBonte was named YC offensive player of the year and Rogerson was named coach of the year.

Rhody also was 7-4 — during a rare hot run for the Rams, who shared the YC title in ’81 — and was 2-3 (fifth) in the YC. Offensive lineman Richard Pelzer was named I-AA All-American.

Merrimack Warriors (1996-2001)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I suffered a massive brain cramp when Merrimack College moved up to Division I from D-II all sports, including football. It wasn’t until late in the season when I realized I needed to add a new team to the site (which primarily covers D-I institutions), and, of course, another uniform history. While Merrimack’s gridiron history goes back to only 1996, the Warriors have worn enough uniform styles to pack Duane Stadium (their home field).  

Merrimack had a club team for about a decade before its first varsity team hit the field in ’96. As a Catholic school whose colors were blue and gold, the Warriors elected to emulate a certain other Catholic school with blue and gold, right down to the Champion numbers (although Notre Dame’s were considerably smaller). While Merrimack didn’t exactly shake down much thunder while impersonating the Fighting Irish, the Warriors still went 5-4 in their first varsity season.

Merrimack's first varsity team in action, 1996.
The only thing missing is an "ND" on the sleeves.

The 1996 Merrimack Warriors. You've got to start somewhere,
even if it means shooting your first team photo in a basketball gym.

Over the next several years, Merrimack made some small changes to the uniform; while the Warriors kept the basic Notre Dame elements (plain gold helmet and pants, blue jersey), they drifted away in other areas, particularly a change to the ugly Machine font for the numbers and the addition of a Nike swoosh on the front. 

Upon moving to the Northeast-10 Conference from the Eastern Football Conference in 2001, Merrimack added an NE-10 patch to the jersey front, and the gold pants turned blue on the road. (And talk about mixed signals — the blue pants added an “M” in the form of Notre Dame arch-rival Michigan.) By the mid-aughties, the blue pants were worn on the road, as well, and by decade’s end, the Warriors ditched gold for yellow  (which their other teams already used — BTW, do message board users still get into childish “yellow vs. gold” debates?) and added the “MC” logo that’s worn to this day.

The '98 Warriors, with Machine font for numbers. 

By 2000, Merrimack was wearing numbers on the sleeves.

The '01 Warriors added a Northeast-10 logo to the jerseys.

Holy Cross Crusaders (1945-7)

A while back, we looked at a couple schools (Boston University, Rhode Island) that played in obscure bowl games. Now let’s take a gander at a small school that played in a slightly bigger bowl game — the 1945 Holy Cross Crusaders, who went 8-2, were ranked No. 16 in the nation by the Associated Press and ended the season with a loss to Miami in the Orange Bowl — yes, THAT Orange Bowl.

Unlike many New England schools (including Harvard, Boston College and most of the future Yankee Conference cow colleges), Holy Cross elected to go with a full program throughout World War II. The Crusaders went 6-2 in 1943 and 5-2-2 in ’44 going into the ’45 season under first-year coach John “Ox” DaGrosa. Holy Cross marched through its typical schedule of Ivy and other small, private Eastern schools (Villanova, Colgate, etc.), with its only setback coming to Temple in the next-to-last regular-season game. The Crusaders crushed arch-rival Boston College, 46-0, in the season finale to clinch a spot in the Orange Bowl against Miami.

The Orange Bowl game was first played after the 1934 season as a low-level bowl game (the first three games all attracted four-digit crowds), but quickly took off in popularity as big-name schools (Tennessee, Georgia Tech, etc.) got involved. Holy Cross’ showdown with Miami on Jan. 1 1946 drew 35,709, the second-largest crowd in the game’s history (no doubt helped by the host school’s participation, but crowds of 60,000-plus became standard a few years later, whether The U was there or not).  

This cartoon from the Tomahawk student paper
commemorates Holy Cross' appearance in the 1946 Orange Bowl.
Ah, the days before GIFs ... 

As for the game itself, Miami snapped a 6-6 tie in improbable fashion on a play that would be the stuff of legend today. The Cross was at the Hurricanes’ 26-yard line with 15 seconds remaining, too far away for a field goal in those pre-specialist days. Ox DaGrosa refused to settle for a tie and went for a pass play. Gene DeFillipo’s pass bounced off the hands of receiver Bob Conway and into the hands of Miami’s Al Hudson, who ran the ball back 89 yards for a game-winning pick-6 as time expired. Can you imagine if a game like that ended now? Poor DeFillipo and DaGrosa would be crucified on social media and on SportsCenter, and the ending certainly would win an ESPY as play of the year.

From top to bottom, Al Hudson's 89-yard, game-winning,
walk-off pix-six that gave Miami the 1946 Orange Bowl win 
over Holy Cross. Images taken from the highlight film.
Maybe I should be writing about those fiery orange
Hurricanes' unis. 

Despite the down ending, the game capped a memorable season, and Holy Cross football never reached these heights again, although basketball won the NCAA title in 1947 and baseball won the College World Series in ’52, so the athletic program was on a serious hot streak. Ox DaGrosa stepped down after the 1947 season (when only 10 players showed up on the first day of training camp and he had to suit up baseball players to fill out the roster; the ‘Saders still finished 4-4-2 and beat BC) and died a few years later.

TipTop 25, in its review of the ’45 AP poll, drops the Crusaders to No. 24, noting their two losses came to team that were unranked in the original poll. Works for me.

Holy Cross’ uniforms for ’45 were typical of the period: Silver helmets and pants, purple and white jerseys. In ’46, however, Ox DaGrosa took a left turn, switching to white helmets, jerseys with alternate-colored shoulder panels and pants with stripes down the back. Very un-Holy Cross, as you can see. In ’47, the silver helmets and conventional pants returned, and the paneled jerseys were ditched for more conservative versions in ’48, after former HC and Chicago Bears star Bill Osmanski became coach. 

The Ivy League: Seasons to Forget

Recently, the Ivy League announced that it will not hold any athletic events for the fall semester due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The schools that basically invented football will be on the sidelines for the first time since the 19th century (although Columbia didn’t have football from 1906-14).

The news made me want to research some of the Ancient Eight’s more victory-deprived teams, seasons that were so bad the respective schools likely wish someone had pulled the plug then, too. Every Ivy school — even the Yales and Harvards — has endured a tough stretch now and then (well, in Columbia’s case, a good stretch now and then).

In many of these cases, some of these dreadful seasons occurred before dramatic turnarounds, thus proving the old adage about things being darkest before the dawn and all that. 

What follows is a look at a sorry season for every Ivy school, in alphabetical order:

Under coach John McLaughry, Brown rarely played up to the standards set by his father, DeOrmand “Tuss” McLaughry (his 1926 “Iron Man” team is covered here). McLaughry fils went 17-51-3 from 1959-66, and the 1961 bunch market rock bottom: The Bears went 0-9 and were outscored 245-24 (that’s twenty-four, almost the 1963 UMass team in reverse), suffering five shutouts in the process. A couple losses were actually close (12-9 to Rhode Island, 7-0 to Penn), but many were more along the lines of 50-0 to Columbia, 34-0 to Dartmouth and 52-0 to Princeton. The season ended with a 30-6 Thanksgiving Day loss to Colgate in a game that “preserved its perfect record,” in the words of the Brown Daily Herald.

Amazingly, I believe this is the first time I’ve had a chance to mention the Bears’ classy uniforms from this era. Basically, they’re Princeton’s redone in seal brown and white. The team may have been awful, but at least it looked good while losing. 

I know, I know, Columbia has had dozens of seasons it wish it could wipe from the record books, so let’s pick a team from an otherwise decent era for the program. Coach Lou Little’s 1943 wartime team went 0-8 and was outscored 313-33. The Lions were shut out four times and managed more than one score only once, in a 47-13 loss to Dartmouth, one of four top-20 teams Columbia faced that year. Little missed three weeks “due to an acute sinus condition,” according to the Columbia Spectator, whose season-ending headline read “Lion’s (sic) Gameness and Courage in Defeat Make Campaign Unforgettable.” (I’ve noticed many of the old-time student newspapers/yearbooks had a lot of that “root-root-root-for-the-team-this-Saturday” aspect to them that took a complete 180 by 1968.) The Spectator also noted that Columbia’s linemen were outweighed by an average of 20 pounds per player. And remember, in an era when 200-pound players were a rarity, 20 pounds was a lot to surrender. 

Just two years later, with the war over, Little and Columbia went 8-1 and finished No. 20 in the final AP poll.

Ah, Cornell. Rarely good, rarely bad, just kinda there. But the Big Red hit a pothole in 1975-76, when it went a combined 3-15 and the head coach was let go. The coach became an assistant at Stanford and then the San Francisco 49ers, where he eventually became head coach and won two Super Bowls. His name … George Seifert.

This Los Angeles Times article by the late Chris Dufresne offers some insight into the Seifert debacle. Basically, several Cornell alumni were upset that former Ohio State and Baltimore Colt star Tom Matte (the running back who was pressed into duty at QB for a few games in 1965, you may recall) didn’t get the nod and withdrew their support. “Dick Schultz, Cornell’s athletic director at the time … told Seifert he was fired for his own good, that his gaining alumni support was next to impossible,” Dufresne wrote.

Also, check out the uniforms, which I think I’ve profiled elsewhere. How boring can you get? In Seifert’s second season, the classic wishbone “C” was removed from the helmet in favor of blank lids, and the trim from the pants and socks were removed. The unis, like the team itself, made you want to sleep. Luckily, that changed in 1977, when Bob Blackman became coach.

Dartmouth had been a powerhouse since the turn of the 20th century, but that changed after 1996, when the Big Green went 10-0 and stormed to an Ivy League title. (Basically, from what people told me when I lived in the area, Dartmouth jacked up its academic standards along the lines of Harvard and Yale, and poor coach John Lyons suddenly had a very narrow pool from which to recruit.) Not even the return of former star player and head coach Buddy Teevens to the sidelines couldn’t reverse Dartmouth’s fortunes at first, as he went 2-8, 2-8 and 3-7 over the next three years. Then came 2008 -- 0-10 debacle, its first winless season since 1883 (0-1), when it was still getting the program off the ground. The Green scored only 129 points, less than half of its total from the year before, and surrendered 343. And to make matters worse, the costume of Keggy, the unofficial beer keg-shaped mascot, was stolen before the season, which was a true tragedy, considering this was the team that made you want to drink after the game.

Even the uniforms were dreadful: A dated template with fat, blocky letters and numbers. The whole thing screams mid-2000s. Thankfully, the unis were dumped after the season.  

The good news: Dartmouth has four pieces to the puzzle.
The bad news: It's a 1,000-piece puzzle that won't be solved for another seven years.

Despite his 7-33 record from 2005-08, Dartmouth opted to keep Teevens, who rewarded his alma mater’s faith in him and won Ivy titles in 2015 and ’19. (In addition to the titles, you have the other things Teevens brought to the program, such as contactless practices, a robotic tackling dummy, etc., which made national headlines. As a Dartmouth fan, I'm glad the Greenies kept him.) The Green has had only two losing records since that 2008 disaster. 

A while back, I wrote about Harvard’s late-1940s trials and tribulations under coach Arthur Valpey, who went 5-12 and outfitted his teams in bizarre black pants, decades before black returned to prominence on the Crimson’s uniforms. In ’49, the Crimson went 1-8, low-lighted by a season-opening 44-0 loss at Stanford (Harvard’s first cross-country trip since the 1920 Rose Bowl), in which “several starters were injured playing with the wrong size cleats,” according to Mark F. Bernstein’s excellent “Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession.” After the season, Harvard opted to phase out the Armys and Stanfords from its schedule and concentrate on smaller, more like-minded foes in what athletic director James Conant called “Operation: Strictly Amateur,” according to Bernstein, and the seating capacity at Harvard Stadium was reduced by 19,000 seats.

Valpey’s replacement, Lloyd Jordan, didn’t have much better luck at first, going  24-31-3 from 1950-56, including a 1-7 debut season in ’50, but the days of dreadful football eventually ended under John Yovicsin, Joe Restive and Tim Murphy … and haven’t really returned.

Penn’s back-to-back winless seasons against national powerhouses while wearing white helmets were covered here. The 1970s, under coach Harry Gamble, brought some success at first, but that petered out and eventually hit rock bottom with an 0-9 disaster in 1979, part of a 17-game winless streak (16 losses and a tie) from 1978-80. Gamble, who was popular with his players at the time, was given the dreaded vote of confidence by Penn officials, but stepped down after a 1-9 season in ’80, when the Daily Pennsylvanian reported that a Quaker player circulated a petition calling for Gamble’s retention, but only 30 of 53 players signed it. Penn’s AD gave Gamble one of two options: Fire four of his assistants or take a pencil-pushing job in the athletic department. “He chose none of the above,” the DP wrote.

Jerry Berndt took over as coach in ’81 … and led the Quakers to an Ivy crown in ’82, their first in 23 years.

The uniforms of the early Gamble years were sleek and flashy, but had become bogged down by the late 70s (which I also wrote about here: The “P” inside the football was replaced one the helmet by a “Penn” that looked as it were scrawled on by a 6-year-old (apologies to all 6-year-olds reading this if you’re offended), the “PENNSYLVANIA” wordmark and numbers on the jerseys looked less professional and the navy pants look awful when worn with maroon jerseys.

Princeton enjoyed several years of success under Fritz Crisler, who gave the Tigers their winged helmets (which, amazingly, I haven’t written about) and took the style with him to Michigan in 1938. But in 1931, the year before Crisler took over, Princeton went 1-7 under one-and-done coach Albert Wittmer, who experienced far better results on the basketball court, where he went 115-86 from 1922-32 and remains the third-winningest men’s coach in program history. He also found time to serve in the New Jersey state legislature. 

Wittmer’s cause wasn’t helped when his predecessor, Bill Roper (career record: 89-28-16), criticized the current coaching staff in a Philadelphia Evening Bulletin column that ran following Princeton’s season-ending 51-14 pasting at Yale. “The game reminded me of a battle between two armies,” Roper wrote, “one equipped with modern inventions of warfare and the other using antiquated equipment but fighting with flaming courage despite its handicap.”

Two years later, Crisler guided the Tigers to an undefeated season.

Princeton’s uniforms weren’t too different than what it had worn since at least the early 1920s, right down to the padded variant.

We wrap up with Yale, which was a well-regarded program in the 1930s and ’40s under coaches Ducky Pond and Howie Odell (combined record with the Bulldogs: 65-40-4). But in between, there was another one-and-out coach, Spike Nelson — the first non-Yale graduate ever to lead the Bulldogs — who went 1-7 in 1941. The Bulldogs edged Virginia (!) on opening day, 21-19, then lost their last seven games, scoring only 33 points the rest of the way. On December 22 — just 15 days after the Pearl Harbor attack — Nelson resigned to join the U.S. Engineer Corps. In 1944, Odell led the Bulldogs to a 7-0-1 season. 

One oddity with the uniforms: The helmets in 1940 and ’42 were blue on the bottom and white on top, with a winged pattern in the middle. The Spike Nelson helmets, however, were plain white. As you can see, Yale used differing number fonts.

Maine Black Bears (1970)

I love going to antique stores or flea markets, because you don't look for items, they look for YOU. So imagine my joy when I came across a 1970 football program recently at an antique store in central Maine, placed in a display among some other Maine-centric items in honor of the Pine Tree State's 200th birthday:

The program is rather thin by today's standards, but it's loaded with goodies. Let's dig deeper: 

The coaching staff. Walt Abbott has served UMaine since the 1950s in every capacity imaginable: Student, player, coach, administrator, instructor, TV/radio announcer, you name it. Jack Butterfield also was the head baseball coach. Bob Pickett later was the head coach at UMass. Dick DeVarney was a former star QB and infielder at UMaine.

The trainer and the equipment guys. Oh, to go into that locker room
and snap up a few jerseys and helmets ...

The captains. Ah, the old Durene jerseys with
long sleeves and stitched numbers. (And yes, I know my
graphic above has shorter sleeves.)

Some of the Black Bears. Here's an oddity: 1969 was college football's 100th anniversary,
so why is a "102" logo used in 1970?

Alas, the team wasn't nearly as good as this program, going 3-5, although the Bears won their last three games after an 0-5 start, and no one was named to the all-Yankee Conference first team. (I believe this was the last year Maine played as few as eight games, although who knows what'll happen in 2020.) Although the game preview tabbed Maine as heavy underdog to C.W. Post, the Bears crushed the Pioneers, 42-8, for its first victory in front of a Homecoming crowd of 7,611.

Now excuse me while I look for another antique store. (Yeah, I know there's eBay, but where's the fun in that?)

The cheerleaders, posing at a grid rather than on the gridiron.
Anyone falls off this thing and you're looking at a lawsuit.