ABSTRACT
The 1925 Dartmouth Big Green football team was a juggernaut. According to some, though not all, they won the mythical national championship that year after having gone 8-0 and outscoring their opponents 340-29, with five of the wins coming by shutout. Ivy League football had dominated college football in the 19th century, but by the early decades of the 20th century the Ivies had begun to lose their stranglehold. In 1925 the All-American Andrew Oberlander-led Dartmouth team won a nearly consensus national championship, but from that point on, only Yale in 1927, and even more tentatively, Princeton in 1935 would garner even modest consideration for national champion honors. The last Ivy League team to finish in the final rankings of the top level of college football was Dartmouth back in 1970. This transition is no coincidence. By the mid-1920s, even as college football had cemented its place in the American sporting pantheon, well above the professional game embodied in the fledgling National Football League, and even as F. Scott Fitzgerald splashed the romance and masculine ideals of Ivy League football across his novels and short stories, the Ivy League schools had begun to doubt the desirability of playing elite college football. Furthermore, schools in the South and West had chosen to commit greater resources to the sport, with Alabama a particularly potent rising force. The 1925 Alabama team would in some circles share national title honors with Dartmouth, and would go on to stake a similar claim in 1926. This chapter will explore the changing nature of college football in the 1920s through the lens of once-mighty Dartmouth College.
