Welcome to the off-season.

One of the projects the Sickos Committee on Substack will explore during this off-season is one where we will do a dive into the internet archives to find out the seemingly lost history of College Football teams who we used to have playing on Saturdays in the fall. We will explore universities and colleges who used to have football but then decided for whatever reason to end their football program. Then we will highlight their Best Season of all time in our however many part series called the Best Season of All Time for Schools Who Stopped Having A Football Team also known as the BSOATFSWSHAFT (ya damn right, hope you can dig it). 

I’ll give you some background on the program if I can find it. Give you some basic history about the team, when they started playing and when/why they stopped playing and of course their best season in my opinion. Also, I’ll see if I can find a football helmet with the logo to show it to you here.

Now for the first team I wish to explore in this series.  

The Evansville Purple Aces

Why Evansville you ask? Well, it used to be the Refrigerator Capital of the United States and they hosted the glorious Refrigerator Bowl before the last one in 1956. Evansville had the moniker “Refrigerator Capital of the World” on account of the city’s booming post-war factories — including International Harvester, Servel, and Seeger — producing 3,800 refrigerator units a day. The Refrigerator Bowl Wiki 

Players would enter the field at the Reitz Bowl by literally running through a refrigerator frame! Hard to beat that for a bowl game entrance! 

Back to the Evansville Football Team. 

Evansville College's first football team came about in 1898.

From the Evansville Athletics website, 1898: 0-1-0; 1899: No record. 1900: 0-1-0; 1901-08 No records. 1909: 1-0-0.

Based on this information, it appears that Evansville took over 10 years to win their first football game since we don’t have any records for 1899 and 1901-1908.

Throughout their history Evansville competed in the College Division through 1975, then were in Division III from 1976 - 1992, made the jump to I-AA (FCS) in 1993 but only lasted a few years in I-AA with their last year in 1997. 

As far as I could research, The Purple Aces were in the Ohio Valley Football Conference, the Indiana Collegiate Conference, moved to the Heartland College Conference, then moved to the Mid-South Football Conference and were in the Pioneer Football League when the program was closed in 1998.

All that's left of Evansville football are memories (Pay-walled article here where I got most of my information about the program’s closure along with Wikipedia) 

Why did the program shut down?

In 1993, the NCAA implemented rules requiring schools to play on the same level in football and basketball. 

So it meant the Purple Aces had to make the jump from the non-scholarship Division III level skipping Division II and had to upgrade the program at least to Division I-AA status. That’s a big jump for any program. 

“After nearly 100 years and 667 games, the clock ran out on the program on March 16, 1998.”

Then Evansville president James Vinson and the board of trustees pulled the plug on the non-scholarship program, claiming it was at a competitive disadvantage. UE officials said it was not about money, but it was. UE's athletic department was facing a $1.5 million deficit and football cost much more than it produced.

It formed the Pioneer Football League along with Butler, Dayton, Drake, San Diego and Valparaiso. But UE was badly over-matched in the conference it helped create. It was 5-20 in the PFL during their short lived stint.” wrote Chad Lindskog Evansville Courier & Press.

But we’re not here to eulogize this Evansville program, we are here to talk about the Best Season of All Time for Schools Who Stopped Having A Football Team.

The 1949 Evansville Purple Aces

Shout out to the 1974 Evansville team that matched their most wins in a season in program history by going 8-1 and making the Division III playoffs but ending the season with a 17-16 loss to Central of Iowa and finished 8-2. 

I gave the nod to the 1949 team as the Best Season of All Time for Evansville due to ending on a positive note, winning a conference title and they played & won a Refrigerator Bowl! You can’t match that! 

They finished 8-2-1 and won the Ohio Valley Football conference. By looking at the standings, they likely shouldn’t have won the conference but Evansville was declared The Ohio Valley Football Conference champion because Marshall and Louisville did not play required games in 1949. A weird thing here is the 1949 Louisville Wikipedia declared that the Cardinals were actually independent this year. 1949 Louisville Football. Marshall doesn’t and I guess they were disqualified from the conference title since they only played four conference games and not five. 

I did my best to piece together their record based on their yearbook, as there isn’t a Wikipedia page for the 1949 Evansville Aces football team. 

They were coached by Donald Ping. He served as the head football coach at the University of Evansville in Evansville, Indiana from 1946 to 1953, compiling a record of 38–35–5. What a Megaphone. 

Dick Gonterman was the punter, you know we had to note that. The 1949 Evansville Aces team below.

The Purple Aces won their first six games to start the year. 

• Evansville 14 - Morehead State  0

• Evansville 24 - Butler  7

• Evansville 20 - Western Kentucky 0

• Evansville 17 - Missouri Valley 7

• Evansville 47 - St. Norbert 6

• Evansville 13 - Murray State 6

• Chattanooga 21 - Evansville 17

• Evansville 7 - Eastern Kentucky 7

• Evansville 38 - Kansas State 7

• Louisville 28 - Evansville 7 

Due to winning the Ohio Valley Conference they earned a berth in their hometown bowl game, the 2nd Annual Refrigerator Bowl. 

In the Refrigerator Bowl, they faced Hillsdale College. Hillsdale had won 13 straight games and were the favorites. 

“The Aces bombed Hillsdale College with a barrage of precision passes, and whipped the touted Bearcats 22-7”  - really not much more to say about it in the yearbook.  The Evansville Courier summed it up on the Front Page.

The best was the Evansville Courier Headlines on Page 3. 

Evansville wins the Refrigerator Bowl accompanied with the headline of Auburn upsetting heavily favored Alabama due to a missed extra point by Alabama for the tie.

That’s a really nice trophy. I wonder if Evansville still has it and how much it weighs. 

The Refrigerator Bowl MVP Ray Bawel. 

Has the program tried to comeback at any point?

Talk has existed since about 2007 about upgrading football again to a fully funded NCAA Division I team, but, after a year of investigation, the board of trustees voted against this in October 2012 as currently being too expensive. 

I say bring it back for these shoulder pads alone no matter the cost. 

This purple and the Aces script on the helmet is just amazing too. 

Maybe we will see the Purple Aces back on the gridiron again but for now we can only reminisce…