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- Best Season of All Time For Schools Who Stopped Having A Football Team aka the BSOATFSWSHAFT - Part 10 of ??? - The San Francisco Dons
Best Season of All Time For Schools Who Stopped Having A Football Team aka the BSOATFSWSHAFT - Part 10 of ??? - The San Francisco Dons
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 (shut your mouth! why? I am just talking ‘bout the BSOATFSWSHAFT).
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 or other things I find interesting.
Now for the next team we wish to explore in this series…
Also, this one is a written by another Committee Member - Dr. Garage. But you could probably tell when they say they live in San Francisco.
The University of San Francisco Dons
Why did I choose this team?
I live in San Francisco.
…
Fine. I live in San Francisco, and the Dons used to play football at Kezar Stadium, which is a short walk from my house. It’s a stadium with a lot of history, including having been the home football stadium for the Niners at the same time as the Dons and the long-demolished San Francisco Polytechnic High School Parrots played there. Yes, the Poly Parrots. Check that parrot just going to town on the letter P.
But above all the rest, it’s because the best season of all time at USF is one of the most interesting in the history of the sport, for reasons related to their on-field performance, but especially for off-field American history reasons.
History of the team
The USF Dons first fielded a football team in 1917. Well, the school that became USF did, as it was then still known as St. Ignatius College, wearing blue and red in wild contrast to the school’s later green and gold livery (St. Ignatius Prep remains a private high school on the west side of San Francisco and still wears blue and red). While the Don remains one of the most unusual mascots in major college sports, the proto-USF teams at St. Ignatius were known as the Grey Fog, so it honestly could be even better.
The school renamed itself University of San Francisco in 1930 and became the Dons in 1932. According to the school, DON is an acronym for “De Origin Noble,” the traditional Spanish title for aristocrats, and specifically in honor of “Don Francisco de Haro, first mayor of San Francisco”. This is a bit of a stretch of history, as De Haro was actually the first and fifth mayor of Yerba Buena, a small settlement later renamed San Francisco in 1847, eight years after he left office for a second and final time.
The USF Don with his good friend, Fr. Paul Pitzgerald, current university president.
Hilariously, USF was moved to change the name from Grey Fog, as the San Francisco Junior Chamber of Commerce felt the nickname contributed to negative impressions of the city and “hurt advertising.” More than 90 years ago, San Francisco was fretting about how the national media would see us. It’s a long-standing tradition here.
As to football, much of the history here is extremely inauspicious. Records are poorly kept, and there isn’t much to celebrate. The first season I could find a record of, 1925, saw the Grey Fog, led by coach Jimmy Needles (!) go 2-4-1 with the only victories coming over Barbarian Club and Mare Island Naval Hospital, with losses against the far more prestigious Olympic Club and Chico State. That season, the Fog played at Ewing Field, which burned to the ground thanks to a wayward cigarette during a baseball game the next year. It is now a subdivision next to the campus. They relocated to Kezar soon after.
Jimmy Needles, thinking about how much easier basketball is to coach than a Jesuit college’s football team matched up against San Diego Submarine Base.
The years to come were similarly undistinguished, with Needles finally just barely getting a winning season in 1929 at 4-3-1 in part thanks to wins over San Diego Submarine Base and California B Team. Needles finished his career well, going 6-3 in 1930 and 4-4-2 in 1931 before stepping down owing to illness, replaced by, I swear I am not making this up, Spud Lewis. Needles then coached the first American Olympic Men’s Basketball Team to gold in the 1936 games, because anything was possible at the dawn of amateur athletics.
Spud Lewis in his playing days at Stanford, circa 1929 https://exhibits.stanford.edu/shpc/catalog/sf577wg7847
Spud’s tenure was poor to middling (he stepped down after five seasons, going 15-21-4), and he wrapped things up with a 4-4-2 season of his own in 1936. Seeking a successor, USF kept it in the family, hiring the coach of St. Ignatius Prep, George Malley. He hung on for four seasons, going 14-6-6. Jeff Cravath coached the Lone Mountain maniacs to a single 6-4 season in 1941 before passing the Don baton to Al Tassi, who lasted through the end of 1943. From what we can tell, the Dons didn’t play football in either 1944 or 1945 because of World War 2.
Clipper Smith with Babe Ruth (?!) in 1926 (somehow they wrote the date wrong on the picture). No, we don’t know how all these people hung out together, why, or what the best baseball player of his era was doing at a practice field in Gonzaga.
Seeking a fresh start, they brought in an experienced head coach, former Gonzaga, Santa Clara, and Villanova coach Maurice “Clipper” Smith, or as we now know him, “Mo Clips” (no one has ever called him this). Naturally, he lasted one year. The Dons brought in Edward McKeever, who provided the then-best season in program history at 7-3. He came to USF from Cornell, and he also coached Notre Dame in 1944. He left USF immediately after 1947 to coach one season with the professional Chicago Rockets, who made it just one more season after he left, under the name Hornets. He then became an assistant at LSU, then had no sports footprint we could find until showing up as the GM of the Boston patriots in 1960. What the hell, Ed?
Edward McKeever in 1942, thinking about how he was soon going to embark on the weirdest career in sports history.
USF finally found the best man for the job after decades in the wilderness post-Needles in South Bend native and Notre Dame alumnus Joe Kuharich, a retired NFL guard. Kuharich had a season as a Pittsburgh Steelers assistant prior to making his way to San Francisco. In his second season, 1949, he matched McKeever’s 7-3 and followed it up with 7-4 in 1950. Those teams got extra attention, as they were publicized by an outstanding student news director named Pete Rozelle, who went on to be commissioner of the NFL and is widely credited with inventing the Super Bowl. This all brings us to the final season of the school, which was also the best season of all time at USF in 1951.
Why did the football team get shut down?
Football is a really expensive sport, and home attendance at USF collapsed after the Niners began playing at Kezar in 1946, driving the school a whopping $70,000 into debt. The school concluded it could not survive past the 1951 season unless it could get invited to a major postseason bowl game, with the attention and money it could bring to the school. A Bowl Game to save the football program. The short answer is that they didn’t go to a bowl game. The great story is in why.
Now time for their best team of all time…
The 1951 San Francisco Dons
This all brings us to the final season of the school, which was also the best season of all time at USF, 1951.
The 1951 Dons, led by Kuharich (in jacket at far right) charging onto the field in a promotional image.
As noted previously, Kuharich (soon to be an NFL head coach) had the Dons rolling going into 1951. Four players from the team would ultimately have notable careers in pro football: Bob St. Clair, Ollie Matson, Gino Marchetti, and Red Stephens. St. Clair had gone to SF Polytechnic before USF and got drafted by the Niners, so his home football stadium in high school, college, and the pros was Kezar. He also served as mayor of the nearby suburb of Daly City while he played OT for the Niners, which rocks. This was an absolutely loaded roster, and the school was determined to make a splash that season.
Stars of the 1951 team. From left: Ed Brown, Ollie Matson, and Gino Marchetti, we think. But the image doesn’t have a caption, and Marchetti usually wore 76. It’s a bit confusing. https://usfdons.com/news/2018/2/19/USF-black-history-month-51-dons.aspx
Unfortunately, for attention reasons, the school couldn’t get any of the major programs in the state to schedule them—not Cal, not Stanford, and not either Los Angeles team. Fortunately for them, this led to a highly favorable schedule.
They played an in-season home and home against San Jose State, winning the first matchup a glorious 39-2 (San Francisco safety alert) and taking the road tilt 42-7 just three weeks later. They took a road trip to Boise to beat Idaho 28-7. And they swamped overmatched marines from Camp Pendleton 26-0.
The Dons had a hell of a line. Bob St. Clear is here lined up as a tight end, which is a terrifying prospect given what he could do on the field. https://awfulannouncing.com/2015/san-francisco-dons-1951-movie-film.html
After a very fast 4-0 start, the Dons headed east for a matchup with the Fordham Rams. Rozelle pitched New York media in advance of the game, hyping up the dynamic running back Matson, one of two black players on the roster alongside Burl Toler. Matson romped in the Big Apple with a 94-yard kick return for a touchdown, and the Dons held on 32-26 despite jet lag from what was reportedly an 18-hour flight from the West Coast.
The rest of the season was gravy. The Dons returned to the West Coast and made quick work of a San Diego naval station and rivals Santa Clara and Pacific, before capping the season with a dominant 20-2 (San Francisco safety alert) win over Loyola in the Rose Bowl.
The Dons finished the regular season at No. 14 in the AP poll and were just waiting to hear from the bowls about a potential postseason date with destiny and a lifeline for the program. And it came. USF says that while the Orange Bowl reached out with an invitation to Virginia, who was ranked one position ahead of the Dons, it declined an invitation because the university president didn’t like "big-time, highly subsidized football." The Orange Bowl reportedly had just one condition for the matchup with Georgia Tech: leave behind Matson and Toler for the matchup in segregated Florida.
The Dons found the terms immediately unacceptable, and the program immediately folded. In early 2015, the school hung a banner for the team reading “Honor Before Glory” at War Memorial Gymnasium at halftime of a men’s basketball game. A handful of players, including St. Clair, wearing his NFL Hall of Fame gold blazer, were present for the ceremony, as was I, learning the tale for the first time.
Bob St. Clair at the rededication of the playing surface at Kezar Stadium as St. Clair Field. What a king.
It’s an incredible story, and there's a fantastic team to celebrate. It also might not be true…
A 2016 article published by WBUR included an official denial by Orange Bowl officials that the Dons were ever invited, with VP of communications Larry Wahl claiming "All our research shows it’s a false story, unsubstantiated. We invited two higher ranked teams." Newspapers from 1951 also noted that USF was considered to be undeserving of an invitation, and that their quest for the game had been abandoned, as Baylor took the slot.
Despite the denials from officials and the newspaper articles, it’s impossible to dismiss the team’s narrative. The Orange Bowl has no incentive to confirm the alleged invitation, and papers of the time tended to go out of their ways to avoid any mention of racism. While it’s possible every player on the team, its coaches and the school were mistaken, I strongly doubt it. Besides, the Orange Bowl continued to shut out black players until 1955; there is zero doubt that if USF had been invited, they would have needed to betray their teammates in order to participate. And they would never have done so. Honor before glory.
Any chance of the program coming back?
A pretty solid No here. The Dons did create a new Division 2 football team in the 1960s, which then died out in the 1970s. The school is a happy member of the football-free WCC, and if there were any doubts about whether football could return to Lone Mountain, the banner at War Memorial is the final word. Dons football is for remembering, not for reviving.
Now for some ads: