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)

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 or some other cool things and show it to you here.

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

The Drexel Dragons

Why did I choose this team?

Their nickname is the Dragons; you should be surprised it took me this long to choose Drexel.

History of the team

I really struggled to find many old pictures of Drexel Football. They seem to hide it behind layers of hoops and digital collections I had to jump through, and nothing was really readily available by quick searching. I do salute their paper, The Triangle and this three-part article from 2014, Why Doesn't Drexel Have Football?, with a good bit of information. I was really disappointed; I couldn’t find a photo of the football stadiums and fields they played in. If you have any information on it or photos, please let me know. 

As for the Drexel football history. 

Drexel had an interesting football history, with a lot of stops and starts in the program for a few different reasons. The first football team at Drexel University was formed by students in 1892. However, they seemingly played it on a random, game-by-game basis until the team played its first scheduled season in 1895. 

I just wanted to know how that worked without a schedule. Hey, can Drexel come outside and play a game of football today at 3pm?

Their first intercollegiate game was played in 1898 against Ursinus College, which Drexel won 16–0. 

In 1909 the school discontinued football for lack of a proper playing field. 

However, in 1911, when Anthony J. Drexel (the founder of the University) estate found this out, they donated a field in Runnymede, Delaware County, which was used as athletic grounds with a field laid out for football. 

Most early games took place in Fairmount Park. 

On October 9, 1926, the team played its first home game on what was known as "Drexel Field" located at 46th and Haverford Ave, which had a capacity of 5,000. 

In 1963, the team moved its home games to a new Drexel Field at 43rd and Powelton Ave, which would later be named Vidas field.

Vidas Field still exists to this day, but I can’t find it set up for football. Here’s what it looks like now.

The 1936 Team and action photos below.

The 1936 Cheerleaders

The Dragons were members of two conferences in their history. From 1937 to 1940, the Dragons were members of the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference, in which they won the championship in 1937. 

The DRAGON AGGREGATION

After 1940, they were again an Independent school until 1958, when the team joined the Middle Atlantic Conferences in the College-Southern division. Previously, other athletic programs at Drexel were members of the conference; however, they were non-football members until the 1958 season. They won a division title in 1962 and remained in the conference and division until 1970, when the school became a member of the University Division of the conference. However, that same year, the University Division of the conference folded its football division, leaving Drexel independent until the team was discontinued after the 1973 season.

I don’t have an overall record for the Dragons team on their Wikipedia page and really couldn’t compile one on my own, so I am unable to give you a comparison to current FBS teams.

Why did the football team get shut down?

I am just going to let the Triangle tell this part. All quotes are from Why Doesn't Drexel Have a Football Team Part II directly. 

“The end of Drexel football came Nov. 19, 1973.

“From our standpoint, we were just totally floored,” Cole said about the cut.

“The coaches were blindsided too,” Spagnolo added. “I don’t think they saw this coming either.”

Spagnolo continued, “We were both finishing our junior years when they cut football, and when you think about it, we were the ones who got screwed the most. If we were freshmen or sophomores, you can still play for a couple more years. If you were a senior, you were done your senior year. But for us, nobody is going to take you for a year, and you’re not going to want to transfer for a year. We got screwed.”

The press release tried to sugar coat this a little bit. 

“In the press release sent out to make the announcement public, the school cited the budgetary issues with continuing to fund football as well as opening the new Physical Education Athletic Center. The Triangle reported that the new center cost about $8.6 million to build and would cost $250,000 annually to operate. The administration put a fund drive in place to help raise $700,000 per year to make payments on the building. Still, the football program was axed to help fund it.

As people investigated further, more reasons for the cut came out. There seemed to be a growing frustration with the lack of interest in the sport. Hagerty told The Triangle that the low student interest and the sport’s “impingement” on other sports in the athletic department were considered.

“Students at a co-op university are doers rather than watchers,” Hagerty said at the time, trying to explain the low interest.

When football was cut, it was taking up somewhere in the range of 40-50 percent of the athletics budget. The Nov. 30, 1973, issue of The Triangle reported that the overall athletics budget was about $320,000 and football ate $142,873 alone, mostly in operating expenses and scholarships. Students were paying a $30 student activity fee at the time, but football just took up too much of the money in athletics.”

So again that pesky money thing. Also, in 1973 the NCAA was reorganizing football and changing the classifications. 

“Football was already the biggest mouth for the athletic department to feed, and it was about to get bigger as well. The NCAA, the main governing body and rule-maker for college sports, was reorganizing their competition structure. There would now be three divisions — I, II and III — so Drexel would have to make a decision on where they stood athletically.

Division I was for the big boys, the powerhouse football and basketball teams that were a way of life in some parts of the country. Division II, where many of Drexel’s local rivals would look to play, was too expensive for the football team. They would have had to pour more resources into a program that they felt was already overfunded. Division III, though, would have required Drexel to develop new rivals and ultimately take a financial risk that administration was not willing to take.”

A pretty tough decision to keep it going here. They could have stayed D-II or dropped to D-III but ultimately felt it wasn’t worth the investment and shut the program down. 

The 1955 Drexel Dragons

The Dragons were coached by Eddie Allen. 

Allen played for three seasons on the Penn Quakers football team until 1940, when he left to serve in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. He served until 1945 and achieved the rank of captain. Upon leaving the military, he returned to Penn for his fourth and final season. Allen was an All-American honorable mention at Penn.

Allen was selected 94th overall (11th round, pick 4) in the 1946 NFL Draft by the Chicago Bears. Allen appeared in nine games for the Bears during the 1947 NFL season. During the season, he played as both a fullback and Punter.

A DUAL THREAT FULLBACK AND PUNTER!!

The following year, Allen played for the Brooklyn Dodgers of the All-America Football Conference.

After serving as head coach at Upper Darby High School for the 1949 season, Allen was hired by Drexel University as head football coach in February 1950. During the 1955 college football season, Allen led Drexel to an undefeated season (hey, this is the season we are talking about). In eight seasons as head coach at Drexel, Allen compiled an overall record of 33–24–1.

On January 10, 1958, Allen resigned as head coach in order to devote more time to an investment firm at which he had been recently given a major promotion. Drexel was his only collegiate coaching job in his career. I really hope it was a major promotion at this investment firm.

Drexel has its best football season in history when the team has its first— and only — undefeated season. The Dragons finish 8-0 under team captain Vincent Vidas ’59, the only player in Drexel history to be named to two All-American teams. Today, Vidas is in the Drexel Athletics Hall of Fame and his name brands Drexel’s Vidas Athletic Complex on Powelton Avenue. Hey, we mentioned that earlier!

Their first game of the year came: “After a rigorous two weeks at football camp, the Dragons met West Chester in a hard-hitting, bruising battle, but the Allenmen came out on top, beating the Rams 7-0." (only a two week football camp huh)

"The Dragons had tasted their first victory of the season. Next came Ursinus, and on a muddy field, the Dragons rolled over the Bears for a 20-13 victory. Then the Diplomats from Franklin & Marshall came down to try their luck. Again, the rains came, and in a sea of mud, the Dragons swamped the Dips 23–6.

" What a nickname! You're the diplomats, and your rivals just call you The DIPS. (This game was muddy as hell, as seen below)

The Drexel juggernaut moved on and they crushed Lycoming 33-14.

Homecoming arrived against Johns Hopkins and in front of a crowd of 4,000, they crushed them 34-13. (Pep rally photos below)

They rolled through the rest of their games by dominating Western Maryland 34-13, the Coast Guard 27-7, and finishing the final game in the snow against Pennsylvania Military College 20-6.

They carried Coach Allen off the field in the snow.

More snow football pictures!

Finally, I couldn’t end the blog with a better picture than this one.

Any chance the program returns?

Really doubt it here. They’d have to be FCS and the Philadelphia market is pretty saturated with football teams. You have Temple, Penn, Villanova and many others in the area. It would be be really cool to see them back but I just don’t see it but maybe something awakens the Dragons?