Best Season of All Time for Schools Who Stopped Having A Football Team (aka the BSOATFSWSHAFT) Part 3 of ??? - The Portland Pilots aka Columbia Irish.

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 or just some general things I found interesting.

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

The Portland Pilots 

Why did I choose this team? 

I figured we would head out west after we did a team from Indiana and Vermont. Also, there are a few pictures I found associated with this team that made me want to write about them immediately. (I’ll show you later) Also, I really hope they had purple leather helmets.

Brief History of the Portland Pilots football team. 

The Portland Pilots football team represented the University of Portland in the sport of American football from 1909 to 1942 and 1946 to 1949.

They took a break from 1943 - 1945 during World War II. Understandable. 

Also, prior to 1935, the school was known as Columbia University, and the football team was known as the "Irish" (due to an affiliation with Notre Dame). 

The football team was also sometimes known as the "Cliffdwellers".

So, you could say they were a little like Auburn as they had three different nicknames. The Irish, Cliffdwellers and Pilots. They finally stuck with the Pilots.

According to the Portland Pilots Museum there was a championship team in 1913, an undefeated season in 1914, and a tie for the title in 1920. The tie for the title was a three way tie after one team, Washington High School had to give a win to then Columbia aka Portland. The 1913 and 1914 seasons they played mostly local high schools and not many other universities or colleges. (Football on the Bluff: 1902-1950)

However, they state worthy opponents were picked – “usually the heaviest”. Like we say, the only analytic they had in the early days of football was how much people weighed. 

“There were years of transition, when teams were too light to play a regular college schedule but when high schools refused to play them.  Scores of trophies still testify to the success of these Columbia teams. - Noted again by the Portland University blog.”

The program’s first win over a ranked team was in 1939 when they upset the 20th Ranked St. Mary’s Gaels. It’s called the greatest upset win in Pilots history. 

Fun fact about this 1939 Portland season, they finished 1-5-1 and this was their only win. St. Mary’s dropped out of the poll and finished 3-4-1. 

Here is a program from their last season when they played Nevada in 1949. I really don’t know why the ref is jumping like this on the program. Nevada won the game 53-27. 

They were never in a conference for their existence, so they had no chance at any conference titles and they never made a Bowl Game. 

Why did the program shut down?

In February 1950, Rev. T. J. Mehling, president of the University of Portland, announced that the school was abandoning its football program in order to focus its efforts on its basketball program. Mehling cited the "extraordinary expenses" associated with maintaining a first-rate football program. Why does football has to be so expensive? 

Portland's decision to cease competition in intercollegiate football was part of a trend among west coast Catholic universities in terminating their football programs: Gonzaga (1942); Saint Mary's (1950); Loyola (1951); San Francisco (1951); and Santa Clara (1952). (This looks like a list of future blogs here and it is!)

The best part of this is that students basically acted out the death of football at Portland in the newspaper… and yes this is what made me choose to write about Portland. 

They acted out shooting a football after they closed the program. I’d make an Old Yeller reference here but this was 6 years before the book Old Yeller event existed! 

“We’re sorry Portland football we love you but we must put you down, because of the (holding back tears), because of the extraordinary expense!”

Then they had a funeral for the football they had just shot with a full burial. 

RIP Portland Pilots football. You were too beautiful for this world. 

Oh yeah, let me tell you about their Best Season of All Time. I got a little bit distracted by the death and burial of a football. 

The 1932 Columbia Irish aka Portland Pilots. 

Now, I couldn’t find too much about their Best Team of All Time. I couldn’t locate a yearbook but I tried to piece together the season from newspaper articles. Portland only has the University yearbooks digitized from 1935 and later. The name change of the school took place in this time frame and it just seems the Columbia yearbooks aren’t uploaded as of yet. So most of the pictures I got of the team are from The Log, the 1935 Portland University yearbook.  

The Pilots aka the Irish were coached by “Genial” Gene Murphy.  He attended Columbia Prep in Portland, Oregon. 

He played college football for Knute Rockne's Notre Dame Fighting Irish football teams in 1921 and 1922. 

In June 1927, he was hired as the athletic director and head football and baseball coach at Columbia University (renamed the University of Portland in 1935.) He held that position for 10 years from 1927 to 1936. He went from the Irish in Indiana to the Irish in Oregon. 

He retired in December 1936 to enter private business.

He was posthumously inducted into the University of Portland Hall of Fame in 1991.

For some reason Wikipedia doesn’t have his record for his coaching career at Portland so we added it in via really bad photo-shop. Gene Murphy (American football, born c. 1900)

In 1932, the Irish/Pilots played all their games in Multnomah Stadium.

A view of the stadium in the 1930s from the street. 

Here’s an aerial view of the stadium in 1940. 

The 1932 Irish/Pilots went 6-0-1. 

Their year started with a 12-12 tie against Pacific… of Oregon. Not the Pacific in California. Do you know how hard it is to find something with two universities who are much more popular counterparts with the same name in different states? 

Their next game, which was also on a Thursday Night. The Pilots were the first to do Thursday Night football, I guess. 

The Irish/Pilots defeated Eastern Oregon, which was known as Oregon Normal then 19-0 on a wet field. 

Finally playing their first Saturday game of the year, the Pilots defeated Linfield 19-7. They were aided by a 99 yard kickoff return to the house on the opening kickoff and then cashed in a 104 yard Pick 6 for another touchdown in the second quarter.

The Pilots took it to the College of Idaho, crushing the Coyotes 26-0. They got another Pick 6 as the cherry on top of this win. 

The next week Columbia trekked on up to Walla Walla to take on Whitman. This team apparently was built on special teams and defense. Again powered by a fantastic kickoff return and for the 3rd straight week, they got another Pick 6! Another win for the Pilots 20-6. 

I wanted to see if Portland could continue this amazing streak of getting a Pick 6 in three consecutive games but this was the best I could find. They defeated Pacific Lutheran 7-0. Columbia in New York was upset and it ended their undefeated season. So I couldn’t find much at all on this game besides someone calling it a slow game. 

In the final game of the season, Portland aka Columbia won 6-0 over Puget Sound. 

The weird thing here is that I couldn’t find anything celebrating their undefeated season in the newspaper. I mean, 6-0-1 is nothing to sneeze at but really not much press coverage of the season. Well the 1932 Columbia Lions aka the Portland Pilots we’re celebrating your undefeated season now! We know it's nearly 100 years later but what an amazing ride! 

Any chance that the Portland Pilots bring back football?

After all, they said they didn’t mean to have this be the end of football at Portland when they shuttered the team.

Maybe they meant a different kind of football? They do have a thriving soccer program who made the NCAA Tournament in 2023. As for the football we celebrate here, it doesn’t look likely. They seem to have buried the football forever.