- The Sickos Sentinel
- Posts
- Best Season of All Time For Schools Who Stopped Having A Football Team aka the BSOATFSWSHAFT - Part 11 of ??? - The Creighton Bluejays
Best Season of All Time For Schools Who Stopped Having A Football Team aka the BSOATFSWSHAFT - Part 11 of ??? - The Creighton Bluejays
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 to show it to you here.
Shop the Sickos Committee Store (20% off Sale Ends April 8th, store closes April 9th.)
Now for the next team I wish to explore in this series.
The Creighton Bluejays
Why did I choose this team?
It was March Madness, and Creighton was in the Sweet 16. I had done other “basketball schools” like Gonzaga and Marquette. So Creighton was in the process of being written. I will say I got distracted by something in Creighton’s “football” history in the 1980s and immediately did a podcast about that (it’ll come out eventually on the Patreon/paid Substack). Then I got caught up in the Madness of March, Easter came around, I got visited by my in-laws, and one thing led to another, and this post is a bit delayed. Sorry, Creighton Bluejay fans, for the delay.
History of the team
I do want to give a huge shout-out to the actual University of Creighton here. They have done some beautiful work and have added so many photos of their football history on their own website. This made finding the history so much easier for me. I will link throughout in case you want to check it out for yourself. A visual history of Creighton football. As for choosing the Best Team of All Time, that’s not that easy.
However, let’s talk about the history of football at the school.
Creighton football got going as early as 1891, but the University wouldn't officially have an intercollegiate program until the early 1900s. I love this part here. Yeah, we’ve had a football team since 1891, but it was unofficial and not a school-recognized sport. The first game in the program's history was pretty hilarious, and I will let the University tell the story themselves.
On a dreary day in December 1891, a hastily assembled team of Creighton students played the first organized game of football in Omaha’s history. A crowd of about 500 people gathered to watch a sport that few in the Midwest had seen before. Creighton’s opponent was Omaha Medical College (now the University of Nebraska Medical Center). OMC was the clear favorite. For one, they had uniforms and equipment. Another advantage:They knew what the game of football was.
The Creighton team, meanwhile, had almost no idea what it was doing. They had no suits, no equipment, no coaches. They took the field in sweats and T-shirts. Only two of the team’s 11 players had even seen a game of football before playing in this one.
That 1891 game would consist of no forward passing, just a lot of running and plunging. As the Creightonian later wrote, the game was simply “a matter of strength and ‘beef.’” (OMAHA BEEF YEAH!!) By the end, the Creighton team’s shirts were torn to shreds and covered in mud. Most of the players had no more idea how to play football than they did at the game’s start. But Creighton won anyway.
An illustration from the yearbook and also here A visual history of Creighton football
They won 12-0, according to the Creightonian. Or 6-0, according to the Omaha World-Herald. Isn’t it great when the scores are not matching!
I really love the line, “Most of the players had no more idea how to play football than they did at the game’s start." They played an entire game and basically still didn’t have a clue how to play it. They had no idea what they were doing, but still won 12-0. Amazing.
Before Creighton built its stadium, the crowd would watch from wooden stands. Also, maybe they even had drive-in parking for the game?
Finally, in 1925, Creighton football and the new-at-the-time track program got their own home —Creighton Stadium. With a seating capacity of 15,000, the stadium was the largest structure in Omaha at the time. Love that the biggest building in Omaha was a football stadium.
It was a concrete stadium in the shape of an oval, but lacked enclosed end zones. Also, it was asymmetric, the larger grandstand on the south sideline was single level and included the press box, while the north grandstand had a second deck, bounded by Burt Street.
The Stadium was closed in 1963 and then demolished in 1966.
Back to the history of the football team itself. They were Independent until 1921, then joined the North Central Conference from 1922 to 1927. Then they joined the Missouri Valley Conference from 1928 to 1942.
They won three conference titles in their history. Two as Co-Champs in the NCC (1925, 1927) and one as Co-Champs in the MVC (1936). They never had one outright by themselves, though. This will make my job much harder on the Best Team of All Time.
The team finished 187–143–28 (.561) all time, which is a pretty solid record and would put them with an interesting batch of teams from MACtion, CUSA, ACC, Big XII and the Mountain West.
Why did the football team get shut down?
In the late '30s and early '40s, Creighton's football program scaled back its team, facilities and season until Creighton suspended basketball and football in 1942, due to WWII. The plan was to bring both sports back after the war, but due to costs, Creighton could only reinstate one. Basketball returned; football didn't.
Damn it, football, why do you have to be so expensive??
A little bit of the 1921 Creighton Bluejays & the 1927 Creighton Bluejays
So, as I said earlier, Creighton never won an outright conference title.
In 1925, they finished, 6-3-1 and went 3-0-1 in conference for a 3-Way Conference Title.
In 1936, they finished 4-4 but went 3-0 in Conference which was good enough for a share of the conference title.
In 1921, they finished 8-1. If I chose this team, which I almost did, I was really limited on the research since Creighton didn’t have a yearbook until 1924. Also, their coach was Howard M. Baldrige. I went to his Wikipedia page, and it didn’t mention a damn thing about him being the football coach at Creighton from 1921–1922. All it mentioned was him getting elected to the Nebraska State House of Representatives in 1923, then eventually making it to the US House of Representatives in 1931. He was the Head Coach in 1921 and the wiki just mentions his marriage to his wife in November of 1921 six days after the football season! Howard M. Baldrige Wiki. So again, I was extremely limited on the 1921 team, which really could have been Creighton’s Best Team of All Time but I’ll rate it a veryyyy close second place.
They finished 8-1 with their only loss against South Dakota State.
I really really really really wanted to post this article because of the phrase Aggie danger bone was at the end of it.
As for the 1927 team, they finished 6-1-1 and went 2-0 in conference but shared the title with someone who was 5-0 in Conference. Their schedule had much bigger teams, but they had a tie, a loss and two fewer wins than 1921. Also, I could get a lot more information about this team, and Creighton actually had a year book!
They were coached by Chester A. Wynne. He coached Creighton from 1923 (since Mr. Baldridge wanted to leave the Bluejays for politics) through 1929. Then he left to be Head Coach at Auburn for four years, and he finished his coaching career at Kentucky for four years. In his playing days, he was a fullback at Notre Dame. (Side note: I really need to track how many former Notre Dame players became coaches after their playing days in the early days of football)
So I was feeling conflicted about my choice of placing the 1927 team as the Best Team of All Time. Well the Creighton Bluejay yearbook had my back a little bit.
“Probably the greatest ever that represented the Blue” - I’ll take it.
Their first game they faced Wyoming and they won the game 13-0 exclusively by blocking two punts and taking them back for touchdowns. Ok, this team should have been my choice all along.
Their second game of the year, they traveled to North Dakota. And ruined the opening of North Dakota’s stadium.
Which apparently was opened in a raging snowstorm.
The Bluejays won 7-0 thanks to a long run to set up the only touchdown.
Their next game they traveled to Oklahoma to face the Sooners. The Bluejays battled and escaped with a 13-13 tie.
I love it when two schools I have done in this series match up in the past. Creighton battled the Golden Avalanche to a 14-0 victory.
Also this headline is amazing.
MIGHTY OFFENSE SCORED 14 POINTS. Are we sure that Creighton was not in the Big Ten West?
The next week, they were the visitors for Oklahoma State’s homecoming in Stillwater.
The Bluejays lost their only game of the season, 18-6. Even the yearbook didn’t make much of the defeat, and even said the better team won.
After their loss, they traveled to Salt Lake City to face Utah. In 1926, Utah finished 7-0 and won the Rocky Mountain Conference. Utah was off to a slow start in 1927, but they hadn’t lost a game on their home field in over three years.
The Bluejay yearbook declares this the greatest victory in all of Creighton footballdom. I have to agree. To bounce back from their only defeat of the year and handle Utah on the road. I mean, the yearbook said the line was impregnable.
The Bluejays' nemesis throughout their history was the South Dakota State Jackrabbits. South Dakota State ruined their 1921 season and had beat them five out of the last six years. Not this year, though. South Dakota State went down 14-0, and the Bluejays fought off their Jackrabbit Jinx. The funny thing was that Creighton only played South Dakota State two more times until their program ended in 1942. The Jackrabbits won both of them.
The Bluejays then ended the season with a 20-8 win over the St. Louis Bilikens.
Any chance of football returning?
It’s not likely. It’d be great to see Creighton competing in FCS. Maybe they could join the Missouri Valley Football Conference to take on their arch-nemesis, South Dakota State, again. I don’t see it happening. With approximately 4,400 undergraduate and 4,300 graduate students, it’d be awesome, but I just don’t know how feasible it is.
Thanks for reading! Now it's time for some ads.