Welcome to an attempt to chronicle the rich and varied history of Georgetown University football and place it online.
For the first 75 years of its history, football was king at the Hilltop, with games against many of the top opponents of the day. Michigan State, Ole Miss, North Carolina, and Auburn were among the opponents of this early era, not to mention modern day Big East names like Syracuse, West Virginia, and Pitt.
Before crowds of as many as 50,000, Georgetown was a well regarded opponent on the gridiron, leaving a Detroit columnist to write: "That Georgetown has a good football team is only natural for a university with a well rounded curriculum...to develop the mind and not the body is fruitless; the first cannot survive the other." Former players went on to careers as physicians and attorneys, businessmen and academics, not to mention an Army Chief of Staff, a college president, and the auxiliary bishop of Boston.
For the past 60 years, football's place has been decidedly modest. Its final season in the big-time got off to an inauspicious start--a 34-14 loss at Penn State that marked Joe Paterno's first game as an assistant coach for the Nittany Lions. The sport was cancelled in 1951 for a variety of reasons, none particularly convincing, and the loss of football signaled a quarter century of athletic de-emphasis by the school, slowly withdrawing from the collegiate spotlight. Football returned not by administrative fiat, but by the will and determination of students who recognized the opportunity to
compete as part of the overall educational experience. As it survived and grew, albeit below the national consciousness, it has added to the Georgetown story as a whole.
This iteration of the Football History Project contains a variety of facts, details, and trivia of interest to any Georgetown fan. Within these pages, you'll find:
- Dates and locations for as many as 889 of the 894 games played by the school since it began football;
- A complete list of over 2,300 alumni who have played on the varsity, with position, jersey number, hometown, and high school information where available;
- A series of feature articles on the program, from helmet styles and game programs to key figures and moments in its development;
- Photos and bios of all 29 former head coaches;
- Details on over 50 former Georgetown players that played in the National Football League; and
- A series of game, season, and career records currently in force.
(Not all data has been secured, however. The site is in need of rosters from 1988 through 1992 which included jersey numbers as well as the players' names. If you have an old program that you can photocopy and scan, e-mail, or send to us, contact us at the address below.)
Source material comes from a variety of media guides and game programs, numerous Google image searches, cross-references with contemporary news accounts, and two essential retrospectives of the program: a 1947 book by Morris A. Bealle ("The Georgetown Hoyas: The Story Of a Rambunctious Football Team") and a 1978 statistical review of past seasons ("Hoya Saxa: Georgetown University Football Records 1874-1978"). The Bealle book may or may not be out of copyright protection, so it is not copied en masse; rather, it provided a road map to compiling (and in some cases,
correcting) details from the past.
Unlike a book, this site is not created in hot type. Changes can and will be made when identified, so if you see additions or corrections, please do not hesitate to contact me. I'm also hoping to make more additions in the years to come, such as adding team photos, but this involves permissions and locating teams to which a photo was not otherwise published.
I hope that this site provides a glimpse of the treasures of Georgetown's football past, and the promise of its future.
--JR
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