“Princeton Football, the Winning Way,” 1975

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Today’s blog is writ­ten by Mark F. Bern­stein ’83, author of Foot­ball: the Ivy League Ori­gins of an Amer­i­can Obses­sion (2001). A pre­vi­ous entry from him about Prince­ton foot­ball can be found here.

The title of this video notwith­stand­ing, Prince­ton foot­ball fell on hard times after the deci­sion to aban­don the sin­gle wing offense in the late Sixties.
In 1973, hop­ing to revive their for­tunes, they hired Bob Cas­ci­ola ’58, a for­mer All-Ivy tackle, as head coach. Casciola had been an assis­tant coach under Robert Col­man and is cred­ited with per­suad­ing future All-American Cosmo Iacavazzi ’66 to attend Princeton. The team fin­ished last in the Ivy League in Casciola’s first sea­son, but improved in 1974 as Walt Snick­en­berger ’75 won the Asa Bush­nell Cup as Ivy League Player of the Year. That raised hopes that the Tigers could return to the top of the stand­ings in 1975.
Those 1975 Tigers had sev­eral good play­ers, includ­ing quar­ter­back Ron Beible ’76, a civil engi­neer­ing major who set sev­eral Prince­ton pass­ing records.       The film reflects the chang­ing university. In addi­tion to the long hair and flam­boy­ant ’70s clothes (includ­ing Beible’s white shoes), there were African-Americans on the team and female cheer­lead­ers on the side­lines (0:15). Several inter­views were filmed out­side Jad­win Gym­na­sium, which opened in 1969. Casciola refers to the lack of spring prac­tice, a rule for Ivy foot­ball teams that dates to the early 1950s and pre­dates the for­mal cre­ation of a league.
The film also shows dif­fer­ent hel­met logos. Princeton exper­i­mented with sev­eral designs dur­ing this period, includ­ing the abstract striped tiger tail and the car­toon run­ning tiger. Not until 1998 did they revert to the clas­sic “Michi­gan” hel­met design that coach Fritz Crisler had inau­gu­rated at Prince­ton dur­ing the 1930s.
Unfor­tu­nately, the high hopes for the 1975 sea­son were not realized. The team won its first three games but fin­ished 4–5 and fifth in the Ivy League. Casciola con­tin­ued as coach until 1977 and later served as chief oper­at­ing offi­cer of the NBA’s New Jer­sey Nets.
Nine­teen seventy-five was, how­ever, a more suc­cess­ful year for Princeton’s men’s bas­ket­ball team, which won the National Invi­ta­tional Tournament.
–Mark F. Bern­stein ’83
This 16mm film is part of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ His­tor­i­cal Audio­vi­sual Col­lec­tion (item no. 0218)

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