Stadium Size, Football Droppers, and Deemphasizers: Boston U
Stadium Size, Football Droppers, and Deemphasizers: Boston U
This series reviews the program history and stadiums of colleges that dropped or deemphasized football. Click here for the series introduction. The schools included in the review are listed below.
The previous story on football droppers and deemphasizers focused on NYU. One challenge NYU faced when it had a football program was land constraints, which forced students at its Greenwich Village campus to take the subway 11 miles north to the practice field.
Like other urban schools, Boston University faced similar constraints, as illustrated by the football stadiums it has called home over the years. BU began playing football in 1884 but fielded teams sporadically before the school organized varsity athletics in 1916.
The Terriers played a relatively weak schedule in the 1920s, including all away games from 1922 to 1924, one home game in 1925 at Fenway Park, before playing home games at Tufts for a few years.
In 1928, a Boston philanthropist, William Nickerson, donated the funds to build a recreation complex 10 miles away in Riverside. The complex included Nickerson Field, which had 6,000 seats.
The football fortunes at BU were raised starting in the mid-1930s with the arrival of Pat Hanley, a former Mare Island Marine and Washington State player. Leading the team to winning seasons in all but one year, Hanley returned to duty with the start of WWII. The school dropped football for several years before restarting in 1947 when they called Fenway Park home.
That remained the situation until the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee before the 1953 season. The school quickly purchased Braves Field, which sat next to campus and became BU's home field.
Renamed University Field, and later, Nickerson Field, much of Braves Field was demolished in 1955 to make way for campus dormitories. They reoriented the football field to align with one remaining section of stands, leaving 9,000 to 10,000 seats, depending on the source. The field grew to 20,000+ in 1960 and 1961 when the AFL's Boston Patriots expanded the stadium with temporary bleachers. Nickerson Field soon returned to its 10,000 capacity and remains the same today based on the remaining stands from the 1915 Braves Field construction.
BU has three periods of football glory after moving onto campus. The first came in 1969 when the team went 9-1 to earn a spot in the Pasadena Bowl, an early December game played in the Rose Bowl. A 28-7 loss to San Diego State preceded the team's decline over the next few seasons.
Additional success came in the early to mid-1980s when they made the DI-AA playoffs three years in a row, followed by playoff appearances in 1993 and 1994.
Unfortunately, the end soon followed those playoff appearances, as the team won only four games over the next three seasons. Attendance, which seldom rose above 10,000 per game, dropped to several thousand on a good day, contributing to the reported $3 million annual football budget deficit on budgets of the same size.
The end came in 1997 when the Board of Trustees voted to drop football, choosing to announce the decision shortly after the team's homecoming loss. With four games left on the schedule, the understandably upset team members wore tape over the school’s name on their uniforms and helmets the rest of the season, though I could not find images of the tape over in action.
While Boston U never made a significant impression on the national scene while playing football, they contribute in other ways through an Alzheimer's research unit founded in 1996. The UNITE Brain Bank is now the largest tissue repository in the world focused on traumatic brain injury (TBI) and CTE. If you are aware of the incidence of CTE in former football players, much of that awareness results from research conducted at BU.
2024 Concept Uniform
My brother, Steve, dabbles in sports team logos and uniforms. Here are his concept uniforms for BU’s imaginary 2024 team.
Next up: Denver U.
Ranking by Stadium Size
Below are the schools reviewed to date, ranked by stadium size. The stadiums’ opening and demolition years (if applicable) are also noted.
Catholic (Brookland Stadium): 30,000 | 1924 | d. 1985
Marquette (Marquette Stadium): 24,000 | 1924 | d. 1977
Xavier (Corcoran Stadium): 15,000 | 1929 | d. 1988
Gonzaga (Gonzaga Stadium): 12,000 | 1922 | d . 1949
California State University, Fullerton (Titan Stadium): 10,000 | 1992 | still in use
Boston University (Nickerson Field): 10,000 | 1915 | still in use
NYU (Ohio Field): 5,000 (est.) | 1897 | d. 1947
Schools to Review
California State University, Long Beach
University of California, Santa Barbara
Carnegie Mellon
Case Western
Chicago
CCNY
Creighton
Denver
DePaul
Detroit
Drake
Loyola (Chicago)
Nebraska-Omaha
Pacific
St. Louis
St. Mary's
San Francisco
Santa Clara
Sewanee (University of the South)
Tampa
Vermont
Washington University in St. Louis
Wichita State
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