Fordham and BC Enter Into Time Machine For Saturday's Opener

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. -- It is perhaps fitting that Boston College's 2025 football season begins on Saturday with a game against Fordham, a fellow Jesuit institution rich with tradition. More than that, a game against Fordham offers a rare trip through college football's history books. A historic rivalry once broken by a short-sighted decision, the teams share a rich tradition once lost to a sport defined by its hyperactive drive into the future, the revival of which finds its way into a season teeming with the kind of potential that once defined the annual games between the Eagles and Rams.

"I was really proud of the team and how they responded to adversity [in 2024]," said Fordham head coach Joe Conlin. "They've shown resilience, mental toughness and fortitude. That's why I'm probably as excited for this season as I've ever been in my coaching career."

Fordham sits directly at the crossroads between the west end of the New York Botanical Gardens and the short drive down the Bronx River Parkway's East Fordham Road interchange. The five miles between the university and New York's fabled Grand Concourse is loaded with renewal that's gentrified the region, and its easy access to the Henry Hudson Parkway offers outlets linking Manhattan and Gotham's outer reaches to the Bronx borough.

Now dwarfed by their neighbors at Yankee Stadium, the Rams once sat at New York's championship table because of a football program that claimed a national championship during an undefeated season in 1929. Routinely playing before 40,000 fans at the Polo Grounds home of the National League's New York Giants, Fordham used its status under Frank Cavanaugh - the former Boston College coach - to launch into the national rankings at a time when 65,000 fans packed Yankee Stadium to watch the No. 3 Rams battle the NYU Violets.

Vince Lombardi played for those teams that were coached by Jim Crowley, and Fordham routinely stole headlines from the high-powered teams around its region. In 1941, a Sugar Bowl victory over Missouri clinched the team's first Lambert Trophy between Boston College's two Eastern championship teams and a national championship win in 1940.

"Fordham and Missouri fought through a combination cloudburst, semi-flood and quarter-part hurricane," wrote fabled journalist Grantland Rice of the Rams' January 1, 1942 trip to the Sugar Bowl, "and at the well-soaked windup, Fordham finished in front in the Sugar Bowl classic by the thin margin of 2 to 0."

BC and Fordham owned football in the Northeast, so annual matchups between the Catholic-based schools of the New York City and Boston hometowns garnered equal importance and ink in annual newspapers. They commandeered attention away from the New York Yankees' decision to sign Elston Howard as their first Black player, and they battled Joe DiMaggio's budding relationship with Marilyn Monroe.

"Fordham (swamped, 55-20, by B.U. last week) scored first on a 'press-box' special pass, suggested by spotter Jim Lansing on the phones," wrote The Boston Globe in its 1954 game recap. "It was a second-period 17-yard flip from quarterback Dick Brodere to right-half Joe Palmieri, who caught the B.C. backup too tight on the right side."

That drama and pageantry ended abruptly after Fordham canceled its program in the aftermath of a disappointing 1954 season. Just 12 years earlier, Crowley's departure in the aftermath of the Sugar Bowl win left an opening that ultimately resulted in the suspension of the program for the duration of World War II. Its return in 1946 under Ed Danowski failed to recapture the glory of those six-win and seven-win seasons of the pre-war elite, and he resigned after a 1-7-1 season included losses to both Boston University, Boston College and Holy Cross. Hope sprung that Lombardi, a 1936 graduate of the university, would leave his assistant's job with the New York Giants, but he ultimately remained in professional football for the duration of his life.

Fordham instead dropped its program for a decade, but the landscape irrevocably changed by the time that the Rams returned. The Polo Grounds were gone, and a non-Division I club program moved to an on-campus baseball field before regaining varsity status in 1970. For the next 20 years, the Rams were a Division III team until they regained Division I status with the creation of the Patriot League.

Simply put, Saturday's kickoff brings that history to a full-circle moment because the Eagles and Rams haven't played one another since the 1954 season. Once brothers in the Northeast college football scene, they're now on opposite sides of a college football spectrum defined increasingly by historic investment levels. At Boston College, conversation about the Atlantic Coast Network and the autonomous Power Four conferences dominate a possible entryway into the College Football Playoff while Fordham competes for a coveted spot in the FCS tournament. For many, that's enough to overlook the matchup as a gimmick or some kind of circus show, and even more analysts and experts are quick to point out how BC's 2023 battle against Holy Cross was more anomaly than trend.

But this game and its history means something to past echoes of Northeast dominance. For years, Boston College has been a dark horse awaiting its next breakout, and many believe in the Eagles as a possible contender in the loaded and packed ACC. Excitement and enthusiasm is peaking under second-year head coach Bill O'Brien, just as it's continuing for Conlin and the Rams.

Meeting one another on the gridiron is exactly what the first week encapsulates. For one day, Vince Lombardi and Frank Cavanaugh, Mike Holovak and Charlie O'Rourke and Moody Sarno and Jim Lansing and Steve Filipowicz and Larry Sartori - they're all back. The Polo Grounds and Braves Field are once again back.

Fordham and BC Enter Into Time Machine For Saturday's Opener

Related Videos