Football Team
Columbia maintains a football team as an excuse to remain in the very relevant athletic conference known as the Ivy League. Luckily, most of the other Ivy League schools are relying on the same excuse, so the games don't get too brutal.
The football team is currently coached by Norries Wilson.
Facilities
The team plays its home games at the beautiful, bucolic, bilateral, urbane, multicultural, eleemosynary, yet still iconoclastic Lawrence A. Wien Stadium at Baker Field on 218th Street in the Inwood section of Manhattan.
History
Columbia has a storied football history. During the 1980s, the team experienced a record 44-game losing streak. The jubilation that ensued upon the end of this nightmare was possibly the largest outbreak of school spirit ever seen at Columbia.
At another illustrious moment, possibly in an effort to bolster fan enthusiasm, the players joined the Majority Coalition and beat up on some hippies during the 1968 protests.
This is not to mention the period from 1905 to 1915, when University President Nicholas Murray Butler banned the sport for being too rowdy. Recently, the administration has only tried (unwisely and unsuccessfully) to ban alcohol at games. They stopped when they realized that no one could rationally cheer for Columbia while sober.
Contrary to popular belief, the football team has occaisonally won games, most notably the 1961 Ivy League title, the 1934 Rose Bowl, and a 1947 match agains the cadets of Army who hadn't lost a game in four years.
The team has made history in other ways as well. One of the first intercollegiate football games was played between Columbia and Yale in 1872. An early Columbia-Princeton game was the first live televised sporting event.
Heavily recruited football players sometimes come back to speak at Columbia College Class Day.
