First UD bowl game capped legendary season

As enthusiastic fans gathered in Chattanooga, Tenn., and in front of TV sets around the country Dec. 14 to watch the Blue Hens football team play for the 2007 championship, one alumnus in particular brought a unique perspective to the occasion.

Marty Pierson, EG ’51M, is a former player who was an assistant coach on New Year’s Day 1947, when UD made its first-ever bowl appearance and won the 1946 small college national championship. For the Hens, that Cigar Bowl victory topped off an astonishingly successful football season.

“The 1946 team was undefeated,” Pierson said in a recent interview from his home in Newark, Del. “Not only that, but Delaware had a string of 30 [games without a loss] in a row going into the Cigar Bowl. No other team in the country had done that.”

Under Head Coach William D. “Bill” Murray, UD emerged into the national spotlight in 1940, when Pierson was a freshman civil engineering major and a tackle on the team. The Hens lost their first three games that year, without even scoring a point, but then went undefeated the rest of the season.

From the end of that three-game losing streak until Oct. 3, 1947, UD never lost a football game.

During that time, World War II forced the cancellation of the 1943-45 seasons, and Pierson enlisted in the Navy. Murray kept in touch with his players throughout the war, and when varsity football resumed in 1946, he fielded a team of veterans.

By then, Pierson had finished his undergraduate degree at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he had been sent by the Navy, and returned to UD as Murray’s assistant coach.

He continued in that role, while later earning his master’s degree in civil engineering, until Murray left to coach at Duke in 1951, and Pierson accompanied him. The Hens’ undefeated streak continued briefly after the Cigar Bowl win, eventually reaching 32 games—a school record that still stands.

While Pierson was avidly watching UD’s latest championship game on ESPN with his son, Duke Pierson, he says he also was remembering the 1946 season.

The Hens were not only undefeated that year, but they held their opponent scoreless in five games.The overall scoring record for the 10-0 season was 358-45, including Delaware’s 21-7 Cigar Bowl defeat of Rollins College.

Pierson recalls that the team got several bowl bids that year and that the players voted to go to Tampa for the Cigar Bowl because it was scheduled during the holidays and wouldn’t interfere with their class work.

As evidenced by the nine regular-season games in 1946, schedules were lighter in that era, says Pierson.
“And the biggest difference is that there was very little passing in those days,” he says. “It was almost entirely a running game.”

In the 1990s, Pierson spearheaded a drive to commission a bust of Murray. It was installed at Delaware Stadium in 1996, the 50th anniversary of the Cigar Bowl season.