Yale (4-5, 4-2) vs. Harvard (6-3, 4-2)
There is a serious dearth of coverage for this year’s edition of The Game (aka Yale vs. Harvard). The normally reliable Times does not have any mention of it in today’s sports section and not even Beano Cook mentioned it this week. About the only thing that has gotten any attention about the contest is the new tailgating policy at the Yale Bowl (The Times). This is a shame.
While Yale-Harvard is not what it used to be, due to the move to I-AA and changing demographic trends that started in the post-WWII era, it is still an incredible rivalry without peer, save for Army-Navy. Beano wrote a great ESPN Insider article weeks ago that summed it up very well.
We’re feeling a little academic this week, so what better place to shift the focus than to the Ivy League?
If you’ll pass the pointer, we’ll provide a little history — important but little-known history in today’s grand picture of college football.
In the first Associated Press poll, the writers voted three Ivy League teams in the Top 20: Penn (No. 10), Yale (No. 12) and Dartmouth (No. 13). In fact, in the first three polls, Dartmouth also finished No. 7 in 1937 and No. 20 in 1938.
Yale, to this day, is the NCAA’s all-time leader in consensus All-America selections with 100. Harvard and Princeton remain in the top five, along with Notre Dame and Michigan. Bet you can stump a lot of people with that trivia question.
In a story just published by Street & Smith’s, four Ivy League teams — Yale, Princeton, Harvard and Penn — were recognized among the 50 greatest college football programs of all time. Yale topped the Ivies at No. 7.
The Ivy League has had more than 250 NFL players (including 14 on active rosters) and more than 350 first-team All-Americans. The league also has had 58 NCAA Postgraduate Scholars and an impressive 37 Rhodes Scholars…
Ivy League teams remained an integral part of the national scene in college football for decades. This began to change in the 1950s when the Ivy League first eliminated spring practice and decided to get out of big-time football. Except for an occasional mention, the Ivy League slowly disappeared from the national scene…
The growth of state universities, because of the GI bill, started to create a large fan base for some schools. Each year, the graduates remain fans, and now some state universities — such as Penn State and Michigan — have more alumni than a small country in Europe has citizens.
Once the big universities became committed to football, the Ivy League teams and the small Catholic institutions were doomed to an uphill climb.
But even after the Ivy League de-emphasized football, attendance at its games remained solid and still brought frequent sellouts. However, in recent years, it seems the alumni continue to lose interest and even the students fail to attend on a regular basis, except for something special like Harvard-Yale.
Attendance at Ivy League games this year hovers around an average of 10,000, down 500 from last year.
Nonetheless, in hopes of attracting more fans, Yale — which leads the league in attendance at an average of 11,134 — is planning to spend money to improve the 64,000-seat Yale Bowl, which was built in 1914.
So much history has transpired between these two ancient programs. The 1968 game gave the world the brilliant Harvard Crimson headline, “Harvard beats Yale 29-29.” At the same time, a young Yale cartoonist named Gary Trudeau had turned Bulldog QB Brian Dowling into “B.D.,” a character that lives on to this day in Doonesbury. Last year, some Yale undergrads infiltrated stands in Cambridge and got Cantabs to hold a cardblock that said, “WE SUCK.”
Modern football was invented at Yale by Walter Camp. The Yale Bowl was the first grand football stadium, and the model for the Rose Bowl. There is no experience comparable to attending The Game at the Bowl in person; it is something every football fan should do at least once. On three occasions I have had the pleasure and honor of being there; 1987 (-30 F windchill), 1993, and 2001. Yale has only won one of those contests (’93) but they all were exciting.
This year, both teams have a slight chance to tie for the Ivy title (if woeful Columbia can beat Brown) and Yale can win the H-Y-P Championship (which should really be Y-H-P) for the first time since ’99. I am betting they will, they are due in The Game. I predict Yale wins, 24 – 19. You can watch The Game on WGN (or other Tribune Co. stations) at noon today. That is what I will be doing, rather than watching what a bunch of Midwesterners with a bad case of myopia and little understanding of history call “the game.” And if you need to know who to root for, just remember that JFK said, “Harvard is the Michigan of the East!”
Okay, I have rambled on enough. I was going to say that my rambling is proof of why I was not Ivy material, but I read some of the coverage in the Yale Daily News and Harvard Crimson of the game and maybe I was wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I love Penn State and would not trade it for anything, but I would love to have a rivalry this good, but then again, who wouldn’t?