Football Puts Cheerleaders to Work

In its past two games, Harvard has scored 98 points. Its quarterbacks have thrown for 10 touchdowns, and in Saturday’s game alone the team had 560 yards of total offense.

But not everyone is a winner when the Crimson’s offense explodes. There’s probably only one group sorer than the football team right now: the Harvard cheerleaders.

As some of you may know, it’s fairly common practice for collegiate cheerleaders to a pushup for every point that the team has put up after every score.

And it’s not like they do just seven per touchdown. Any time the team puts points on the board, the cheerleaders have to do a pushup for every total point. So, for example, they would do seven after the first touchdown but 14 after a second touchdown, and so on.

You can probably figure out what 98 points means—more exercise than you might hope for.

The Back Page decided to calculate just how many pushups the cheer squad has done in the last two games.

We’ll start with the individual tally. Against Bucknell a week ago, the team put up 42 points on six touchdowns. So the numbers look something like this:

7 + 14 + 21 + 28 + 35 + 42 = 147 pushups per cheerleader

I’m afraid matters only got worse for them against Princeton, when Harvard once again put up huge numbers. The Crimson scored 56 on the afternoon, once again all on touchdowns:

7 + 14 + 21 + 28 + 35 + 42 + 49 + 56 = 252 pushups per cheerleader

Therefore, every cheerleader who worked both games did a whopping 399 pushups thanks solely to a prolific Harvard offense. Honestly, we’ll cut them a little slack if they cheated and didn’t go all the way down.

But how many total pushups did they do? By our count, there were 19 cheerleaders a week ago against Bucknell and 23 against Princeton, including a few children who picked a poor day to make a guest appearance with the cheer squad.

Using that information, you get the total number of pushups from the group:

(19 * 147) + (23 * 252) = 8589

That’s right. The cheerleaders did a collective 8,589 pushups in a week. If they wake up tomorrow and can do so much as move, I’ll be impressed.

And things might not be looking any better. The Crimson has scored more than 40 points in three straight games—the first time that’s happened since the Great Depression.