The Lion Legacy

For the first time since 1961 and the heyday of Archie Roberts, the Ivy League title will be decided at Baker Field in the Bronx, as dark horse Columbia hosts Ivy frontrunner Brown.

Exactly nine weeks ago Harvard was piling up a 34-10 win over the Lions on what seemed the beginning of an inexorable path to a second consecutive Ivy title. Now the Crimson's only chance to share in the league crown is for Columbia to engineer a potentially electrifying win today.

The cynics around the league give the Lions about as much chance against John Anderson's 7-1 Bruins as a flickering candle in a Siberian blizzard. But the mood among Columbia's gridders, who can usually be found nestled in the jazz room of Morningside Height's West End Bar, which incidentally is billing the Frank Williams Swing Four this week, is one of quiet confidence.

"We're going to need a really inspired effort, but I think we can pull it out," Columbia head coach Bill Campbell, who captained the 1961 squad that blanked the Bruins, 50-0, said yesterday. "The game really means a lot to us in terms of respectibility.

All the intangibles point to a Columbia win and anyone who follows the Lions' fortunes knows that the dark forces of irrationality reign supreme at Baker Field. The fact that the Lions are 11 point underdogs is meaningless because Columbia hasn't been tavored in a single league contest this year.

The squad was the underdog last Saturday against Cornell when junior signalcaller Kevin Burns unleashed two scoring strikes, including a fourth down hook-up with co-captain Dave McAvoy. Paul McCormack, replacing leading groudgainer Bruce "magic" Stephens who is doubtful for today with a sprained ankle, rambled for 130 yards in 15 carries as the Lions racked up 35 points.

Favored Penn also swallowed a bitter bill earlier this season, coming out on the short end of a 14-10 score; the Quakers then went on to upend Brown. After a little bit of deductive reasoning, it's pretty apparent that Columbia should be the hands down favorite.

After trouncing the Big Red, Columbia's powder keg offense seems ready to erupt after remaining quiescent throughout midseason. Folowing the first three games of the season against Harvard, Lafayette and Penn, the backfield had churned for 667 yards, and Columbia was running ninth in the voting for the Lambert Trophy.

The Lions then went into a tailspin, losing their fourth in a row in a 47-0 mauling at the hands of Rutgers. Playing in a spanking new Giant Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., the Scarlet Knights made the Hackensack meadowlands look like an explosion in a tomato cannery on a sunset evening.

Not only has the offense finally hit full stride, but Columbia should be aided by the mystique of Baker Field, the wooden horseshoe' on 218th Street and Broadway that has been the site of so many Ivy shockers.

Who can forget the 1971 season when under an indigo October sky Paul Kaliades connected on a field goal with seconds showing on the clock to bring the Lions back from the precipice of defeat against Princeton. Kaliades then repeated the feat against Dartmouth to pull out a 31-29 win from the Ivy League champs.

In the Homecoming game that year the Lions edged Yale 15-14 on a two-point conversion off of a halfback option pass. It was the last play of the game.

It might seems that Columbia's chances for a similar shocker today would be hampered by the loss of starting quarterback Kevin Burns, who is sidelined with a hyperextended elbow, but sophomore back-up Cal Moffie from Newton should prove a decided plus from Harvard's standpoint. Cal's father, Harold Moffie, starred at halfback for the Crimson from 1947-50 and so young Moffie has a vested interest in bamboozling the Bruins.

The key to shutting down Brown's attack will be the effectiveness of the secondary in bottling up the Bruins' gyrating genius, Bill Farnham, who caught twelve passes last week against Dartmouth. "Hell, that's a frightening combination," Campbell said of Paul Michalko to Farnham. Campbell will stay with his normal zone defense but adds "we want to make sure the rotation of our coverage goes to his side."

The burden of bottling up Farnham will go to defensive backs Ed Backus and Rich Witherspoon, who have picked off seven passes between them, as Witherspoon scampered 53 yards on an interception return against Cornell.

Campbell plans to open up the offense but isn't looking for the big play. "We'll throw the ball more than we have been," he says, as the game plan is "to peck at them" with straight ahead runs interspersed with Moffie aerials to McAvoy and Art Pusinelli.

Last season the two teams battled to a 13-13 standoff at the half. When Brown learned over the public address system that Harvard and Yale were also deadlocked at the half, a fired up Bruin eleven emerged from the lockerroomand buried the Lions with a 35-point blitz.

If the Crimson remains true to form in today's donnybrook with Yale and put some some points up on the board in the early going, it's just possible that Brown will lose its emotional edge and the second half at Baker Field will take a completely different turn.

After all, the tradition of Columbia upsets goes all the way back to September 28, 1923 when in the first game ever played at Baker Field the Lions shut out Ursinus College, which, as it turns out, is the alma mater of Brown's head coach John Anderson.