Saving Face: With Win Over Yale, Football Can Clinch Share of Second

Take a step back, and remember where you were a month ago. Chances are, you were giddy about the prospect of the 120th playing of The Game having title implications.

Let’s rewind to Oct. 25, when the current top three in the Ivy League standings—Penn, Yale and Harvard—were each undefeated in league play.

Yale, which was prepared to take on the Quakers at Philadelphia’s Franklin Field that day, had lost one non-conference game at that point—to current powerhouse No. 6 Colgate—but overall looked strong, averaging 41 points per game.

Penn, on the other hand, had not yet faced a formidable opponent—it had beaten No. 19 Lehigh, but the Mountain Hawks have since dropped from the rankings—and had narrowly escaped an upset to Bucknell two weeks before.

Harvard, at 6-0, looked invincible.

But oh, how the fates have changed.

In that critical Oct. 25 Yale-Penn game, Yale forced overtime but eventually succumbed to the Quakers, 34-31.

Since then, Penn has run the table on the Ivies, getting stronger by the week and eventually clinching the title. Yale has been respectable, but lost one game to Brown.

And Harvard? The Crimson has gone 0-3 since that date.

So the promise that The Game once held a month ago is gone. One would be mistaken to downplay what is on the line at Yale Bowl, however. The stakes are still high for the Crimson—very high. Here’s why.

A quick glance at the Ivy League standings reveals two things. For one, Harvard (6-3, 3-3 Ivy) is tied for third place with Columbia (4-5, 3-3). Two, the Crimson is also tied with Dartmouth (4-5, 3-3).

And with the Lions at home against Brown, and with the Big Green playing Princeton, those two perennial cellar-dwellers have a good chance of both finishing ahead of Harvard with a Crimson loss.

The implications of this would be staggering. Neither team has finished ahead of Harvard since 1996. For some perspective, President Clinton was still serving his first term in the White House that year, Kerri Strug made her famous vault on a bum ankle in Atlanta and Ted Kaczynski ’62 was arrested.

Now, it would be wrong to say that Dartmouth, under head coach John Lyons, has been an unsuccessful football program. In fact, the Big Green captured four Ivy League titles during the ’90s—more than any other team. But from 1998-2002, that same program rolled off a miserable record of 10-39, winning a grand total of six Ivy League games.

Columbia, on the other hand, has not won an Ivy League title since 1961 and has had exactly three winning seasons since Harvard coach Tim Murphy was born in 1957.

Michael Griffin, director of football operations for Columbia, said yesterday that he was pleased to have the chance to finish ahead of Harvard this season.

“To finish ahead of a team that was picked near the top of the league and that went 6-0,” Griffin said. “That would be great.”

Of course, there are some other implications that go along with a loss to Yale. A defeat would ensure a fourth place (or lower) finish for the Crimson for the first time since 1999, as the winner of Brown-Columbia would sneak into the third spot behind Penn and Yale. No current Crimson senior has finished that low in the standings.

It would also drop Harvard’s Ivy League record below .500 for the first time since 1999, something else the seniors have never experienced.

Senior defensive tackle Brendan McCafferty said he does not want this to be a first.

“There’s no way we would want to finish behind Columbia and Dartmouth, too,” McCafferty said. “Penn and us have been the top dogs since we got here. It would definitely be a disappointment to finish [that low].”

If Princeton beats Dartmouth, that would put Harvard in a four-way tie—with the loser of Brown-Columbia, Dartmouth and Princeton—for second-to-last, ahead of only 0-6 Cornell. Harvard has not finished second-to-last since 1998.

None of this happens, of course, with a Harvard win over the Elis. With a win, the Crimson would cruise into second place in the Ivy League, and players and fans would be free to consider the season a success.

Plus, said senior cornerback Benny Butler, a win would end the year on a high note.

“We’d definitely put a positive spin on our season,” Butler said.

If Harvard loses, however, it would languish near the bottom of the standings until a new season starts in 2004, leaving all to look back at late October and wonder, “what if...”

Overall, one thing is definitely certain. In The Game, there’s always something at stake.