Game Time

All week students have stood outside the Science Center with shirts boasting “I went to New Haven and all I got was shot” and “Blame Yale”. But after tomorrow, none of this trash talking will matter. It all comes down to this: one football game, one victory, a year of gloating.

“There’s a lot of tradition, a lot of history, a lot of pride that goes into this game,” captain Erik Grimm said.

Tomorrow, when Harvard (6-3, 4-2 Ivy) charges into the Yale Bowl, The Game will likely mean nothing for either Crimson or Bulldog football in fighting for an Ivy League title. Both Harvard and Yale (4-5, 4-2) sit powerless at second in the league. Brown is in first at 5-1 and needs only a victory over winless Columbia to clinch the title.

But the 122nd edition of The Game needs no title hopes to bring intensity.

“I really feel the game stands alone,” Yale Coach Jack Siedlecki wrote in an email. “It does not need to be enhanced by title implications. This is the biggest game in front of the biggest crowd that these players will ever play.”

After the Crimson’s 35-3 rout of the Bulldogs to cap a perfect 10-0 season last year, Harvard is looking to hand Yale its fifth straight loss in The Game.

But this year, Yale is up to the task.

Offensively the two teams match up fairly equally.

The Bulldogs boast the two best wide receivers in the league in junior Ashley Wright and senior Todd Feiereisen, but Crimson senior Ryan Tyler and freshman Alex Breaux have made their way into the top 10 in receiving as well.

Complementing the passing attack is junior back Clifton Dawson, for whom no team has found an answer. Dawson is second in the league with 155.7 average all-purpose yards per game.

Yale senior quarterback Jeff Mroz and Harvard sophomore quarterback Liam O’Hagan are fighting at the top of the pack: Mroz is first in overall passing and total offense with 21 touchdowns and 254 yards per game, while O’Hagan has had a strong second half to the season and now stands third in overall passing and second in total offense with 13 touchdowns and 194.9 yards per game. He has the edge over Mroz in pass efficiency.

“Senior leadership is crucial and it starts for us with the quarterback, Jeff Mroz,” Siedlecki wrote. “On defense, it starts with senior Matt Handlon. They are the guys that have been there before and understand how to win.”

Other than Grimm, the Crimson will look for leadership from senior linebacker Robert Balkema, who is in the team’s top three in sacks, fumbles, and tackles for loss.

“I’m expecting the senior class to play the best game,” Grimm said. “I’m looking for some huge plays out of Balkema. He’s been doing it the last few games, and I’ll be expecting that on Saturday.”

Yale is just sixth in the league in total defense to Harvard’s third, but the Crimson has posted the worst pass defense along with the best rush defense this season.

“People will get passing yards against us for the obvious reason that if they can’t run the football they have to do something,” Harvard coach Tim Murphy said. “But we actually, from a percentage standpoint, from an efficiency stand point [have] been tops in the league.”

Recently the Crimson defense has stepped up in a big way, allowing just 24 points in the last three games. In a 29-3 victory last weekend, it held Penn to just a field goal, and the red zone remained uncharted territory for the Quakers.

A major part of this week’s defensive struggle will be turnovers.

“You look at the key to our success it’s been great defense and ball security,” Murphy said. “There’s no question that that will be the most important statistic in the game.”

Harvard and Yale are tied for second in turnover margin at plus four, and both coaches see this as crucial to the matchup.

After 15 turnovers in its first four games, the Crimson has since picked up its ball control and has only five in its last five contests.

This begs the question of whether or not the Bulldogs will be able to turn this back around.

Princeton entered last weekend’s 21-14 loss to Yale as the league leader in turnover ratio but left in sixth after the Bulldogs forced seven turnovers.

“If we limit our turnovers and force some then we have a great shot,” Grimm said.

With or without turnovers, the only statistic that will be remembered is which team gets the ‘W.’

Because when it comes to The Game, nothing is more precious than a year’s worth of bragging rights.