Harvard, Penn Still On Pace for Title Fight

It’s a college football tradition. Big games, big names.

The Backyard Brawl, the Iron Bowl, the Red River Shootout, and the list goes on.

Even the Ivies grace that compendium of college football lore with The Game. But maybe it’s time to add one more contest—The Battle for the Ivy Title—to that list.

Since 2001, the league’s most identifiable contest hasn’t been the richly celebrated series between Harvard and Yale, but rather the battle waged a week prior between the Crimson and the Quakers.

ESPN thought so highly of the game that in 2002 that it made Philadelphia the site of the first College Gameday broadcast from a I-AA facility.

Only once in four years has either side not entered the de facto Ivy Championship game with a perfect 5-0 record—Harvard was 3-2 in 2003 after an injury to then-junior quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick derailed the Crimson’s hopes of nabbing its second league crown in three years.

Over the years, the names have changed. Ivy Players of the Year Mike Mitchell, Carl Morris, and Fitzpatrick as well as standout skill position players like Dan Castles, Neil Rose, and Brian Edwards, have all grabbed their diplomas and moved on. With each departure, the league’s observers begin etching the deceased date on the tombstone that commemorates the two squads’ tyrannical hold on their fellow Ivies.

The high-flying Bulldogs offense led by Alvin Cowan, Nate Lawrie, Ralph Plumb, and Robert Carr was supposed to have led Yale to a pair of Ivy titles. Before that, it was a solid Princeton squad which was supposed to unseat Harvard and blow past Penn en route to the crown.

This year, it’s senior-heavy Brown that has the poise and leadership to knock off the recent Ivy bullies.

In order to buy this theory, you have to believe that the Bears will be able to go on the road in the second week of the season and knock off a Crimson squad that, by then, will have won 12 straight games, including eight consecutive Ivy contests. And Brown will need to take down an equally formidable Penn team later in the season. And it must do all of this without walking into any of those strange “asleep at the switch” games that have so characteristically befallen it over the past couple years.

Thinking Brown? Think again.

For now, it’s instructive to follow the Penn-Princeton theory from men’s basketball. Just like the Quakers and Tigers, Harvard and Penn have a disproportional piece of the Ivy talent pie. Most years that superfluous skill will guide the two teams to a one-two finish in the league. Some seasons, however, one of the two squads will get tripped up, despite the talent disparity, and drop some winnable games. But it’s exceedingly rare—the 1999 season comes to mind—for both of the league’s giants to slip up at the same time.

It’s why the Quakers and Tigers have won all but two Ivy basketball titles since the Nixon administration, and it’s why Harvard and Penn should combine to capture every Ivy football title for the foreseeable future.

Sure, Cornell might be a team on the rise, and its defense could be particularly stingy. Yale might still have the firepower on offense to outscore anyone in the league. Dartmouth might benefit from newly returned coach Buddy Teevens and his possible insiders edge in terms of recruiting the football hotbed of Florida.

Anything could maybe conceivably happen in the league possibly this season perchance.

But Harvard and Penn do have the last five Ivy Championships sitting in their trophy cases.

Something tells me the sixth will be handed out on Nov. 12 in Harvard Stadium.

—Staff writer Michael R. James can be reached at mrjames@fas.harvard.edu.