'The Game' Gets Airtime on ESPN

On Monday, junior Mike Berg and his Jordan North roommates settled in after dinner to watch television as usual. The channel: ESPN2. The subject: themselves.

In three separate airings on ESPN and ESPN2, the members of the Harvard football team were featured in an NFL Films-produced segment on the history of The Game. The piece ran as part of a 30-minute package entitled “Ivy Leaguers” (the second half was a profile of former Crimson linebacker Isaiah Kacyvenski ’00). It used footage from Harvard practices as well as from this year’s Game, a 30-24 triple-overtime Crimson victory. Though the players were aware of the NFL Films camera crew at the time, the final product was a mystery until Monday.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” said Berg, a defensive tackle whose acrobatic interception on Yale’s possession in the third overtime period set up Harvard’s winning score. “It was pretty cool to see such a big deal made out of it.”

“I thought it was very good, very well done,” sophomore quarterback Liam O’Hagan said. “It was kind of strange having a camera in your face while you’re stretching or the coach is talking to you, but I guess that’s what comes with playing in the Harvard-Yale game.”

In addition to The Game footage, the segment included interviews with historians, former players, Harvard coach Tim Murphy and Yale coach Jack Siedlecki, and New York governor George Pataki, Yale Class of 1967. It also touched on the rivalry aspect, with shots of both a “Yale Sucks” pep-rally flyer and students wearing “Huck Farvard” t-shirts. Distressingly for Harvard students, there was also mention of a now-infamous 2004 prank in which a group of Yale students tricked spectators on the Harvard side of the stadium into spelling out “WE SUCK.”

But the focus of the piece, said producer Todd Schmidt, was on The Game’s storied history—which is actually the history of football in the United States. When NFL Films originally discussed the idea two years ago, the plan was to focus on the legendary 29-29 Game of 1968.

“But as we started digging around,” Schmidt said, “we began to see all the origins of football. And the more we looked, the more we found.”

The segment included illustrations, black-and-white photos, and grainy footage from the earliest days of the sport to show the evolution of football from its genesis on the playing fields of Cambridge and New Haven.

“Everything we know about American football stems from those two schools,” Schmidt said.

The rivalry was hardly lacking in drama heading into the 122nd Game, but the film crew couldn’t have scripted a better contest than the one they attended this November. Harvard rallied from a 21-3 deficit in the second half to send the matchup into three frenetic extra periods, marking the first time The Game had ever gone to overtime.

“It was an unbelievable game,” Schmidt said. “We at NFL Films have seen hundreds and hundreds of games. But it was something we’ve never witnessed before, something unique throughout sports.”

Harvard-Yale possesses, Schmidt said, an “institutional passion” that endures even while Ivy football’s star has diminished beside Division I football factories like Texas or Oklahoma.

“It’s so ingrained—it’s like dyed fabric,” Schmidt said. “It’s unique to anything I have ever seen. The challenge was converting that to a two-dimensional medium.”

Though the film crew interviewed both O’Hagan and Harvard captain Erik Grimm during the week of The Game, the final nine-minute segment ultimately did not include that footage. A 44-minute version is in the works to air on the NFL Network this fall, however, and Schmidt said the player interviews as well as more clips of Murphy would appear in the longer version.

Berg said that he thought the film crew managed successfully to convey a wealth of information.

“I thought for a short segment they did a good job of covering all the bases,” he said.

Berg was also interviewed by Sports Illustrated for an article about this year’s Game, and said he could understand why both the Harvard-Yale rivalry and the 122nd playing of the Game would have drawn the attention of the media.

The topic of students playing football for the love of the game rather than for scholarship money or a future in the pros, Berg said, is “a real easy story to go off of.”

“With guys leaving early to go to the pros, not finishing their degrees—it’s a feel good story, so to speak,” he said. “It’s a story everyone appreciates.”

O’Hagan agreed.

“A lot of kids are in it for the education, but also for the tradition,” he said. “A game like [this year’s] should have some press. It was probably one of the best ones.”

—Staff writer Lisa J. Kennelly can be reached at kennell@fas.harvard.edu.