The Game Can't Top Oklahoma Football

Quit blaming the Boston Police Department.

We the citizens of Harvard College, purported football fans and ardent tailgaters, need to do some self-assessment before we take our complaints to the law.

Long before the BPD intervened to take the “tail” out of tailgate, the powwow at Ohiri Field needed some work.

Spiked cider? Bagels and cream cheese? Dining hall catering?

Even Harvard’s attempts at debauchery are served up with silver spoons.

As a lifelong resident of Oklahoma, and a diehard, bordering-on-obsessive Sooners fan, I rarely claim regional superiority over New England.

But when it comes to college football, the Sooner State trumps the Ivy gates every time.

There is a uniquely religious feel to football in the Midwest and the South, the intensity growing the closer you get to the Gulf of Mexico. If Oklahoma beats Texas in the annual Red River Rivalry—a sensitive subject of late—the university cancels classes the following Monday.

We get a day off in the name of Christopher Columbus, while OU plays hooky if the Sooners take down the Longhorns. Typical.

At the Oklahoma-Oklahoma State game last year—a mere drop in the bucket of in-state rivalries—a fan brought a 55-inch plasma screen TV and his own generator to a field outside the stadium, where he began a simulated OU-OSU game on his Xbox.

Festivities started just after sunup. Families grilled hamburgers under huge tents and more than 120,000 people milled outside Memorial Stadium, although only 89,000 chosen ones were in possession of a ticket.

Sprawled along Memorial Stadium’s side streets were dozens of RVs, each equipped with televisions (plural) broadcasting every nationally televised football game. Ohiri dwellers often don’t even know the score of the Harvard-Yale game, much less the play-by-play of the early SEC game on CBS.

My own OU-OSU tickets were scalped off the street from a clear veteran of the trade, ran me 100 dollars each, and were up in the last level of the stadium. The seats filled more than an hour before kickoff—something Harvard Stadium won’t even see in the fourth quarter of a tie game between the Crimson and the Bulldogs.

And our tickets are free.

When Ohio State went to Austin to play Texas in September, tickets went for 2,000 dollars a piece. Ohio State-Michigan tickets are currently selling for more than World Series billets did a month ago.

And guess what? There’s not a ticket to be found in Columbus, Ohio, this weekend.

We get our tickets free of charge—for every athletic event on campus—and a disturbing number of Harvard students never make it inside the stadium. Not just for Harvard-Yale, but all season long.

The allure of the tailgate is strong, but Ohiri Field is less a bastion of pomp and pride than it is of partying and puking.

The BPD can do what it sees fit, but it cannot cure the overall indifference to The Game itself, nor its outcome.

A tailgate should be a raucous precursor to a football game, not its replacement. We’ve somehow transformed our lone attempt at college football normalcy into a particularly bad night at the Kong.

I notice this more and more as we wind down to Harvard-Yale weekend, being discussed much more for its pseudo-tailgate than for its Ivy League title implications. Both Harvard and Yale are still alive in the race for the Ivy crown, but I doubt more than a handful of students are aware of the ramifications of this Saturday.

Mention the Boston Police Department and the entire campus will erupt in outrage. Talk about how a last-minute call at Princeton sullied the Crimson’s chances at an Ivy title and you fall on deaf ears.

It’s not just at Harvard, either. College football carries little weight in the Northeast as a whole.

Decades of futility for New England college teams have resulted in utter apathy to football’s holy Saturday. Last year, New England was the only region in the U.S. that didn’t televise the Oklahoma-Texas game, college football’s October version of Pats-Colts.

In the BCS’s eight-year tenure, no East Coast team north of Virginia has played for a national title. Syracuse got thumped in its only BCS game in 1998, while Pittsburgh—the other BCS representative from the region—got routed by Utah (Utah!) in 2004.

The response to this exclusion is in line with New England’s general sentiment: just pretend it’s not there.

The Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic are perennial outcasts in the discussion of college football’s powerhouses. The region’s most recognized program—Joe Paterno’s Penn State Nittany Lions—has long neglected East Coast competition to tackle the Midwest’s finest in the Big Ten. Even Boston College fled the inappropriately named Big East for the ACC.

Harvard, restricted to a 10-game season by Ivy League presidents, cares little about teams outside the Ancient Eight.

I would be lying if I said that didn’t upset me. I have to check the final scores of Saturday’s big games before I can call my closest friends from home. If OU loses, I know my brother needs several days before he’s ready to talk about it. Same for my friend here who cheers for Texas.

The contest’s result, not the festivities beforehand, make up the true revelry—and sheer heartbreak—of game day.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t love to see a dozen RVs parked right outside of Harvard Stadium this weekend.

What with the crimson and cream-clad crowd, I’d feel right at home.

—Staff writer Aidan E. Tait can be reached at atait@fas.harvard.edu.