GAME

Academic Integration and Competitive Excellence in Division I Athletics
harvard Football News 2016
THE IVIES todAY
By J. Bennington Peers III
I must say, it is a delight indeed to be back inside the Stadium
with all of you and to know that the besieged and bedraggled
gentlemen from New Haven, our lads’ favorite foils,
once again have consented to provide the opposition (such
as it may be) this day. That issue was far from certain after
last year’s cannonading at the Bowl during which Yale was
consigned to what has become perennial blue obscurity as
dusk was falling.
Harvard indeed had collared the bulldog most handily and I
am told that the demise last summer of Handsome Dan XVII,
our rival’s slobbering symbol, was due to extreme emotional
starvation, his having never witnessed a Yale victory in The
Game after nine years of drooling unsated on the sideline.
Not even during the days of Haughton and Fisher has there
been such a lopsided stretch of a series that commenced in
1875, with nine consecutive Crimson triumphs and 14 of the
most recent 15 encounters. One possible explanation is that
the rivalry has been cyclical over time. It is recorded that Yale
prevailed in 14 of the first 17 meetings and also enjoyed prolonged
successes during subsequent stretches. Harvard’s ongoing
cycle, however, is approaching that of Halley’s Comet.
So complete has been our domination that down at the
Gothic rockpile there was talk of abandoning this august autumnal
relationship. “I fear that the rivalry has become lamentably
akin to that between the kennel master and the pup,”
one Yale dean was heard to observe. “How much longer can
our varsity be brought to heel?”
It was suggested that the season be concluded with an encounter
with the Princeton chaps, as was customary during the
19th century. Yale then could play trick-or-treat with its Halloween-clad
foes and perhaps emerge victorious now and then.
Finally it was determined that it was not so much the
sequence of Ls on the ledger that had made The Game such
a hopeless undertaking for Albie Booth’s woebegone successors.
It was the unbalanced nature of so many of the tallies --
37-6, 45-7, 34-7, et cetera. “Our salvation may be found in the
solution,” proposed one of the college’s instructors in remedial
arithmetic. “Why not a different method of keeping score?”
Harvard, which created both the original format as well
as a scoreboard to display the tally, might well be amenable
to a 21st-century recalculation which would be decidedly gentler
for the losing side. Perhaps a nostalgic return to the initial
engagement at Hamilton Field in which our squad prevailed
by a count of 4-0. In that day, of course, one needed both to
score a touchdown and to execute the conversion in order to
be awarded a single point.
By modern reckoning the result would have been 28-0, a
figure that would have been a more accurate indicator of the
superiority of Captain Whiting’s colleagues. There are, naturally,
alternate schemes of adding one integer to another and
I daresay that they would make for a more palatable total for
Elihu’s progeny.
There’s the Fibonacci sequence in which each number is the
sum of the previous two -- for example 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34.
Thus would a 42-0 Harvard triumph be listed as 20-0, which
would be more bearable and less burdensome to our canine
friends. Better still would be the binary system in which 0 and
1 are used in a dizzying array of combinations.
I must confess, patient reader, that there were times in decades
past when I would have preferred that the binary system
have been adopted on certain Saturdays when our eleven
found itself on the unfavorable side of an outing with Yale,
particularly during the Fifties. The solution then, as you may
recall, was not mathematical but methodical: develop a more
competitive varsity.
That undertaking seems to be requiring an excruciatingly
long time in New Haven, where defenders appear to be habitually
in short supply and where quarterbacks routinely
are scrambling for their lives. Given the outcomes of previous
Saturdays this season the likelihood of a Yale triumph today
appears to be as remote as ever. Thus the binary solution,
with our lads stringing together the 1s and the visitors
the 0s. Messrs. Viviano, Shelton-Mosley, Firkser and Smith will
romp unchecked and the defense will display its usual grit and
grudge. Harvard 101010, Yale 01110, is my calculation and a
share of the Ivy crown shall be a deserved reward.
Now to other business around the League today that will
be tallied by more standard accounting procedures. I will acknowledge
that I had written off the ursine eleven from Providence
some weeks ago in the wake of a quartet of setbacks
but Mr. Estes’ charges evidently have rightsided themselves.
Not that they can take their home date with Columbia for
granted. Our man Bagnoli, who did creditable work for a couple
of decades with the incorrigibles at Ben Franklin’s reform
school, has provided the former pussycats at Morningside
Heights with a respectable roar, as our own eleven can attest.
These notably louder Lions may not yet be kings of the
ivied jungle but they no longer are the leonine laggards who
were easily tamed. That said, I fear that Bruno yet again will
be their master, particularly atop the Old Hill, where the New
Yorkers have not prevailed in a decade. Brown 24, Columbia
14, I would guess.
I must confess that I had expected a trifle more wah-hoo-wahing
out of Hanover this autumn after the first two outings
but the gibbering rustic has been tripping over his moccasins
of late. Any fantasies about retaining a share of the league
trophy long since have vanished and the only remaining motivation
today will be to twist the Tiger’s tail once again. Dartmouth
has enjoyed uncommon success in that regard, with
victories in its last six encounters with the New Jersey felines
but I sense that another is most unlikely today. This Princeton
entry has proven to be most formidable, as Pennsylvania
found to its dismay, and had it not been for our lads’ overtime
legerdemain likely would have claimed the crown by itself.
Princeton 28, Dartmouth 17 seems a reasonable result.
I daresay that after the mauling that Princeton administered
to Penn I thought that the Quaker oafs might well be
left by the wayside in the title chase. Alas, that was but a
daydream. There was a time when I believed that Cornell finally
might possess the required qualities to administer the
coup de grace above Cayuga but recent Saturdays have
indicated otherwise. The Philadelphians rarely have shown
much brotherly love to the Carnelians, even during those
many decades when they met on Thanksgiving, and I doubt
that there’ll be any such fraternal profferings in Ithaca today.
Penn 35, Cornell 14 and I pray that the league officials award
Harvard initial possession of the shared trophy before the
frontier Boeotian renders it unrecognizable.
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