The Situation Down at Yale

Our esteemed contemporary. The Evening World, calls attention to a state of football affairs that is indeed curious. "Harvard won again this year," it says, "and everywhere this is regarded as air upset, as the dope had favored Yale Why? One is at a loss to think. The dope always favors Yale, so much so that the sports writers would appear to have a Yale complex. Yet the hard facts are that since 1906, when the forward pass was introduced and the modern game may be said to have started, Harvard has won eleven games and Yale only eight. Three years there were ties, and two years no games." These are unquestionably the hard facts, but not all of them.

Since 1906, to take The Evening World's starting point, the point score is even more Crimson than the list of victories. Harvard, that is to say, rolled up 183 points, Yale only 110. And two years Harvard administered such a drubbing to her ancient adversary as has rarely been recorded against a first-line team. The scores were 36-0 and 41-0. Since football has been football she has shown her superiority over Yale so markedly that only a few could fail to notice it. Yet these few, it would seem, include most of the sports writers of the country, who go on picking Yale year after year without any regard for the records, blandly confident that all of their mistakes are to be dismissed lightly as "upsets."

It is The Evening World's theory that this is to be explained by Yale's formidable reputation, acquired in the eighties, when Walter Camp had a monopoly on knowledge of the game, or else by the magic of the figure on the Yale totem pole, which is a bulldog. Either of these explanations is plausible and worth thinking about. Our own belief, however, is that the real explanation is to be found in the atmosphere of gentility which is thought to hang over the Harvard campus. Gentility, to the average American, suggests a lot of sissies: it is quite incompatible with physical prowess. So it is natural that the sports writers should pick Yale, where the boys are supposed to have hair on their chests and to eat red meat. The New York World