Tigers Hold Big Edge In Series With Crimson

There's no place like home for Crimson rooters who like to talk about the good old days of Harvard-Princeton football. In 43 games against the Tigers, seven of the 13 Crimson wins and three of the ties took place on home grounds.

Actually the record shows that the "good old days" were well mixed with bad ones for the Cantabs. Football history with Old Nassau got its start on November 23, 1876, when Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia formed the Intercollegiate Football Association at a meeting called by Princeton.

Association members adopted modified Rugby rules, calling for a field 140 yards long and 70 yards wide. The first contest against the Tiger was played in Cambridge and seemed to augur well for the Crimson under these new regulations. Harvard won the first game on April 28, 1877. But Princeton quickly recovered the defeat in the November 7 contest at Hoboken that same year. Not until the home game in 1887 did Harvard win another victory.

During this ten year period, Princeton began using a new method of putting the ball in play, and Harvard started formal coaching. The former event happened in the 1878 game when the Tiger center snapped the ball back to a teammate instead of kicking the ball forward or sideways.

Captain Coaches

Before 1881, the Cantabs had no coaching by anyone except the captain. The start of really systematic coaching under F.A. Mason '84 in 1886 helped the Crimson break its losing streak the following year.

By 1894, Harvard had transferred all home football activities from Jarvis to Soldiers Field. At the same time, the Yale rivalry had become so bitter that the two schools severed football ties for two years. Princeton moved up to be Harvard's foremost rival and won the 1895 battle largely by running a Crimson fumble for a score all the way from its own five yard line.

After being off the Harvard schedule since 1896, the Tiger roared back in 1911 with a closely contended 8 to 6 victory. Sam White saved the day for Princeton in both the Harvard and Yale games that year by recovering a loose ball in the open and running for a touchdown.

The Crimson had a winning streak from 1912 until the first World War interrupted the series in 1916. When the war ended, Harvard began using the forward pass as the big offensive weapon. Its first test came against Princeton in 1920. The Crimson trailed 14 to 7 in the closing minutes of play, but Charlie Buell came through with four consecutive passes to tie the score.

Harvard lapsed into another losing spell through 1925, except for a 5 to 0 win in 1923.

There was something more than just the ordinary Cantab loss in 1926, however. A Lampoon parody of a Crimson football extra carried a gag story of Tiger Coach Roper's death on the field. Lampy's exuberance helped to bring an already acid relationship with Princeton to a break which lasted eight years.

Football ties with Princeton reopened again in 1934. "Today is one which starts a new era in our athletic history," a Crimson editorial commented on the occasion. But the results of the game were not too new. Princeton won 19 to 0.

Fightingest Squad

The 1936 home game witnessed the first Cantab score against the Orange and Black since 1923. To end the game in a 14 to 14 tie, Harvard held the Tiger squad six times within the 20 yard line and twice within the five. Crimson coach Dick Harlow declared he had never had a harder fighting team in all his coaching years.

In a pass, punt, and prayer offense, Dick Harlow's squad kept Princeton to another tie in 1940, this time 0 to 0. The last home game before the war ended in a 19 to 14 Crimson win on a last minute pass.

The only Crimson win since the war did not fit into the "win or tie at home" pattern. The contest, first after the war, took place at Princeton in 1946 and the visiting Crimson team took it by one conversion, 13 to 12.