Egg in Your Beer

Any football team which can absorb three dreadful losses--during which it scored 12 points to its opponent's 110--and then come up with an upset victory, must have more than praise-worthy spirit and courage. The 1951 Harvard squad, which had an abundance of both, probably did more for the College and its nationwide reputation than any other Crimson eleven. For when the season began, Harvard football was generally laughed at; when it ended, the Crimson once again had a claim to respect.

This was a club which started the year with a fairly impressive win over Springfield. But anybody who saw the next three games--crashing losses to Holy Cross, Columbia, and Cornell--could be pardoned for chalking up the Springfield win as defiantly atypical. After the pounding at Ithaca, even Coach Lloyd Jordan admitted he was "disgusted." Crimson fans shuddered, and resigned themselves to another loss-filled schedule.

But Jordan added that he wasn't "discouraged," and his team proceeded to vindicate him in the very next game, which saw the Crimson holding and beating Army. The spirit and fight of the Crimson team, consistently high all year, reached a peak against the Cadets, just when they might well have collapsed permanently.

The Army game was the pivot. From then on, the varsity played exciting, if not razzle-dazzle football. This was one of the encouraging things the 1951 squad did for Harvard football. It came up from fiat on its back to put on hard-played, crowd-pleasing shows the rest of the year, even if it did not win every game. The Crimson lost to Princeton, for example, by a greater margin than to Cornell. Yet the Tigers' victory seemed much less of a rout than the loss to the Big Red.

The difference seemed to be a new confidence, combined with the old fight. For somewhere this team had picked up a scoring punch, the ability to tally from anywhere on the field, whether by a 47-yard drive through Princeton, or an 84-yard dash past Yale.

Sole credit for this fantastic upsurge belongs to the men of the team. Certainly the newspapers did not strain themselves to lend encouragement. Even after the Army win, Arthur Daley of the New york Times referred to "hapless Harvard," and Life magazine snidely remarked that "the impossible has happened, Harvard won a football game." But the squad went on about its business.

The Crimson is still no powerhouse. But it has unquestioned guts and courage. It is developing into a good Ivy League football team which nobody will push around. Opponents who once openly pitied Harvard will have to conserve their sympathies for home consumption.