The '70s: A Decade Of Games

Rivalry. Intense, that's what it is. In the 1970s, the Harvard-Yale football rivalry was just that, with each side leaving the decade with five wins and no 29-all ties. There were blow-outs, there were cliff-hangers, there were goalpost-rippers. There were upsets, there were upset stomachs. There were nobodies and there were stars. Harvard's Richie Szaro, Danny Jiggets and Pat McInally and Yale's Dick Jauron and Gary Fencik, all of whom went on to play in the pros, plus Eric "End Zone" Crone, Teddy DeMars, Larry Brown, Bob Rizzo, Stone Phillips, and Jim Kubacki are just some of the names who made The Games.

The Crimson gridders opened the '70s with two wins, took two in the middle and closed out with last year's amazing 22-7 upset in New Haven. Yale took the only shutout, a 35-0 laugher in 1973, and outscored Harvard 205-161 over the ten-year period.

And now, to The Games:

November 21, 1970: It's the last play of the game. Harvard has the ball, protecting a slim 14-10 lead. Crimson quarterback Eric Crone takes the snap, and for some still undetermined reason, runs back into his own end zone. Lucky for him, he holds onto the ball as he is mobbed by hundreds of Harvard fans and the Yale defensive line, scoring a safety for the Bulldogs rather than a touchdown. Harvard squeaks by, 14-12, and Crone picks up a nickname.

November 22, 1971: Harvard, the underdog, cruises to a 28-2 halftime lead on the basis of an 8-of-12, 143-yard two-touchdown performance from Crone and the excellent running of halfback Teddy DeMars. The Crimson wins going away, 35-16. The defensive backfield intercepts four Yale aerials. Yale finishes its season at 4-5. There are tears in New Haven.

November 25, 1972: DeMars breaks away for an 86-yd. touchdown run in the first five minutes. Harvard jumps out to a 17-0 lead after only 18 minutes and is in command, 17-6, at halftime. Yale hasn't won in Harvard Stadium since 1960. But...Dick Jauron rushes for a total of 182 yards and two touchdowns, boosting the Bulldogs to a 28-17 come-from-behind win. It's Crone's first loss to a Yale team. Some Yalies steal the Harvard Band's big drum. The bands and cheerleaders of the respective sides clash at midfield. This is college.

November 24, 1973: Harvard strolls into New Haven with a 7-2 record and a shot at the Ivy League title. The Crimson crawls back to Cambridge with a 7-3 record and a shot in the back. The Bulldogs laugh all the way to the end zone, 35-0, their biggest margin of victory in the series since they won 54-0 in 1957. Yale sets records for The Game, including most first downs (28), most rushing yardage (395) and total offense (523). Crimson ace receiver Pat McInally is held to only three receptions. There are tears in Cambridge.

November 23, 1974: This time it's Yale doing the strolling, entering the game with an 8-0 record and 11 straight victories. Harvard can tie the Elis for the Ivy title with a win, but things look bad. The Crimson, trailing 16-14 with five minutes to go, gains possession on its own nine-yard line and starts driving. And driving. And driving. There are 15 seconds left, the ball on the Yale one. Crimson QB Milt Holt sweeps around left end, diving over the goal line under a crowd of Yale tacklers. The Crimson wins, 21-16, and Holt is and running back Ken Hill, who paced Yale to an average of more than 23 points per game.

Harvard had to its credit a six-game losing streak which it had snapped only the week before against hapless Penn, and the incredible loss of five QBs, two to academic troubles and three to injuries.

The Las Vegas pundits set the spread at Yale by 13-and-a-half.

But when the Crimson gridders emerged from the tunnel that runs from the locker rooms into the Yale Bowl, they did so with a galvanized spirit that few would have considered even remotely possible given their record.

"All season long we knew we could do it," said team captain Mike Brown. He added that it was others who needed to be shown.

Behind first-string signal-caller Burke St. John, who had recently returned to action following a season-opener knee injury that his doctors thought might sideline him for the year, the Crimson assumed its battle stations before 72,000 spectators and did what no other team had managed against Yale.

For starters, they took the kick-off on the 26 and marched 74 yards to paydirt with fullback Jon Hollingsworth plunging the final four yds. in the face of an Eli defense that had not yielded a single point in the first quarter all season.

Tack on to that Dave Cody's extra point, and two Eli drives frustrated by a fired-up Crimson defense, hitherto considered lackluster. New Haven was wondering.

Then the gridders put together a nine-play, 70-yd. drive that culminated with St. John hitting running back Jim Callinan in the endzone. Before the half expired, the Crimson defense buckled down on an impenetrable goal line stand which started with Yale at first and goal on the four, and Peter Coppinger intercepted a wayward Rogan pass. Yale was unconscious at the half, the score 13-0.

Multiflex wizard Joe Restic's game plan was working as perhaps he only knew it could. By foregoing the services of stellar split end Rich Horner, who was on the verge of going down in the books as the second-greatest receiver in Harvard history, and instead utilizing previously unknown quantities of Callinan and Hollingsworth, Restic befuddled the Elis.

When it opened up the second half with a convincing TD drive engineered by alternate QB Dennis Dunn, Yale looked as though it might effect some "return to normalcy." But the stonewalling Crimson defense shut Yale down for the rest of the game.

Harvard tallied its other scores in the fourth quarter. A Dave Cody field goal padded the gridders' lead by three. When Rogan fumbled at mid-field, St. John maneuvered the squad downfield and appropriately sneaked in with the final score.

Coppinger snagged an Eli pass minutes later to halt Yale's last-gasp effort, and the stands--the Harvard side that is--erupted in a frenzy. Fans poured down onto the field and soon toppled the uprights as the most astonishing Harvard performance since the 29-29 "victory" of 1968 came to an end