Injuring Harvard's Title Chances

If you think about the nature of football, it's not surprising that the game leads to many injuries. Anytime you get 22 overgrown men charging at each other on a confined field, something--or someone--has got to give.

And this year, that someone has almost invariably been wearing a Crimson uniform. Harvard has been hit hard by injuries this season: in last week's game at Princeton alone, four Crimson starters--Tom Yohe, Joe Connolly, Jim Morris and Hal Watson--were felled by injury.

"Injuries seem to run in cycles," Dick Emerson, Harvard's head football trainer, said. "You have good years and you have bad years."

"Last weekend was an unusual game from the point of view of number of players lost during the game," Emerson continued.

Nowhere has the injury spree hit Harvard harder than at the quarterback position, where three players--Yohe, David Landau and Bill Koehler--have all been forced to leave games due to injury.

Yohe was sidelined in the Princeton game by a pulled groin and will probably lose his starting job for today, when the gridders take on Brown.

"Our quarterbacks run more than some other particular teams do," Emerson said. "There is a greater chance of getting injured when you're carrying the ball more."

Connolly's injury, a bruised kidney, may be the most costly for the Crimson. The senior split end was leading Harvard in receptions, yards, and receiving TDs when he went down. Connolly will miss today's game, and his status for the rest of the season is unknown.

Offensive guard Watson certainly wins the award for oddest injury of the year. The senior lineman was running onto the field for the second half at Princeton when he tripped over a section of the runway--an area where long jump and high jump events are staged--and injured his ankle. Watson's status for today's game is unknown.

"Injuries for the most part are not the fault of the individual or the program or of the care they receive," Emerson said. "They are simply the nature of the beast."

Yes, it's still early, but the race may be over. Not the race for the 1986 NFL play-offs or the race for the 1992 Summer Olympics, but the 1986 Sports Cube Predicts race.

For the past several years, The Crimson's football staff has been engaged in a game prediction contest which appears every football Saturday (see box, below). And in this, the seventh week of the season, Bob Cunha's three-game lead over me may be insurmountable.

So what.

Does the Harvard community at large really watch this race as closely as the current leader seems to think? I mean, are there--in dorm rooms all over Cambridge--magnetic standings boards on which our readers eagerly track the Sports Cube Predicts race?

Do you all hurry home from the Stadium Saturday afternoon and call Sportsphone to see how Bob, Geoff and myself have fared? Do you recompute Bob's magic number to clinch the title before hitting the Saturday night parties?

I didn't think so.

Anyway, I will win next year.

This week's picks:

Harvard 31, Brown 13: Landau starts at quarterback for the Crimson and gets injured on the first play from scrimmage. Yohe comes in, engineers several scoring drives, and catches a sudden case of the measles. Third-stringer Koehler hits six straight passes before being forced to leave the game for an appendectomy. Buddy Boyda comes in and....

Coach Restic showed the world in the Columbia game that Harvard had eight quarterbacks on the active varsity roster. Little did he know he would have to use all of them in regular duty later on.

Yale 45, Dartmouth 35: The Dartmouth sports information department sent out its men's basketball press guide this week. The hoop season is a month away. That says a lot about the Big Green gridders.

Princeton 22, Penn 21: This stunning upset will happen. I don't know how, but it will.

Villanova 70, Columbia 3: To be perfectly honest, I don't know a single thing about the Villanova football team. This game is still a lock to predict.

Cornell 27, Bucknell 21: Cornell is turning into the Big Red Machine of the 1980s. Unfortunately, nobody named Morgan, Perez, Bench, or Rose plays on the team.