Another Blowout in New Haven

After 302 years of being second-best, Yalies should be used to taking what Harvard gives them—cooperatively and without complaint. But just hours before their resounding defeat at last weekend’s Game, it seems a few sons of New Haven decided to set-up a backup plan. They didn’t, of course, scramble to conjure a new gridiron strategy; nor, for that matter, did they try do anything that might have legitimately helped their skimpy chances against Harvard’s inexorable might.

No—after back-to-back Harvard victories, someone in that Connecticut abattoir of the mind probably decided that the best way to prevent another Bulldog loss was to incite the home crowd with a late-game spectacle. So the unknown marauders planted a package filled with fireworks on the Yale Bowl’s dingy scoreboard. And when New Haven’s ever-busy police found the suspicious box—several hours before it could have been deployed—they locked down the field and the surrounding streets, causing traffic delays for Harvardian and Yalie alums both.

And right on time, The Game went on to its inevitable conclusion. And at this point, we can only guess who was responsible for the half-baked scheme, but it has Eli painted all over it. Clearly, the failed display—like a botched college application for admission—sprang from a feeble mind. And though Harvard has its eccentrics, Yale has made being pathologically desperate an art. Indeed, a centuries-old inferiority complex pervades the daily existence of the Yalie, a fascinating iteration of humanity that combines decently high SAT scores with an irrational penchant for mediocrity.

Along with two-bit pyrotechnics, the package also contained a banner that read “No School on Monday”—an obvious attack on Harvard’s Thanksgiving break calendar. The clumsily anti-intellectual construction stings with all the force of a soggy slice of New Haven pizza: those of us in Cambridge are hardly daunted by the prospect of three laid-back days of class at a university that isn’t Yale.

And even if the package had delivered its underwhelming payload, it’s hard to imagine its sparkle enlivening the Yale Bowl for long. When it comes down to it, Yale is a lot like the Soviet Union. And it’s not just New Haven’s corroding concrete and dirty smokestacks or the school’s blatant anti-Harvard propaganda and horrifically poor labor relations that make it that way. It’s that Yale can’t hope to compete with a real superpower, especially when its little bundle of perestroika is confiscated by a hard-line police state before the fun begins.

So, a word of advice: Yale, next time you want to do something to distract from the pain of losing to the mighty Crimson, just give up in the first place and save everyone the trouble.