AROUND THE IVIES: Harvard-Yale Will Be A Statement Game

At what point does rock truly hit bottom?

For the Yale football program, that’s not an easy question to answer.

Things started turning dramatically downhill last season, when Bulldogs head coach Tom Williams—apparently jealous over the attention his quarterback, Patrick Witt, was getting over his Rhodes interview vs. The Game “dilemma”—decided to state that he too had faced a similar decision during his time as an undergraduate at Stanford.

There was only one problem: Tom Williams is about as trustworthy as a New Haven street after sundown, and the New York Times later reported he actually hadn’t been a Rhodes candidate at all.

Not sure what was going through Williams’ head here. Did he not realize the Rhodes Committee maintained basic standards of record-keeping or that the Times employed fact-checkers? Was he actually referring to the “Roads Scholarship,” a $500 offer by Pat the Digital Vagabond for any talented traveler/writer/photographer to go to the Burning Man Festival? Or, like Leonard in Memento, could he just not remember anything before a certain date?

No matter Williams’ explanation, nobody was surprised by his dreadful decision-making skills. This was the same guy who just two years earlier thought it would be a good idea to call a fake punt on a 4th-and-22 from his own 25-yard line with a three-point lead and 2:25 to go in the 2010 edition of The Game, helping the Crimson pull off a dramatic comeback win.

If you Google “Harvard Yale fake punt,” terms like “ghastly fake punt faux pas,” “idiocy in the Ivy,” and “the absolute worst coaching decision ever” come up in titles of articles on the first three pages alone, which pretty much sums things up. Being surprised by “resume-gate” after that decision would have been like being surprised by the Petraeus affair if two years ago he had decided to randomly invade Sweden.

But the strange ménage à trois between Yale football, the Times, and the Rhodes committee was not over yet, as the following week the paper reported that the Rhodes Trust had learned of sexual assault accusations against Witt and had decided to suspend his own application unless Yale re-endorsed him.

Taking a page out of Williams ol’ “Pinocchio Playbook,” Witt told the media he had withdrawn his Rhodes application on his own, when in reality the committee had already taken the liberty of doing that for him.

Here again, Google tells the whole story. When you search “Patrick Witt Yale,” articles come up entitled “Sex Smears and the Rule of Law at Yale,” “Pat Witt and Yale’s Disastrous Failure,” “Yale QB’s Deception over Rhodes Scholarship is an Embarrassment,” “Yale’s Unforgiveable Silence on Patrick Witt,” and, worst of all, “Tom Williams (American football) Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” So yeah, you guys might want to try out Bing for a bit.

Anyway, Williams resigned and Witt went on to work for the Romney campaign, which to nobody’s surprise apparently found the ability to grossly misstate the truth to be a positive job qualification. No word on what Witt plans to do next; perhaps Yale alum and fellow truth-slayer Fareed Zakaria is looking for an intern.

Meanwhile, after making the worst pair of calls since the ones Mel Gibson made to his girlfriend, Williams was unable to find even a coordinator job. Instead, he became the safeties coach at UTEP. Upon hiring Williams, Miners head coach Mike Price said that “The fact that he was head coach at Yale brings status and prestige to our program,” which is kind of like Trek hiring Lance Armstrong as its spokesperson and saying “The fact that he was a professional cyclist brings status and prestige to our program.”

In September, the El Paso Times reported that Williams gave the team a passionate speech to motivate it before its game at Wisconsin. The Miners lost that contest and five of its next six after that, proving once again that Tom Williams is about as good a motivator as the “You Can Do It” guy from ‘The Waterboy.’

Of course, both Williams and Witt were just following in the treasured Yale legacy of destroying one’s reputation. The trend began in 1692, when Elihu Yale was removed as President of Madras on corruption charges. In 1999, American Heritage magazine rated Elihu the most overrated philanthropist in American history, which remains the only time to this day anything related to Yale College ranks first on a “best in America” list.

Back in the present, the Bulldogs, as usual desperately trying to be Harvard, hired Crimson assistant Tony Reno to be their next coach.

But before the season had even begun, Reno’s captain, Will McHale, reportedly punched Yale Daily News sportswriter Marc Beck in the face during a fight at Toad’s and fled the scene. According to a witness, the attack came after McHale threw a drink at a friend of Beck’s. Beck was left with 14 stitches and Yale was left without a captain for the first time in its long history. As a sportswriter who generally prefers not to be punched in the face by temperamental linebackers, I’ll avoid making a McHale joke here. But based on his drink-throwing skills, it sounds like he would have been the best quarterback on the Bulldogs roster this season.

Instead, Reno chose to go with freshman Eric Williams, who’s neck-and-neck right now with Hurricane Sandy as the biggest natural disaster of the year. The rookie—seemingly as confused about what he was supposed to do at quarterback as David was after the dentist—is tied for first in the country with 2.0 interceptions per game, and his 1:2.3 TD:INT ratio is by far the worst in the nation.

Unfortunately, Reno didn’t have many other options to replace him, because preseason backup quarterback John Whitelaw quit the team after realizing that losing the starting job to Williams was like losing the 100 meter dash to a drunken, blind turtle.

Since then, the freshman has gotten hurt twice, as have his two backups, leaving the Bulldogs to turn to a three wide receiver set—two wideouts at wide receiver, and one under center. Despite some moderate success by Henry Furman last week, Yale of course lost, just as it has in seven of its nine games this season. The Bulldogs couldn’t even beat Columbia, which is akin to losing a game of Trivial Pursuit to Brick Tamland.

This Saturday, Yale travels to Harvard Stadium. They say in rivalry games that anything can happen, but sorry Forrest—sometimes in life you really do know what you’re going to get. And on Saturday, you’re going to get a Harvard win, and probably a Crimson blowout.

To put it simply, if you think the Bulldogs are going to win this game, you probably also think that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are going to happily grow old together, that the YouTube comments section is an intelligent source of commentary on anything, and that signing a long-term contact with the Florida Marlins is a good idea.

As Stefon from Weekend Update would say if Yale football was New York’s hottest club, “this club has everything—college football’s worst starting quarterback, historically bad play-calling, bloody sportswriters, decrepit bulldogs, H.C.V.-positive coaches, resufakes, quarterwide receiverbacks, a city that’s the love child of a dumpster and a trash can, a Jumbled Folsom Prison Blues...”

Seth Meyers would interrupt, “What’s a Jumbled Folsom Prison Blues?”

And Stefon would say, “it’s that thing where, instead of shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die, Tim Murphy beats a man named Reno just to watch him cry.”

Because that’s what will happen tomorrow. And finally, when the Jumbled Folsom Prison Blues occurs, Yale will have at long last hit rock bottom.

COLUMBIA AT BROWN

There are 100 quarterbacks in the FCS who qualify for the league’s passer rating title. Columbia’s Sean Brackett ranks dead last. A word of advice to all coaches out there: in the future, when your quarterback is having a worse statistical season than Eric Williams (who’s 95th in that category), he probably shouldn’t be playing enough minutes to qualify for any statistical titles. I bet even Tom Williams knows that.

Pick: Brown 24, Columbia 13

PENN AT CORNELL

Like non-Jewish fans of Harvard Hillel, Cornell is coming off a major letdown this week after it was stunningly upset by the Lions. The Big Red was picked third in the Ivy preseason poll, but it has just two conference wins.

Meanwhile, by upsetting Harvard last Saturday, Penn became the first Ivy team to win a share of the Ivy title with at least four losses since E.T. was released in theaters—you know, when Drew Barrymore was still a cute little kid and not a 13-year-old with a cocaine addition. Kudos to the Quakers, who were the first squad to outplay the Crimson all season. Penn was more physical, dominated the trenches, and neutralized Harvard’s greatest strengths in what was truly an all-around impressive victory.

Here’s the problem: last Saturday, Penn lost starting quarterback Billy Ragone to a gruesome dislocated ankle. This week, the Quakers will be forced to start Andrew Holland, and Penn badly struggles to move the ball with Holland under center. Whether or not Jeff Mathews plays—he left last week’s game with an injury—it’s tough to see a Holland-led Penn offense going into Ithaca and outscoring Cornell.

Pick: Cornell 28, Penn 24

DARTMOUTH AT PRINCETON

The Tigers are still alive for a split title, which would be a great accomplishment for the team that was picked last in the Ivy preseason poll. Despite the Big Green’s solid year, it’s tough to see Princeton losing at home with so much potentially at stake.

Pick: Princeton 24, Dartmouth 20

YALE AT HARVARD

Simply put, as Harvard center Jack Holuba put it last year after the Crimson’s 45-7 thrashing of the Bulldogs, The Game has become “a little boring.” Harvard has won 10 of the last 11 meetings between the two squads, making this about as much of a rivalry as Don Draper vs. Pete Campbell.

In a recent interview with the YDN, Bulldogs running back Mordecai Cargill said Yale’s strategy this weekend would be “the same game plan we had all year.” If that’s the case, let’s just say that on Saturday nobody should plan any revelrous contests where you drink every time Harvard scores.

(Side note: the Cargill interviewer identified Yale as “we” in one of her questions. Apparently all of the YDN contributors who had any sense of journalistic integrity left after last year’s Witt cover-up have been successfully wiped off the face of the earth by reporter hunter Will McHale).

The Bulldogs could be without its top offensive threat, halfback Tyler Varga, and so things could get ugly early. In fact, the biggest question heading into this game is really not who will win, but rather whether Murphy will pull his starters when he’s up big in the third quarter, or leave them in to make Reno and his assistants feel worse about their decisions to leave Cambridge than they already do (if that’s even possible).

And it’s not just me saying that; for the first time in a while Yale hasn’t even been able to sell its own allocation of student tickets to The Game. As one Eli told the YDN, “It just didn’t seem worth it, since we are probably going to lose.” At least you’re self-aware, Yale. I’ll give you that.

On the whole, if all of the above results hold, we’re looking at a three-way tie for the Ivy crown—certainly not what Harvard would have wanted, nor what anybody would have expected a month ago, but it’s something, at least.

Pick: Harvard 52, Yale 0

—Staff writer Scott A. Sherman can be reached at ssherman13@college.harvard.edu.