AROUND THE IVIES: Harvard To Take On Quakers for Crown

UPDATED: Nov. 9, 2012, at 10:57 p.m.

It’s happening again.

Whoa, calm yourselves, my dear cheerleaders. No, Columbia’s not coming back.

Instead, I’m referring to Harvard and Penn playing for a share of the Ivy League title in the season’s penultimate week, which has happened 11 times in the past 13 seasons. Since the start of the millennium, one of the two programs has taken the conference championship in every year but two.

In other words, Harvard vs. Penn is like Lindsay Lohan at a rehab facility—we’ve been down this road many times before. But this year, the stakes are especially high on both sides. A victory tomorrow would allow Harvard to tie the Quakers with 15 Ivy League titles and would move Tim Murphy within one championship of Al Bagnoli (whose last name, you can’t disagree, sounds like it would be a delicious breakfast pastry).

It’s been a strange season for Penn football, which went 0-3 in non-conference play, even losing to William & Mary (who is 1-7 against everyone else). The Quakers needed a last-minute drive to squeak by Columbia, which is kind of like needing a harness to successfully climb up that hill where the Teletubbies live. And then it lost to Yale, which is like losing a tackle football game to the Teletubbies.

But in the past two weeks, Penn looked much more like the team that was picked second in the Ancient Eight preseason poll. It has hit its stride just in time, knocking off Brown and winning a huge game at Princeton to set itself up for a chance at the title.

Of course, had Penn just beaten the Bulldogs, it still would’ve controlled its destiny in the Ivy race going into the final week even with a loss to Harvard.

But the Crimson too has a defeat on its schedule that, like Clint Eastwood’s thought process, has become increasingly incomprehensible over time. Had Harvard topped Princeton three weeks ago, a win tomorrow would have guaranteed it a perfect 10-0 season (Yale’s on the schedule next week). That would have put the Crimson squarely in the discussion of the greatest Ivy football team of the modern era (which, of course, is a discussion nobody actually has, but that’s not the point). Harvard can still win an outright title, but its rank among the all-time greats has taken an unsalvageable hit.

So despite suffering a monumental hiccup as startling as that time Kramer went on that crazy racist rant, here both teams are. Penn comes in fresh off its impressive victory in Jersey, while Harvard barely survived a squeaker over Columbia last week. And when I say squeaker, I mean that in the Ali-Liston, Reagan-Mondale, Stalin-Trotsky sense.

Little known fact: the Lions’ loss was so pathetic that President Obama changed “Columbia” back to “Occidental College” on his resume. Columbia was competitive for a shorter time than the Tim Pawlenty presidential campaign, and even Karl Rove was willing to call the game by the end of the first quarter. By then, it was readily clear that Columbia was about as ready for the match as Mitt Romney was to concede Tuesday night, because the Harvard offense was so unstoppable that even Todd Akin admitted there was no way to shut that thing down. Things got so bad for the Lions that even Paul Ryan felt pity.

What was that? You want to relive more classic 2012 election moments through my witty analogies to Columbia’s patheticness? Well why didn’t you say so?

Big Bird really isn’t happy about the election results, because he’s dead. That’s right, after watching Columbia last weekend, the poor guy decided just to hang himself, thinking there was no hope left in the world. Nate Silver said afterwards that Columbia’s likeliness of losing was so high it broke his statistical models. Jim Lehrer didn’t have to ask what the differences were between the two teams because they were so blatantly obvious. Rick Perry was even able to remember the three things Columbia did wrong—not being incredibly awful at football, not being unbelievably terrible at football, and not being horrifically dreadful at football. After watching the game, Newt Gingrich proposed that the Lions’ players be the first ones to be sent to his moon colony with the requirement that they never return.

There, is that enough? No? You much prefer political satire to the wealth of 69 jokes I had at my disposal but probably wouldn’t have been allowed to print? Fine, if you insist.

After watching the Lions, Rick Santorum is somehow now even more strongly against encouraging people to go to college. America’s happy warrior Joe Biden is no longer laughing, because Columbia was the biggest piece of mularkey he had ever seen. The Lions made Richard Mourdock stop believing in God’s will, and after the game Pete Mangurian started asking his assistants to provide him with binders full of women because the men on his team were so bad. Herman Cain came up with a 9-9-9 plan to save the Lions before realizing that fixing the team was going to be much more challenging than fixing the tax code. Fox News even admitted Columbia football was a far more pressing disaster than the Benghazi attacks.

Alright, I’m done. I know that will disappoint many of you, but we must keep moving forward (boom!).

PRINCETON AT YALE

Tony Reno walks into Toad’s to drink away his sorrows over leaving the Harvard football program for the disaster that is Yale. He orders a beer.

“That’s $4.75,” says the bartender.

Reno gives him a five dollar bill, which the bartender stows away.

“Excuse me, I’d like a quarter back,” Reno says.

“Sorry,” the bartender replies. “There are none left on campus.”

The nearby drummer plays ba-dum-tss as the bartender gives Reno his change, but the reality is that the coach still has nobody left under center. Injuries to Yale’s top three quarterbacks forced the Bulldogs to play a running back (Tyler Varga) and a wide receiver (Henry Furman) at QB two weeks ago. Last week, much to the delight of the Brown defense, opening day starter Eric Williams made his heroic return. Williams promptly completed half as many passes to the opposing team (two) as to his own receivers (four, out of 15 passes) before getting re-injured and turning the QB job back over to Furman. Yale football, ladies and gentlemen!

In seven games this year, Williams has now thrown 14 interceptions, the second-most in the country (and the guy ahead of him has played two more games and also thrown 26 touchdowns; Williams has thrown six). Out of the 100 FCS quarterbacks eligible to qualify, the freshman comes in at 95th in passing efficiency (Colton Chapple, by the way, is second). So congrats, Yale! Your QB has finally made the 95th percentile in something. If there’s a Rhodes Scholarship for bad quarterbacking, you won’t have to worry about letting that one slip away this year.

But honestly, I shouldn’t be too hard on Williams because none of this is really his fault. Ivy quarterbacks rarely succeed until they become upperclassmen (the difference between Chapple as a sophomore—when Murphy couldn’t even trust him to pass—and Chapple as a senior is exponential, for example). Simply put, Williams was about as ready to be Yale’s starting quarterback as Napoleon’s brother was to run Spain or Snookie was to be a parent.

This would not have been a problem had junior John Whitelaw not quit the team in the preseason after losing his job to Williams, which leaves us with three questions:

1) Just how bad was John Whitelaw at football if he lost a starting job to Eric Williams?

2) Who regrets leaving their respective position more, Whitelaw or Reno?

3) How on earth did Penn manage to lose to this team?

Pick: Princeton 31, Yale 7

CORNELL AT COLUMBIA

Jay-Z vs. Nas. Pizza vs. Bagels. Dodgers vs. Yankees. Aaron Burr vs Alexander Hamilton. Spiderman: Turn off the Dark vs. critics.

Over the years, there have been hundreds of great New York rivalries. This is not one of them. Cornell is bad at football, and Columbia is worse.

But by the way, Columbia, I owe you an apology. Last week, I wrote about 1,000 words on how terrible you were, but to your credit, you proved me wrong. Looking back at last week’s column, I’m embarrassed to see how poorly I assessed your team. I picked a 42-0 Harvard victory, and that turned out to only be the score at halftime! Boy, what was I thinking? Somehow, as far as Lions go, you managed to hold up worse on Saturday than Mufasa did against Scar and the Cowardly Lion did against life.

So what went wrong? When writing, I heeded the famous advice of Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder: “You never go full Koenig.” Simply put, I was too nice, and I ended up overrating you. But it won’t happen again. Next time, Columbia, I’ll go full Koenig. Because you’re right, you really are that bad.

Pick: Cornell 56, Columbia 17

BROWN AT DARTMOUTH

Someone call The Jeffersons, because the Big Green is moving on up! Yes, Dartmouth continued its recent-year ascent on the Ivy League ladder with a very impressive 31-14 win over the Big Red in Ithaca last week (by the way, how can colors be big?). Dominick Pierre, who has turned into a star, collected 154 yards on the ground while Dartmouth’s defense made Jeff Mathews seem more out of his element than Donnie in The Big Lebowski.

The Big Green now sits in third place in the Ancient Eight and its five wins in eight games this season has equaled the amount its basketball program won in 30 last year.

So kudos to you, Dartmouth. But I think Brown—whose only Ivy losses have come to Harvard, Princeton, and Good Penn—is a slightly better team.

Pick: Brown 24, Dartmouth 21

HARVARD AT PENN

Simply put, it’s Harvard’s year.

And just like in last year’s de-facto Ivy title game between the two teams, the Crimson will show it on the field.

So prepare yourself, Tim Murphy. The Gatorade shower is coming.

Pick: Harvard 35, Penn 13

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