126th meeting of Ivy League rivals

Location: Players Grille (Miramar), 4456 Hendricks Ave (just north of Emerson St.)  Go to the back room.

About THE GAME (HARVARD-YALE) 

The Game (always capitalized) is a name given to the football game between Harvard University and Yale University. As of 2008, the Harvard Crimson and Yale Bulldogs have met 125 times beginning in 1875, when American football was evolving from rugby. The Harvard-Yale game is played in November at the end of the football season, and the venue alternates between Harvard Stadium and the Yale Bowl. As of 2008, Yale leads the series 65-52-8. The 2009 Game will take place on November 21, 2009.

The Game is the oldest continuing rivalry and also the third-most-played rivalry game in college football history, after The Rivalry between Lehigh-Lafayette and the Princeton-Yale game. In 2003, the rivalry was rated the sixth-best in college athletics by Sports Illustrated On Campus, after Army-Navy, Alabama-Auburn, Duke-North Carolina, UCLA-USC, and Cal-Stanford.

Story

The first meeting between the teams occurred on November 13, 1875, at Hamilton Field in New Haven. Harvard won 4-0 by scoring four touchdowns and four field goals (at the time, a touchdown merely gave the scoring team the opportunity to gain one point by converting the field goal).

The rules that governed the early years of The Game were a modified version of the rules of rugby and made the game particularly brutal. In the second half of The Game of 1892, Harvard introduced the flying wedge formation, devised by chess master Lorin F. Deland, which so devastated Yale players that it was outlawed the following season (nevertheless, Yale won 6-0). After The Game of 1894, about which newspapers reported seven players carried off the field "in dying condition," the two schools broke off all official contact including athletic competition for two years. Since resuming in 1897, The Game has been played annually except during the First and Second World Wars.

The first known reference to "The Game" occurs in an 1898 letter by former Harvard captain A. F. Holden (class of 1888) to Harvard coach Cam Forbes on the occasion of The Game being permanently moved to the end of the season ("it also makes the Yale-Harvard game the game of the season"). But capitalized reference to The Game appears to have been first made by columnist Red Smith in the late 1940s, and it first appeared on the cover of The Game program in 1960.

Yale ended a five-game losing streak against Harvard in 2006, winning 34-13. The margin of victory was the widest in the last decade for Yale. That Harvard winning streak was third longest in the history of the series, after Yale's 1902-1907 six-game winning streak and Yale's 1880-1889 eight-game winning streak. Harvard's offense was held to 13 points, the lowest of its season, and Harvard's running back Clifton Dawson gained only 60 rushing yards. Yale tied with Princeton University for the 2006 Ivy League title.

In 2007, in a match-up of teams undefeated in the Ivy League, Harvard outplayed Yale to a 37-6 victory. In 2008, Harvard (8-1) beat Yale (6-3), with a final score of 10-0.

Significance

 

Half-time festivities at The Game, Yale Bowl.

For many students and alumni of Harvard and Yale, The Game is an important event. The schools are located only a few hours' travel from one another; and, perhaps because they are among the nation's most prestigious and oldest universities, the rivalry is intense. Beating the rival is often considered more important than the team's season record. Furthermore, since Ivy League schools do not participate in post-season football games, The Game is usually the final game of the season (except for 1919, when Harvard beat Yale 3-0 and went on to the Rose Bowl, where they defeated Oregon 7-6); since most Ivy League football players do not go on to professional careers in the sport (the league does not offer athletic scholarships), it is almost always the graduating seniors' final organized game.

The Game is significant for historical reasons as one of the first football games played between U.S. colleges. The rules of The Game soon were adopted by other schools, such as Rutgers and Princeton, which had been playing soccer (i.e. Association Football) since 1869, making football the archetypal college sport. The schools that would become the Ivy League played a large part in the development of American football in the late 19th century; football's rules, conventions, and equipment, as well as elements of "atmosphere" such as the mascot and fight song, include many elements pioneered or nurtured at Harvard and Yale. For many years, The Game was also likely to determine the Ivy League championship, although recently it has been rare to find both schools enjoying a strong season simultaneously. The Game receives relatively little national attention today; most college football fans are more interested in games between larger institutions whose teams are made up of scholarship athletes, many of them bound for professional careers. The high attendance at Harvard Stadium or the Yale Bowl for the contest testify that The Game still generates interest beyond the respective campuses and alumni bodies; tickets for The Game generally sell out even in modern times when The Game is played at Harvard, as Harvard Stadium's seating capacity is less than half that of the Yale Bowl.

Notable game:  Harvard Beats Yale in 1068

 

Scoreboard November 1968 Harvard Beats Yale 29-29

In what is usually considered the best Game, in 1968, the Harvard team made a miraculous last-moment comeback, scoring 16 points in the final 42 seconds to tie a highly touted Yale squad. Yale was coming off a 16-game winning streak and its quarterback, Brian Dowling, had not lost a game he had started since the sixth grade. (Dowling was the inspiration for the character BD in Yale graduate Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury.) The tie left both teams 8-0-1 for the season, inspiring the Harvard Crimson to print the headline "Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29". [1] This headline was later used as the title for a 2008 documentary about this Game directed by Kevin Rafferty. [2] One of Harvard's offensive tackles was Tommy Lee Jones, later to find fame in Hollywood. As it turned out, this would be the final tie in the series.

Half-time at The Game in 2005, Yale Bowl

The Game has become known for the large, joint Harvard-Yale tailgate parties that run throughout The Game in the fields next to the host stadium every year. The tailgate party was even televised by ESPN in 2004. While most alumni who travel to The Game actually watch it in the stadium, most students and recent alumni treat the tailgate as their primary destination. The tailgate attracts thousands of students and has recently roused the concern of the Boston Police Department, who have cracked down on underage drinking at the student tailgates, as well as moving it further away from the stadium and reducing the space available.^[2] This is significant, since, for many students, The Game is the social apex of the year.

The Little Red Flag is a Harvard pennant which, since 1884, has been waved by Harvard's "most loyal fan" after each score by Harvard during The Game. As of 2005, the honorary position is held by William Markus of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who attends every Harvard football game.