MovieChat Forums > Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 (2008) Discussion > What's the big deal?

What's the big deal?

posted 12 years ago by dddmi7-1
2 replies | jump to latest

I guess I'm completely biased. What's the big deal? Barely any of the players can hold onto the football when being barely brushed by an opponent. I've seen much more effort at local high school games in the midwest. I'm assuming it's true today, many "players" in the ivy league wouldn't make the practice squads of competitive NCAA teams. Of course the exception here would be Calvin Hill who ended up having a hall of fame career with the Cowboys. It's almost like a glory days look at us, we had a football conference sort of documentary. Pretty sad by conventional football standards. Gary Trudeau put a few of us in his cartoon, again: big deal! Sad, pathetic, and entirely self-serving! I can see where people in Massachusetts and Connecticut would be interested in this. 1968, As I recall, was the year the Detroit Tigers beat the St. Louis Cardinals in the MLB World Series. The following year Bo Schembechler beat Woody Hayes UofM vs. OSU, in their first match. Those are memorable events from the late 60s in sports. Yale vs Harvard, or Harvard vs Yale?

ESPN 30 at 30? Now, the SMU debacle is worthy of a documentary. But Harvard and Yale playing a pickup football game in front of 14,000 people? Barely a blip on the sports radar in my opinion.

Oh, and the lame interview with Tommy Lee Jones about how humorous Al Gore was at Harvard? Now that was so pathetic I don't know where to start. He played a song with his new touchtone phone? I guess that's humorous for the Father of the Internet and the champion of global warming/cooling!

[–] johnston.scot 12 years ago

I think you're displaying a bit of ignorance here.

Into the '70s, Ivy League football teams were actually fairly competitive. As late as 1981, Yale beat Navy. That Navy team went to the Liberty Bowl, where they very nearly beat, you got it: Ohio State. Yale's margin of victory was actually bigger than OSU's.

That was in 1981. In 1968, the quality of play was considerably closer. It changed over time due to a combination of factors, including
- the split of Division I into IA and IAA in 1978 (the Ivy League winding up in the latter);
- de-emphasis of athletics by Ivy League schools;
- the opposite at the big football schools, which now play in what amounts to a professional* league whose teams have a nominal, and largely financial, connection to the colleges which effectively own them;
- the preceding being heavily driven by the aftermath of the NCAA v. Board of Regents of the Univ. of Oklahoma case, which allowed colleges to run their football programs for the purpose of raking in big TV dollars; and
- large economic changes, which make the tuition at a no-athletic-scholarship Ivy League school look rather hefty.

None of that had really happened in 1968.
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*Except that the players aren't paid a salary, at least not openly.

[–] papadanof4 9 years ago

Sad that the OP totally missed "everything". YOU MISSED IT!!