2. Football was at Bucknell. The Harvard football team was in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, meaning that a team which finished 2-8 last year was many, many miles away from the others, which gave them good luck.

Do I buy this theory? Nah. Heck, the gridders won 30-7 against a team that they lost to two years ago. Maybe if they had been at home, all the other teams would have won by blowouts.

3. This weekend was one of the few times that the Yale athletes got to spend time in a real city. As a result, they all went out on the town the night before and came back to the hotel real, real late and had bad hangovers. Nope, too stupid. Besides, they probably drove up on Saturday morning.

4. Yale is defined as being inferior. This is certainly the most appealing to me, because I'm a Harvard student and thus defined as being elitist. And as an elitist, nothing feels better than saying someone else is naturally inferior.

Is it true? Is Harvard just naturally superior, making these athletic contests silly jokes that Yale students don't get?

Much of the data doesn't support this. After all, our football team has an all-time losing record against the Elis, and Harvard athletes seem to think that games against Yale are big, important ones, which would tend to suggest that Yale might actually be equal with us. Perish the notion!

5. The U.S. News & World Report "rankings" were a clever ploy to build up Yale's confidence, only to have it be shattered on the athletic field. This makes a whole lot of sense. All three losses happened when Yale just didn't have enough guts to pull out the win--with their women's soccer team giving up the deciding goal with 11 seconds left, to their men's soccer and field hockey teams being utterly impotent in overtime.

So if there is any rule in place now that results in Yale losing to Harvard, it must be one with subtle effects, which are not readily apparent except when all else has been expended on the field. A false sense of school superiority might be just that thing.

And to think, all this time I was mad at that magazine. Truly, I am sorry.