Winning The Game, though, is more easily said than done. And then there are the ranks of seniors who will be playing the last game of their college career.
Of Dogfighting and Aerial Assaults
Not the least of those seniors is Yale quarterback Alvin Cowan, who will guide the Bulldog attack against Harvard counterpart Ryan Fitzpatrick on Saturday.
And interestingly enough, the teams of these two dynamic signal-callers have followed strangely similar paths on the way to their deceptively good seasons.
Yale got out to a fast start behind Cowan, New Haven’s own Payton Award-candidate, who led the Bulldogs to a school-record 62-28 victory over Towson in the first contest of the year. Following that game, Yale reeled off three straight wins, and the senior—over the full nine-game span to date—has been averaging 284 passing yards per game and has tossed 20 touchdowns, adding an additional seven trips to the end zone on foot.
“Yale [is] a tremendously balanced and outstanding football team. They’re good on special teams, they’re good on defense, they’re especially good on offense,” Murphy says. “[And Cowan is] not unlike Ryan Fitzpatrick—very mobile, very versatile, and he’s been a tremendous catalyst for their offensive success. You throw in a couple of outstanding running backs, a tight end that’s an NFL prospect, big wide receivers, arguably the best offensive line in the Ivy League—there’s a lot to contend with there.”
And still the similarities between the squads extend far beyond their depth charts.
Yale—like the Crimson—also lost a narrow game to Penn, the Bulldogs’ contest decided by a single overtime field goal.
Yale—like the Crimson—also edged out a scrappy Princeton team, needing one more overtime period than Harvard did to defeat the Tigers.
And finally, the Bulldogs have also struggled of late, dropping three of their last five games while the Crimson has notched three straight losses.
Indeed, if the comparable rise and precipitous falls of these two squads’ parallel paths have shown us anything, it’s that The Game is definitely going to be a competitive one—despite the absence of the aura of 2001—or even 2002—when a fortuitous Quaker loss would have still given Harvard a share of the Ivy League title.
“Obviously, we aren’t pleased with the way things have turned out,” Raftery says. “But we still are confident that we are a premier team in this league, and this nation for that matter. We know we can play with the best in [Division I-AA], and we want to go out and show that this Saturday. We really don’t need any more motivation than that.”
In the Air Tonight
Nevertheless, it’s still distressing to look back.
It’s hard for Murphy, Fitzpatrick, Dawson, Butler and Raftery—and especially all the seniors—because while they look forward to Saturday, they know that this year could have been that undefeated season they had hoped for and expected.
And The Game, in that context, could have been the ultimate way to end a career.
But there’s a reason that Harvard-Yale remains one of the premiere rivalries in all of sports. There’s a real reason that it has been the highlight for more than a century’s worth of frigid autumns.
As you step foot in dodgy New Haven, Conn. on Saturday afternoon, with thousands of your classmates around you, at least take solace in this fact.
Because if there’s anything redeeming about this contest, anything that separates Harvard-Yale from all other games of its kind, it is that on this day, The Game will be the one game that truly matters.