The Game

Whenever anyone at Yale says "The Game," they mean the Harvard-Yale football game, which this year took place on Saturday, April 19th, 2011. I said I would meet the law graduate students there, but I had the wrong starting time. I arrived after the second half had started. I missed the announcement of the players, the kick-off, and the half-time bands. The game itself was one of the worst in the school's history. Harvard beat Yale 45-7. The Bulldog fans were quite bored in the second half.

The real drama was off the field, unfortunately. A 30-yr-old woman from Massachusetts (not a student) was killed and two others were injured when a U-Haul truck carrying beer plowed into them at the tailgate party before the game.

There was even more drama involving the Yale football team. In the week prior to the game, Yale's quarterback, Patrick Witt, released a statement declaring that he would be playing in The Game. This was significant, because it meant that he would not go to Atlanta that weekend for the Rhodes Scholar interview(s). In January the New York Times reported that earlier in the term he had been the subject of an informal complaint by a female student for sexual assault. That process had resolved itself with a meeting of all parties before the faculty officers. Another student, however, informed the Rhodes Trust committee of the informal complaint. They asked Yale to "back" Witt, or not, as a candidate for the Rhodes, with a new letter. It remains unclear as to whether Witt had already decided not to play before he heard of this request, as he claims, or whether he heard of this request and decided to withdraw from the Rhodes competition, as people have inferred from materials released by the Rhodes Trust committee.

As if this was not enough drama for one game of football, the New York Times had reported in an article before the game that Yale's football coach, Tom Williams, had lied on his résumé about being a candidate for the Rhodes when he was an undergraduate at Stanford in 1992. Yale investigated the story, and the result was that Williams stepped down as coach on December 21. The fact that he had been unable to give Yale a victory in The Game was not cited as a reason for his resignation, although, as the New York Times subsequently reported, his coaching in 2009 had been faulted.