Harvard beats Yale 29-29

Keith Raffel, author of Dot Dead: A Silicon Valley mystery, takes us back to the days when Ivy league football was for real—and the classic Harvard/Yale showdown of 1968.

Name a team undefeated in the Rose Bowl. 

USC? 

Nope. 

Michigan.  Ohio State? 

Nope.  Nope. 

How about Harvard—which played once and thumped Oregon 7-6 on New Year’s Day, 1920?

Here’s the point: way back, when college programs weren’t merely farms teams for the NFL, Ivy League football counted.  Harvard and Yale have won 25 national championships between them.  The last gasp of terrific national-level football in the Ivy League was 1968, my freshman year at Harvard. 

The two teams were mirror images.  The Yale Bulldogs, nationally ranked in the AP poll, were an offensive juggernaut directed by quarterback Brian Dowling, who had led Yale to 16 straight wins.  (Dowling went on to cultural immortality as the model for B.D. in classmate Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip.) 

Calvin Hill, who might be better known today as the father of NBA star Grant Hill, starred at running back.  To give you an idea of how good Hill was—the year after graduation he won the NFL’s rookie of the year award over O.J. Simpson. 

Coming into the battle with Harvard, Yale was averaging 36 points a game, which, if memory serves, was tops in the country.

The Harvard Crimson had no big stars and was expected to finish last in the Ivies (Wait:  the team did have a future star in guard Tommy Lee Jones, but he won that Oscar for his exploits on the silver screen, not the gridiron.)  In Harvard’s first game against Holy Cross, the team scratched out a lucky 27-20 win. 

The team vastly improved—especially defensively—as the season rolled along.  If memory serves, Harvard had the first or second stingiest defense in the country, giving up only seven points a game coming into the showdown with Yale.

So on November 23, 1968 at Harvard Stadium, what did we have?  The country’s top offense against a top defense.  The irresistible force against the immovable object. 

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