The Harvard–Yale football rivalry, also known as The Game, is an American college football match between the Crimson football team of Harvard University and the Bulldogs football team of Yale University.
Though the winner does not take possession of a physical prize, the matchup is usually considered the most important and anticipated game of the year for both teams, regardless of their season records. The Game is scheduled annually as the last contest of the year for both teams. As the Ivy League did not participate in postseason play for football until 2025, The Game used to be the final scheduled outing for both teams' graduating seniors. Some years, the rivalry carries the additional significance of deciding the Ivy League championship.
The weekend of The Game includes more than just the varsity matchup; the respective Yale residential college football teams compete against "sister" Harvard house teams the day before. The Game is third among most-played NCAA Division I football rivalries. Yale leads the series 72–61–8.
"Harvard and Yale generally duke it out in the academic arena", but geographic proximity, the history of Yale's founding and social competition between the respective student and alumni bodies animate the athletic rivalry.
Former Harvard football head coach Joe Restic, who held the position for 23 seasons, quipped regarding his relationship with former Yale football head coach and National Football Foundation/College Football Hall of Fame member Carm Cozza, who held the position for 32 seasons: "Each year, we're friends for 364 days and rivals for one."
The signature Harvard fight song, "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard", names Yale in the famous final stanza. The song is sung in the Harvard football locker room after a victory regardless of the opponent. The song is among six Harvard fight songs that mention Yale. "Down the Field" is Yale's signature fight song and Harvard is the named foe. The song is among five that mention Harvard. Two of the songs, "Bingo, That's the Lingo" and "Goodnight, Harvard", have been sung substituting Princeton for Harvard when appropriate. Cole Porter composed the former and Douglas Moore the latter.
The football rivalry is among the most admired rivalries on the American athletic scene. The schools and the rivalry established the template for American college football. The Game is the most prominent athletic contest between the schools and has accounted for many of either rival's best-publicized athletic feats. Sports Illustrated (College Edition) rated the athletic rivalry sixth-best among American athletic collegiate rivalries behind, in order, Alabama–Auburn, Duke–North Carolina, UCLA–USC, Army–Navy and Cal–Stanford. The football rivalry was ranked 8th among Athlon Sports's top 25 rivalries in the history of college football.
Significance
"A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard" from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville exemplifies public fascination beyond athletics with both institutions. Twelve past presidents of the United States have earned an undergraduate or professional degree from one of the universities. The list includes: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, George Herbert Walker Bush, George Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford, Rutherford B. Hayes, John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.
Theodore Roosevelt, a fan of football, is considered often the savior of football in the early 20th century. Roosevelt, who attended the second Harvard–Yale game as a first year student at Harvard College in 1876, has been quoted, "In life as in football, the principle to follow is hit the line hard". Roosevelt suggested turn-of-the-century "manly virtues" were taught and reinforced on the gridiron.
Walter Camp, captain of the 1878 and 1879 Yale football teams, is considered often "the father" of American football and its most ardent popularizer. Camp attended almost every important rule committee meeting for the sport to his death in 1925 while napping between sessions of the Intercollegiate Football Rule Committee. Camp attended a rules meeting for the sport when he was a student at Hopkins School in New Haven, Connecticut. Camp wrote professionally about the sport, popularizing All-American teams with Caspar Whitney for This Week's Sports magazine. Eventually Collier's magazine featured the annual selections.
The rivalry has been noted in American athletic and popular culture. The University of Mississippi's first football team, organized by Alexander Bondurant, adopted Yale blue and crimson for team colors in 1893. Newspapers printed Bull Tales, Garry Trudeau's collegiate precursor to Doonesbury published in the Yale Daily News, often featuring Brian Dowling and Calvin Hill, in the run-up to the 1968 Yale vs. Harvard football game. "Burns, Baby Burns", the fourth episode in the eighth season of The Simpsons, depicts Mr. Burns returning to Springfield, Massachusetts after attending The Game.
Thomas G. Bergin, better known for commentary on The Divine Comedy and longtime Sterling Professor of Romance languages at Yale University, authored The Game: The Harvard Yale Football Rivalry 1875 – 1983, published in 1984.
Owen Johnson's Dink Stover, Gilbert Patten's Frank Merriwell and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tom Buchanan played football for Yale.
Historical significance
The first contest was held in 1875, two years after the inaugural Princeton – Yale football contest. Harvard athlete Nathaniel Curtis challenged Yale's captain, William Arnold to a rugby-style game. The next season Curtis was captain. He took one look at Walter Camp, then only 156 pounds, and told Yale captain Gene Baker "You don't mean to let that child play, do you? ... He will get hurt."
The Harvard-Yale series is the third most played rivalry in collegiate football history, including 139 games since 1875. In the series, Yale has 70 wins, Harvard has 61 wins, and the teams have tied eight times. Only two collegiate rivalries have played more often than Harvard-Yale. Princeton and Yale have played 143 times since 1873, and Lafayette College and Lehigh University (known simply as "The Rivalry"), have played the most, 157 games, dating back to 1884.
Yale and Harvard have played major roles in advancing and shaping intercollegiate athletics. The first American intercollegiate sporting event took place August 3, 1852 after Yale invited Harvard to a race of crews. The first intercollegiate contests in ice hockey, soccer or five-on-five basketball contests featured teams from Harvard and Yale. Many now century-old aspects of American football were introduced by Harvard or Yale students or athletes. Yale introduced cheerleading at athletic events in 1890. Harvard introduced spring practice to collegiate football March 14, 1889. Yalies sang "Hold the Fort" during the 1892 Harvard game, considered the first public performance of a collegiate "fight song".
Years later, representatives from Harvard, Yale and Princeton were summoned to the White House October 9, 1905, by Theodore Roosevelt to discuss reforms to mitigate unnecessarily violent, unsportsmanlike play and minimize resultant fatalities and injuries in football. Roosevelt sought reform of rules to quell misgivings about the sport he admired. The New York Times, Harper's, McClure's and The Nation advocated reform if not abolishment of the sport. The era's progressives, muckrakers, university faculties and presidents—particularly at Harvard, led by its president, Charles W. Eliot and NYU, led by its president Henry MacCracken—and the general public had misgivings about the sport's safety and place in higher and secondary school education. Walter Camp, Bill Reid, and Arthur T. Hillebrand attended the meeting, representing respectively Yale, Harvard and Princeton.
The "Grim Reaper Smiles on the Goalposts" cartoon, published December 3, 1905, in the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune depicting the Grim Reaper sitting on the crossbar of a goalpost overlooking a mound of uniformed dead bodies exhibited how the press presented the problem. November 25 Union College halfback Harold Moore was knocked unconscious in a game versus NYU. Moore, age 19, died of a cerebral hemorrhage six hours later. MacCracken called a meeting of university leaders to suggest protective gear be worn by the athletes. Reformers requested deemphasis or suspension of the sport. The press reported that 18 athletes, 15 of whom were high school students, died from football-related injuries during the 1905 season. The era has been described as the "first concussion crisis" for the sport.
A meeting convened December 28, 1905, with 62 schools represented to appoint a rules committee. January 12 the American Football Rules Committee met. March 31 the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States was established, the corporate forerunner to the NCAA.
Rules were changed: the flying wedge was banned, the neutral zone was created, and the distance increased to ten yards from five yards for a first down.
Council of Ivy Group Presidents
Decades later the eight universities that administer athletic programs and competition under the auspices of the Council of Ivy Group Presidents, better known as the Ivy League, reiterated reforms
rooted in requests made during the series of meetings. Agreements among the athletics departments at Harvard, Yale and Princeton in 1906, 1916 (the "Three Presidents Agreements" on eligibility), and a revision of that agreement in 1923 have been considered precursors to the Ivy Group Agreement, each agreement addressing amateurism and college football.
The Ivy Group Agreement, adopted in 1945, states for football, "the players be truly representative of the student body and not comprised of a group of special recruited and trained athletes". Harvard president Nathan Pusey and Yale president A. Whitney Griswold collaborated closely toward the eventual implementation of the Ivy League in 1954 with the "Agreement" extended to all sports. Round-robin play started in 1956 for football among programs representing Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University.
Game results
† The 1881 game is recognized by both teams as a Yale victory due to four fewer safeties.
‡ Hosted ESPN's College Gameday.
All games since 1956 are Ivy League contests. The teams did not play in 2020 due to the Ivy League cancelling the 2020 football season because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Regular season overtime was introduced for Division I-AA in 1981 and was first used in the 2005 game.
Stadiums
The contests are hosted in stadiums listed on the U.S. National Register of Historical Places and are U.S. National Historic Landmarks. They are among the oldest gridiron football stadiums.
Yale Bowl
Designs for the Rose Bowl and Michigan Stadium were influenced by the Yale Bowl Stadium. When the Bowl was built by Charles Ferry in 1914,
the Colosseum of Pompeii in Italy was the only other known structure in the world engineered by digging a hole then using the displaced dirt to build the surrounding wall or berm. The Bowl had the largest seating capacity for a stadium in the world upon completion of construction. Head coach Carm Cozza likened the feeling of running through the tunnel onto the Bowl to a gladiator entering the arena.
The Yale Bowl, completed before World War I, presaged a collegiate stadium-building blitz associated with the game's popularity in the Roaring Twenties. The modern era of college football, with radio broadcasts coast to coast of gridiron exploits by Red Grange or the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, began soon after the construction of stadiums that rivaled the Yale Bowl's seating capacity. The Rose Bowl venue, its annual post-season contest, and the plethora of venues and post-season football contests known as "bowls" has been attributed to the Yale Bowl.
Walter Camp had been the long-tenured treasurer of the Yale Athletic Union, precursor to the later professional athletic department administration. Yale swim athlete and team manager Robert Moses—acknowledged later in life as the power broker of urban planning and a "master builder"—had disagreements with Camp regarding the Athletic Union's treasury. Moses wrote editorials in two campus papers and lobbied Camp and the administration for larger sums for the minor sports (every sport save football, rowing and hockey) from the fund swelled by football receipts. Camp conceded little. Camp's big idea was to fund eventually the Yale Bowl Stadium.
The Walter Camp Memorial Arch greets visitors to the Walter Camp Fields on Derby Avenue in front of the Bowl. A seven-person committee, including Yale Law School Dean Robert Hutchins, who would later abolish a storied football program at University of Chicago, raised money for the arch from a variety of sources, including 224 colleges and universities, and 279 high schools and prep schools.
Harvard Stadium
Harvard Stadium was built in 1903. The 25th Anniversary Reunion gift by the Harvard Class of 1879 funded the project.
The stadium is the nation's oldest permanent concrete structure dedicated to intercollegiate athletics. The stadium mimics the Panathenaic Stadium. Henry Lee Higginson, founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and first president of the Harvard Club of Boston, donated the land, known as Soldier's Field, for a memorial to Harvard men who were killed during the American Civil War.
Camp accommodated Harvard on the issue of widening the playing field to "open up" play from the almost perpetual rugby scrum that characterized the sport. The rules reform movement, which gained impetus after the 1905 meeting at the White House, demanded action.
The present standardized playing field width was as wide as could be accommodated in Harvard Stadium, the first football stadium constructed with reinforced concrete and a pioneering execution in the construction of large structures. The forward pass was adopted instead of an even wider field. The rule change is mentioned often as the most important in the history of the sport. John Heisman championed the forward pass and is credited with lobbying successfully influential members of the IIAUS American Football Rules Committee to adopt the change.
Other venues
Although the rivalry is predominantly held at either school's home stadiums, it has taken place at neutral venues as well.