<p>What is the team like? How Hard is it to make the team. How Good is it overall. Also any other info you may have on it, other than anything that has to do with yale. Thanks.</p>
<p>Harvard has good Football. It is a 1 AA team (or Championship Subdivision if you prefer). It is consistently a factor in the Ivy league (co-champion with Brown this year). Although Ivy league teams don not participate in the 1-AA tournament, Harvard does well against leagues that do participate. I saw a poll that rated Harvard as 20th this year in 1-AA. </p>
<p>A century ago Harvard was among the top few programs in the country (Harvard, Yale , Princeton were originally labeled the big three based on football, rather than academic prowess). Obviously this is not true today, but the team is still competitive. The difference between a good 1-A team (BC for instance) and Harvard is elite speed and great size. However, Harvard does have some very skilled players. I would say if you are from a fair to good high school program, you would have little chance of making the team if you were not the best player on your team. If you come from a very good program (one that produces many college prospects) you will not make the team unless you were a valuable player on your squad.</p>
<p>Harvard plays in a beautiful and historic stadium that holds slightly more than 30,000 for a game. Unfortunately, these days it is less than half filled for most games. The exceptions, are a home game against Yale (this will be packed) and new opening night game against Brown or Holy Cross (both schools are relatively close to Cambridge 40 or 50 some odd miles away) which has drawn over 20,000 fans the past 2 years (first 2 night games in school history). Harvard usually ranks second in the Ivy League in attendance (Yale is first) and somewhere around the top 10 in 1-AA.</p>
<p>I hope this helps answer your question.</p>
<p>I don't recommend trying to walk on to the varsity football team. For one, the chances you'll be anything more than a waterboy are small if you weren't already semi-recruitable as a HS senior. For another, football's probably the most demanding sport at any level of competition in terms of mind, body, and time. You would have to either pick an easy major or take a hit to your GPA, unless you're one of those insane kids.</p>
<p>If you still wanna play football there's a yearly turkey bowl in November for intramurals. Or you can try for JV, which this poster is considering doing next year.</p>
<p>There is a starting center in the NFL who has gone to the Pro Bowl multiple times who played Harvard football. Not everyone in the Ivy League plays up to that level, but not everyone in the SEC gets a professional contract either. There are some very good football players in the Ivy League. </p>
<p>Over the last eight years: 64 wins, 15 losses, two perfect seasons, and four Ivy League championships.</p>
<p>Matt Birk, represent!</p>
<p>They seem to be pretty successful, but not all that good. I guess I come from an area with very good football recruits, but I've played against alot of guys that were much better then the squad I saw play this year.</p>
<p>Harvard is rated #117 in the Sagarin</a> Index.</p>
<p>That would be #15 in I-AA (out of 125 I-AA programs).</p>
<p>Which puts Harvard ahead of such schools as Indiana, Washington, SMU, Army, Ohio University and Tulane, to name a few. Harvard plays a very good brand of football with real college students.</p>
<p>There were over 110 players on Harvard's football roster in 2008 -- more than 1/8 of all male undergraduates. I'm sure many of them got little or no playing time, and did not travel to away games. But I would bet anything that a significant percentage of them were walk-ons. Half? At least?</p>
<p>Quite a few must have been walk-ons.</p>
<p>I tried to find out the number of walk-on football players in the Ivy League, and while I don't know the exact answer, I believe that the number is few. Each year, each school has approx 30 football recruits (it is not exactly 30, but the 4-year period is a max of 120, so if you have fewer than 30 one year, you may have more than 30 the next, assuming that the 4-year period is max of 120). </p>
<p>Now, we have to assume that maybe not all recruits (even after matriculation) will stay on with the team for the whole 4 years. So, there may be a few walk-ons, but I doubt that there are many.</p>
<p>
[quote]
There were over 110 players on Harvard's football roster in 2008 -- more than 1/8 of all male undergraduates.
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</p>
<p>The most recent preceding reply caused me to reread this. JHS, are you confusing a one-year figure with a four-year figure?</p>
<p>Yup, guilty. Pretty stupid, huh? "More than 1/32 of all male undergraduates" doesn't sound so impressive.</p>
<p>Where does the 30 football recruits information come from? DI rules? I don't think that's what the Ivies do. I would be very surprised to learn that there were 30 actual recruits per class. I don't know a whole lot about it, but I would have guessed 10-15, and then maybe another 50 where the coach says "I need at least 20 of these kids accepted".</p>
<p>Back in the day, there were very few actually recruited football players on Ivy League teams. The number was certainly lower than 15 per class. And many walk-ons. Of course, if the walk-ons weren't any good, it was dispiriting to hang around acting as blocking dummies, so lots of them quit. But there were plenty who started, too.</p>
<p>JHS,</p>
<p>I saw a blog by Bruce Wood, who has followed Dartmouth's football program for 15 years, and he mentioned the 30 number, and I verified it through Googling. For his blog on June 5, 2008, he listed the names of all 2008 recruits by the 8 schools. </p>
<p>The name of his blog is biggreenalertblog at blogspot</p>
<p>Harvard was 37th in the Sagarin ratings at the end of the 2004 season: [url=<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/sports/sagarin/fbt04.htm%5DUSATODAY.com%5B/url">http://www.usatoday.com/sports/sagarin/fbt04.htm]USATODAY.com[/url</a>]</p>
<p>They had a hell of a team - but I don't think they actually would have held their own against Minnesota, NC State, etc. But who knows!</p>
<p>My favorite H football story is that when they ruled the football world in 1903, they built Harvard Stadium - the nation's first reinforced concrete stadium and an engineering marvel of its time. By 1906, football had become so brutal that Pres. Teddy Roosevelt threatened to outlaw it if the football powers couldn't find a way to make it safer. The conference of schools that convened first proposed widening the field so that the game could spread out laterally. Harvard, with its brand-new concrete stadium designed around a standard-width football field, threatened to walk out in protest. Since that wasn't going to fly, the next option was to try to spread the game out vertically. The forward pass entered the rule books the following year. If not for Harvard's stubbornness over their concrete stadium, Larry Fitzgerald and Kurt Warner might be out of work!</p>
<p>I had the opportunity to interact with the Harvard football team and staff in 2008. There could not be a nicer group of people to work with. Those of you on the team may remember little Zachary? The four-year-old autistic waterboy for the team in 2008. He has released a children's book called, I'M WITH THE TEAM, My Summer With The Harvard Football Team. It is available at The COOP, Harvard Bookstore, Curious George Bookstore, and around.</p>
<p>Gadad, I think they were playing rugby (not football) before the forward pass was implemented. I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure football w/o a QB most resembles the sport of Rugby League (as opposed to the more popular sport of Rugby Union).</p>