Can someone explain to me what it’s like at the Harvard Yale football game? I intend to go soon, and I’d love to hear what the exciting rivalry is like at the event.
As a parent who never attended Harvard or Yale, but has two children there, the “big game” seems to be one huge drinkfest that is enjoyed by current student’s and alumni. I can understand the allure of it from a student’s perspective, but I don’t get the 50/60/70/80 year-old alumni, most of whom are men, reliving their youth and getting plastered at 10 am only to have their wives be the designated drivers. I attended one Harvard-Yale game with a group of 50-60 year old Harvard alumni and that was enough for me. Everyone was more interesting in drinking than watching football. It makes absolutely no sense to me!
My kids go to the game and have a blast (but without the drunkenness). They get it. I get it. Did you go to a sports school? We all graduated from a high school with a famous sports tradition. When you go to that sort of school, this kind of thing makes more sense. If you want to talk about old guys getting together to relive their glory days, you should come to alumni events at our high school. We recently had a gala celebration for the 1964-1965 basketball team. It was the fiftieth anniversary of that year’s team.
However, at Harvard, it seems that The Game is the exception, not the rule. Other than The Game, most folks don’t seem to care a lot about sports at Harvard.
I didn’t go to a big sports high school, nor did my kids. I agree the Harvard-Yale game is the exception, not the rule.
I was at this years game and it was so much fun! Yes there was tailgating and yes a lot of students and alumni were drinking. It was not unlike the tailgating scene at an NFL game.
The tradition is fantastic, Cambridge was packed with Yale and Harvard students. Both teams were very good they were playing for first place and it was the last game of the season.
ESPN game day was there, there were many lead changes through out the game and Harvard scored the winning Touchdown in the last couple of minutes of the game on a very long pass and acrobatic catch by the receiver. It was all you could ask for in a college football game.
The tradition is what it is all about which is intensified by the academic rivalry.
I don’t intend to miss any of these games going forward.
Every game at UW-Madison, as good as we are these days (damn you if you mention 59-0 or the damn loss to duke in April… we were better but stopped playing…), is a big game. The Badgers’ historical rivals are the Minnesota Golden Gophers (great in so many fields…), the Iowa Hawkeyes (#1 in creative writing), the Illinois Fighting Illini (very good in engineering, math, and pretty decent overall), and the northwestern wildcats (an ivy in the midwest - not nearly as good as the other big ten schools at the masters or PhD levels, but great at undergrad).
Everyone has rivals.
If you Ivy Leaguers want to bleat about football, you have the Princeton Tigers at whom to look up: they still have the most “national championships” in D1 footballl - more than Michigan, or Alabama, or Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Ohio State, Miami or USC.
So get behind those Tigers from Princeton, because championship-wise, you’ll be there forever. hehe
I am not a rich man, but if among my progeny emerges a highly sought specimen, I will tell him or her to go wherever he or she pleases. I will love the heck out of him or her regardless of all of this, of course, but I will do my best to give good advice. And if he or she is accepted to HYPSM, i’ll be like, “Yes. Just pick.” Chicago, the same. Northwestern too. Because then he or she will be close to home. Same with Carleton, Grinnell (hippie alert - real world adjustment necessary) and Macalester. Beloit and Lawrence even. If the kid(s) want to go out east to schools not aforementioned, I will watn them against buying homes, because batsh1t crazy people buying homes they had no business buying led us into the real estate crash. it was not the banks - that is a copout. caveat emptor.
^ Drink a big glass of water and go lie down bucky. 
HY game is a pretty cool experience. That game WAS football for many years prior to the NFL. It’s a chance for alums to reconnect and current Harvard or Yale students to party with their peers from the ‘rival’ school. This isn’t the SEC, so nobody gets too bent out of shape about the outcome.
Harvard vs. Yale is fun, but as a former Crimson athlete I consider the “Big Game” to include any event vs. Yale. Victory was always sweet. :-). Fun to play and fun to watch whether field hockey, ice hockey, basketball, etc.
Might it be that, under normal circumstances, it’s challenging to get decked-out in crimson or Bulldog blue/white and profess your school’s superiority (and denigrate another school) without sounding like a pretentious d-bag? Maybe part of the appeal of the Harvard/Yale rivalry is that it affords a “safe zone” to show school spirit.
Rivalries have existed since the beginning of time. It is tradition, it is fun, it is for bragging rights in an area that means nothing. As a country boy with blue collar roots whose daughter is at Harvard I did and do find some of rivalry things amusing. Is some of it pretentious, yes to my way of thinking absolutely, but I am not offended by it.
Certain things are funny even though they are pretentious. Williams putting a minus sign next to Amherst’s big A on an athletic field, The Bowdoin student body yelling “Safety School” at the student body of Colby I believe at a home hockey game.
Army vs Navy, Ohio State vs University of Michigan, Red Sox vs Yankees, it just adds a bit more emotion and fun to the experience. It is only obnoxious if someone thinks these things really matter.
The H-Y game this year gave my son the opportunity to sleep on the floor of a H student friend’s dorm room and remind him that, no matter the outcome of the game, Y students have a better social life. It was all in good fun; what’s the harm?
Rivalry games are great fun everywhere, no question about it, and the Harvard-Yale game is not really very different. There are more current and former Senators, Representatives, Governors, and Cabinet secretaries in the stands than tends to be true elsewhere. The festivities surrounding the game tend to remind one of the similarities between the schools, rather than the differences (and I suspect that’s true everywhere). At Harvard and Yale, the glee clubs had a joint concert and, among other things, sang some of each other’s fight songs. Regurge01 has a point I haven’t heard before, but it strikes a chord.
The actual quality of football at a Harvard-Yale game? It’s fine . . . as long as you have never seen good college teams play. When I was at Yale, I went to every home football game, and every Harvard-Yale game no matter where it was, and I loved every one of them, win or lose. One week into law school, I went to a game between Stanford and Oklahoma, and was stunned to realize what crappy football I had been watching for years. It’s not a crappy overall experience, though, when you know and care about the people on the fields, and the teams are evenly matched. Harvard and Yale do, however, have more, and better, football songs than other colleges, even those who stole theirs from Yale [cough Oklahoma cough]. (There are a few colleges whose main fight song is first rate – like Michigan – but they don’t have a lot of bench strength, and Cole Porter didn’t go there.)
Treasured memories from Harvard-Yale games: An all-Barry-White party at Harvard, before I had any idea Barry White was cool. Meeting Benazir Bhutto at breakfast. Soccer games in the morning between the Yale residential college intramural champion (my college three out of four years) and the Harvard house intramural champion. Being sober enough after the game not to fall asleep or get sick, once.