Every year at The Game, there's always The Jackass who takes The Pregame so seriously, he never makes it to, let alone remembers, The Game itself.

This year, it looks like some students are skipping The Game again, only this time it's deliberate. Now that Yale won't be subsidizing the $60 round-trip bus ride to Cambridge, and Harvard won't be tacitly condoning reckless inebriation, Elis are trying to get psyched about this weekend's match against Princeton instead. Not one of The eight tailgate spaces set aside for Yale at The Harvard-Yale game has been taken, according to The Crimson. All this predicts a lackluster game -- at this point, The team may not even bother to show.

This just in from Princeton:

From: [redacted]
To: ivygate@gmail.com
Subject: bizarre princeton tradition

so apparently if princeton football wins against both harvard and yale (hence being ivy champs) the school celebrates by having a huge bonfire on Cannon Green, in which students are allowed to throw in wooden school furniture/property.  all sanctioned by the administration.  school-sanctioned vandalism?  i guess they got too much money to spend...

anyways, this came up b/c they won against harvard and the yale game is this weekend.  hasn't happened since 1995 apparently.

i just started my master's here, so this is all news to me and slightly frightening.  

Can anyone confirm? 

At least the people calling for this guy's resignation have a coach with a passing interest in winning games and retaining his players. Saturday's battle of wits between Columbia's football coach Norries Wilson and Harvard's Tim Murphy left us wondering if this Toothpaste Sandwich Crazy Bowl had a corporate sponsor.

Harvard's Tim Murphy had homefield and did his best to squander this mental chess match, but ultimately failed in his attempt to alienate his entire roster. Liam O'Hagan, the quarterback Murphy benched sans explanation for the first, oh, five games, played just fine in his personal home opener, completing 16 of 26 passes for 181 yards and one touchdown. Senior wide receiver Keegan Toci, of course, did not play, due to being kicked off the team for his explusion drunk driving assault charge opinions.

But Murphy was no match for Wilson, who will see Murphy his roster alienation ante and raise him by also despising points and yards. The Lions mounted a rushing attack of negative 14 yards on the afternoon, prompting Wilson to really come down hard on his offensive unit: "I thought our offense probably played the best game they played all year," Wilson told the Spec. "I know they turned the ball over four times, but I think they're coming along."

Coming along indeed, especially when your philosophy is don't score. In the fourth quarter, Lions' place kicker Jon Rocholl booted a 40-yard field goal, but a personal foul on Harvard gave Wilson a narrow window of opportunity to take the points away from his team. Wilson seized on it and declined the made field goal, and the Lions were able to capitalize on this opportunity to not score. All it took was an illegal block and a missed field goal on the second attempt, and Wilson's 24-7 defeat at the hands of comparative genius Murphy was complete.

Note: Harvard's running back Clifton Dawson (120 yards, 2 TD) came up just 57 yards shy of breaking Ed Marinaro of Cornell's all-time Ivy rushing record, and is poised to break it this Saturday at Penn. This will be one less reason to cover Cornell.

Quick, who are the only two coaches in Penn football history to win 100 games?

If you live on a street named after a tree, that's an easy one. The first is George W. Woodruff ("The guy who was Teddy Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior?" you ask. The same!), who won 124 games for the Quakers from 1892 to 1901 and was elected into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1963.

The other is current coach Al Bagnoli, who is 103-36 in his 15 years on the sidelines of Franklin Field.

But if Daily Pennsylvanian columnist Josh Hirsch (along with a growing number of Penn alums) gets his way, Bagnoli's days may be numbered. Why? Because he lost two straight years to ... wait for it ... Brown! 

Is this why Penn is so good at sports? Because they don't tolerate even a little losing? The Ivy League has always been a safe haven for underperforming coaches. Exhibit A: Harvard men's basketball coach Frank Sullivan, who is somehow the longest tenured coach in Ivy League basketball despite never winning a title and boasting a league record of 166-229. Canning Bagnoli would hardly be deserved, but it might keep Penn on top.

Don't worry Bags, if you do get fired it won't be that bad. You'll have even more time to work on your amazing tan [NSFW].

One of the most memorable moments in Columbia football came in 1985, after Jim Garrett's first game as head coach. The Lions led Harvard 17-0, but wound up losing in embarrassing fashion, 49-17. In his post-game conference, Garrett went on a tirade and famously called his players "drug-addicted losers." He was fired after one winless season. Now, 21 years later, another first-year Columbia head coach has followed with an equally unprofessional tirade during a post-game press conference. After the Lions lost to Penn 16-0 on Saturday, a Spectator reporter asked coach Norries Wilson about the team's inconsistency on offense. Wilson unleashed his rage for more than six minutes. Listen here, and read Josh Hirsch's dead-on column in the DP for a full recap:
powered by ODEO "I realize that some of my comments may have been interpreted as critical of Ivy League football game officials," Wilson said in a statement yesterday. Hey Norries, ya think? In case you didn't hear the tape...

It's much harder to play when you're playing 11 on 18. I'm not allowed to comment on officiating, so I won't say that we got held. What we should do is hire the Penn O-Line coach to teach our guys how to tackle, because their O-Line does a great job of tackling. And on the touchdown, if you want me to send you the clip, then I'll send you the clip where our defensive end was tackled, and nobody made the call.

In the same statement, Columbia A.D. Dianne Murphy said that the school had apologized to the officials, to Penn, and to the other six Ivy League schools. Conspicuously absent from that list: the 19-year-old Spec reporter Wilson blew up at. "If we handed you a pen, none of you could draw up a coverage or a front, so I'm tired of hearing about it," Wilson says on the tape. "If you want to come coaching, come coaching if you know so much about football. They work their butts off, so you all can complain about how bad they are. So you can write your negative articles about them every week." We certainly have no idea how to draw up a coverage, Nor. But you've scored one touchdown in two Ivy games. So regardless, we feel pretty secure writing that you're a jerk.

A Dartmouth tipster writes in with news from Hanover...

Not two weeks ago, Dartmouth sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma was put on "extended probation" -- and 11 of its members arrested -- after it was discovered that becoming a sister at the vaunted house entailed participating in an initiation process that can only be described as "blackout rollerskating." (The official response from Kappa prez Whitney Dickerson '07: "Kappa Kappa Gamma opposes inappropriate or illegal use of alcohol by its members." Ms. Dickerson is evidently fine with inappropriate use of alcohol so long as imbibers are fastened to little plastic wheelies.)

Last weekend -- Homecom-ing! -- 15 additional Big Greeners were arrested on charges ranging from public intoxication to trespassing.* The number doesn't even take into account the additional 46 "incidents" reported to campus Safety and Security. If you do the math, this means that in the past fortnight, almost two percent of the student body been busted for running afoul of some town law or campus ordinance. Well done, young men and women of Dartmouth! Don't let asshole alums come up and tell you that "no one rages here anymore," as asshole alums are wont to do.

*A brief aside on trespassing: It was, until 1986, standard practice for members of the freshman class to form a boozy human wave and "rush the field" during the Homecoming football game. In that fateful year, a few innocent bystanders -- one of whom may or may not have been in a wheelchair -- happened to get trampled, and the fun-killers who populate the upper ranks of the school's administration put the kibosh on the whole thing by threatening to slap any scramblers with a trespassing charge. Old traditions die hard at Dartmouth, and now drunk upperclassmen simply hurl invectives at drunk freshman to take matters into their own hands. Sometimes they do:

The Harvard football team must be really good -- because beating reigning Ivy champ Brown on Saturday 38-21 with this bullshit in the locker room is truly a feat.

We just got off the phone with Keegan Toci's dad, and the guy is pissed. With good reason. Toci, you'll recall, is the senior wide receiver that head coach Tim Murphy fired earlier this month after the team's annual Skit Night. The sketches at these things can get pretty raunchy -- was Toci behind the one that implied a player had given Murphy a blowjob? No, that was running back Clifton Dawson, who's still on the team. KeeTo's big crime? Um ... listing 20 reasons the team would never move up to Division I-A. God, Keeg, what were you thinking?

Coach Murphy's reaction was swift and insane. In a special meeting in front of the entire team, he canned Toci for his "mean-spirited attack." That's when things totally turned into that locker room scene at the end of Varsity Blues, the Boston Globe reports:

"After Murphy announced Toci's dismissal, he asked the 110-member team whether it supported his position. An uneasy silence ensued, then one player after another rose from his seat until about 20 stood in protest, with others apparently poised to follow, before Murphy abruptly ended the meeting and left the room, according to one witness."

Coach Murphy may well be out of control. Remember that he also benched Liam O'Hagan, the starting quarterback, for half the season and has never told anyone why.

Now Toci is appealing to the university for reinstatement. He didn't answer our calls, but his dad did: "'Unacceptably malicious?' This is coming from a man who called a team meeting and called my son out and humiliated him in front of 104 peers -- said he was 'a cancer to the team' and said he 'needed to be removed' -- this man is saying that what my son did was unacceptably malicious?

"Harvard's 'Academic and Community Standards' says that the central value at the university is the protection of free speech and inquiry. Apparently Murphy hasn't read that. ... We're not going to let this go until Keegan's name is cleared."

(Murphy and athletics director Bob Scalise didn't return calls we made late Sunday to their offices. They've never gotten back to David Toci, either.)

Normally, it's pretty easy to find out what the latest Harvard football player did to get suspended or thrown off the team. When head coach Tim Murphy told seniors Danny Lane and James Velissaris in May that they'd be sitting out the season opener, it was because they got in a dust-up with a campus shuttle bus driver. When captain Matt Thomas was canned indefinitely in June, tout Cambridge knew it was over his ugly blowup at his girlfriend. And last week, we hear wide receiver Keegan Toci was dismissed from the team for insulting Coach Murphy at a traditional skit night for the football team. (And obviously, the pileup of discipline cases has the locker room divided -- some team members say privately that this time, Murphy went too far.)

At least the facts are in the open on those incidents. In the biggest case of all, no one -- not even his teammates -- seems to know what prompted Murphy in June to bench starting quarterback Liam O'Hagan for five games. The starting quarterback! Half the season! One coach reportedly told his players O'Hagan was fortunate to only miss that much -- leading some to say the QB actually benefited from Thomas's assault-and-battery antics, because the team could not handle another high-profile embarrassment.

The off-field drama didn't have much effect on the scoreboard Saturday, with the Crimson thumping Holy Cross 31-14. But the team's backup quarterback blew out his knee, and reigning Ivy champ Brown is up next week. Murphy may be regretting his call on O'Hagan, or at least feeling some pressure to tell people what in the hell he's thinking.

What's the only factor more important to Ivy League teams than winning? Filthy nice facilities. IvyGate's secret sports correspondent reports:

With football season just around the corner, Harvard is doing what it does best: making everyone else feel poor. Their stadium will get a $5 million upgrade, including a futuristic synthetic playing surface and lights on the stadium's exterior. They're also installing a seasonal "bubble" to protect willowy Harvardians from the mean ol' wind. (Though it won't keep out these guys.)

Up in Dartmouth Country, they're laying new turf on Memorial Field. Congrats, guys! Only a few weight room renovations and a new field house to go until respectability.

Columbia is trying to keep up, but as usual they're being ... frugal. Apparently unable to hire a handyman, the school declared "Pride Day" and -- Lord, that we were making this up -- had the soccer teams reseed the field themselves.

Now, before any of the commenters get clucking about how much money is spent on athletics, I feel obligated to note a little something down in Texas called The Godzillatron. When Penn installs the largest high-definition video screen on planet Earth ("nearly as wide as the field itself") at Franklin Field, then you're allowed to complain.

OMG Columbia we
totally have an idea
for how you can
pay for expansion!