‘The Game’ is third-longest matchup in college football history

The Crimson of Harvard University and the Bulldogs of Yale University will meet on the football field for the 139th time on Saturday morning at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut.

Saturday’s meeting between the two Ivy schools is scheduled to get underway at 11 a.m. (CST) and will be aired on ESPNU.

Harvard enters the 139th edition of ‘The Game’ with an 8-1 overall record and sitting atop the Ivy League standings at 5-1. Yale comes in with a 6-3 overall record this season and is second behind its rival in the Ivy League standings at 4-2.

The Harvard-Yale rivalry is the third-longest matchup between two teams in college football history. The rivalry games between Lehigh and Lafayette (158) and Yale and Princeton (145) are just ahead on the list of longest football meetings between two teams. Yale took the 145th meeting with Princeton last Saturday by a 36-28 margin in two overtimes, while the Lehigh-Lafayette matchup is also scheduled to take place Saturday at 11 a.m. (CST) on ESPN+ at Goodman Stadium in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

In the Harvard-Yale rivalry, Yale leads the series 69-61-8. In the last two meetings, both teams have come away victorious with Harvard winning the 2021 contest by a 34-31 decision and Yale winning last year’s game by a 19-14 margin.

The first seven meetings in the series did not feature touchdowns being recorded as scores, as it is now, with only goals on kicks being listed as the only points that were counted toward the finishing outcome.

The first meeting took place November 13, 1875, at Hamilton Park in New Haven, Connecticut with Harvard winning by a 4-0 margin (Harvard made four goals and two touchdowns).

There have been a total of nine meetings end in a tie, but the 1881 contest, which ended in a 0-0 tie, was listed as a Yale win due to a safeties rule during that time. The last time the series ended in a tie was 1968 - a 29-29 deadlock at Harvard Stadium.

The 1968 tie, which saw Harvard score 16 points in the final 42 seconds, inspired The Harvard Crimson to print the logically impossible “Harvard Beats Yale, 29–29” headline. This headline was later used as the title for a 2008 documentary ‘About this Game,’ directed by Kevin Rafferty.

In the first seven contests, each team came away with a 3-3-1 record with Yale winning the first two meetings in 1875 and 1876. The first tie came in the 1879 meeting at Yale.

The 1881 game ended in a 0-0 tie, but was listed as a Yale win, as the rule back then was if a game ended in a tie and one team had four or more safeties than the other, the win would be awarded to that team.

The first 11 meetings were played at seven different sites: Hamilton Park in New Haven, Connecticut (1875, 1876, 1879, 1881), South End Grounds in Boston, Massachusetts (1878, 1880), Holmes Field in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1882), Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan, New York (1883, 1887), Yale Field in New Haven, Connecticut (1884), and Jarvis Field in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1886).

The rivalry game was played at Hampden Park in Springfield, Massachusetts from 1891-1894 and has also been played at historic Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts in 2018.

From 1897-1942, the site of the yearly rivalry game alternated between the two schools with Harvard serving as host in odd years and Yale serving as host in even years. The alternation between sites was changed following the 1945 contest.

The 1945 battle between the two rivals should have been played at Harvard, but was played at Yale when the game was added to the end of Yale’s regular-season schedule, which had been finalized before Harvard decided to resume its football program following WWII.

Because of that circumstance, the site alternation between the two schools was switched to Yale hosting during odd years and Harvard hosting during even years.

The rivalry game has also been featured on ESPN’s College Gameday pre-game show in 2014 with legendary former coach Lee Corso picking Yale as the winner. (Harvard defeated Yale 31-24.)

The largest margin of victory in the rivalry was 54 points in 1957 at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut - a 54-0 Yale win.

Harvard holds the longest winning streak in the series at nine games, defeating its rival in consecutive meetings from 2007-2015. (Yale ended the streak in 2016 with a 21-14 win at Harvard.)

Yale’s longest winning streak in the series is eight games (1880-1884, 1886-1887, 1889).

Since 1875, the only times the two Ivy schools did not meet on the football field were 1877, 1885 (Harvard banned football that year), 1888, 1895, 1896 (rivlary was suspended for two years due to violent 1894 game), 1917, 1918 (both teams suspended football due to WWI), 1943, and 1944 (Harvard suspended football due to WWII).

For the past 77 years, Harvard and Yale have battled each other in the final regular-season contest for both schools with the only cancellation being 2020 when the Ivy League canceled entire 2020 season due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 1963 game was scheduled to take place on November 23, but was postponed to November 30 following the assasination of President John F. Kennedy, who was a Harvard Class of 1940 graduate and was scheduled to be in attendance following his visit to Dallas.

The first overtime game in the series came in 2005 in New Haven, which Harvard won 30-24 in three overtimes. Only other overtime game in the series happened in 2019, which Yale won 50-43 in two overtimes.

The 2019 contest, which was also played at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, saw the second half delayed by more than one hour due to a small group of protesters holding a sit-in at midfield.

Below is an excerpt from the Harvard-Yale football rivalry Wikipedia page about the 2019 second-half delay. Halftime began at 1:40 p.m., but the start of the third quarter was delayed when a small group of protesters holding a sit-in at midfield were soon joined by more than 500 spectators, including students and alumni from Harvard and Yale. Among the causes being protested, the media coverage focused most on the calls for the two universities to divest from fossil fuel holdings and Puerto Rican debt. Play resumed a just over an hour later after security escorted out the 42 individuals who refused to leave.

Along with the ESPN College Gameday coverage, the 2014 contest also featured the first time African-American athletes (Yale WR Deon Randall and Harvard DB Norm Hayes) represented each school as captains at the opening coin toss.