Patrick Witt Knows Yale-Harvard Is More Than Just a Game

One evening last fall, Yale student Patrick Witt was studying inside his eight-man suite inside Jonathan Edwards College, his residence hall. As Witt pored over a book, one of his roommates approached and asked if he would be attending the tailgater before that Saturday's Bulldog football game.

"I'd love to, but I can't," Witt replied. "I'm on the team."

For Witt, a quarterback who spent his first two seasons playing at Nebraska, it was just another, "I don't think we're in the same conference as Kansas anymore" moments. "We'd shared a suite for a month or two by that point," Witt said. "I assumed he'd realized I was the quarterback."

Two years ago this November, Witt scored on a 16-yard touchdown run in mop-up duty during a 62-28 loss at Oklahoma. On Saturday he will take snaps in The Game, the annual Harvard-Yale rivalry that was first played in 1875. Harvard-Yale is the second-oldest continuing rivalry in college football after only Princeton-Yale (1873), the contest in which Witt led the Bulldogs (7-2) to victory just last Saturday. Witt, a history major, can appreciate his place in all of it.

"Harvard-Yale goes way beyond a football game," the 6-2 junior from Wylie, Texas, said. "These are major, world-renowned institutions going at it for bragging rights."

Witt's older brother Jeff played quarterback at Harvard, but suffered a career-ending shoulder separation his freshman year. He graduated in 2009. Patrick had Ivy League-worthy grades in high school but also a scholarship offer from the Cornhuskers and other FBS schools. "I was either going to go to Harvard or take one of these offers," Witt said.

(Harvard, by the way, has its own version of Witt on the roster in Andrew Hatch. The senior, who has missed much of the season due to a concussion-related injury, began at Harvard in 2005 and then transferred to LSU after serving a Mormon mission. He was initially the starter in Baton Rouge in 2008, suffered an injury, and then opted to return to Cambridge to finish his career and undergrad degree.)

Witt chose Lincoln. He redshirted as a freshman in 2007, then backed-up Joe Ganz in 2008, completing 6-of-8 passes and scoring on that touchdown run in Norman in spot duty. After undergoing surgery for a lateral meniscus tear in his right knee, Witt realized that he wanted to challenge himself more academically.

"I don't regret for a second going to Nebraska," said Witt, who had a 4.0 grade-point average as a finance major in Lincoln. "I wanted to scratch that itch."

Witt (pictured below) hoped to follow in his big brother's footsteps, but he learned that Harvard does not accept transfers (Hatch may have been allowed to do so since he initially attended Harvard). Instead, it was off to New Haven. Exploring the Yale campus on his first day there in the summer of 2009, Witt and his family ran across Senator Joe Lieberman.

"We took a picture with him," said Witt, for whom New Haven is a new haven. "It was another of those 'I must be at Yale' moments."

Witt's current course load includes the following classes: The Age of Hamilton and Jefferson, Third-Year French, Ancient Greek History, and Applied Physics. On Thursday morning, he handed in a 25-page paper for that first class (he even wrote it). He had been a finance major at Nebraska, but after a year or so recalled telling his brother that "if I had to do it over again, I'd be a history major."

Good fortune, in a sense, was on Witt's side. "So many of my credits from Nebraska did not transfer over to Yale that it was almost like beginning anew," Witt said. "So I changed my major to history."

Last year, Witt received his first "non-A" of his life, settling for an "A-minus" in a course entitled "Readings in American Literature."

"I wasn't too happy about that," he conceded.

What pleases Witt, whose father is a captain at Delta Airlines and whose mother is a captain at American Airlines, is the ability to soar academically. He plans on applying to be a Rhodes Scholar next year. He has written some two dozen articles for the Yale Daily News and, while it would be a disastrous career decision financially, Witt is a tenacious wordsmith. He even penned a preview column for last year's Big Game in which he confessed that he'd attended two previous Harvard-Yale games and cheered for the Crimson.

"I enjoy writing for the Yale Daily News," Witt said. "But I do tend to overextend myself at times."

As a former Big 12 quarterback playing in the FCS Ivy League, Witt, to the surprise of no one, leads the Ancient Eight in passing yards per game (252.2) and completion percentage (60.2 percent). However, Yale has lost three in a row and eight of its last nine to the Crimson.

Last year the Bulldogs led 10-7 late in the fourth quarter. Yale, facing fourth-and-22 from its own 26 and armed (legged?) with the Ivy League's most prodigious punter, lined up to punt. Then faked it.

The play gained 15 yards, but that was seven yards shy of a first down. Harvard scored the game-winning touchdown on the ensuing series. Sometimes the best and the brightest can be too smart for their own good.

"Our entire focus tomorrow," Witt said as the team bus made its way from New Haven to Cambridge on Friday, "is to get a win against Harvard for the seniors."

Indeed, outside of the current nine-year drought, the last Yale senior class to never experience a win versus Harvard graduated in 1923 (the Bulldogs lead the series, 65-53-8).

"We're looking forward to it," Witt said. "Oklahoma-Nebraska is a dying rivalry. It'll be extinct next year. But Harvard-Yale? It's 'The Game'."