Harvard-Yale can't be The Game

About two weeks ago, Harvard and Yale played each other in football, in a match-up that is traditionally known as "The Game" — capital letters required, according to Wikipedia. The Crimson defeated the Bulldogs in triple overtime, 30-24, for their fifth win in a row, leaving some to believe that the Yale mascot must be female, given that they have been Harvard's bitch for the past half-decade. Harvard won the epic showdown; those in Cambridge celebrated into the night, those in New Haven wept a little more than usual and the rest of America yawned and shrugged its collective shoulders.

Is Harvard versus Yale really The Game? Maybe when Calvin Coolidge was The President. Nowadays, however, The Game is so not The Game it shouldn't even be called The Game. OSU-Michigan, Texas-Texas A&M, Florida-FSU: these are The Games. Harvard-Yale is The Game like Campus was The Eating Club to Join This Year. And football isn't even the strong suit of either of these two universities! The Game? Perhaps The Chess Match, or The Scrabble-Off, but The Game? Not so much.

And in a day and age when every single Notre Dame game is on NBC, Harvard-Yale wasn't even broadcasted nationally; I guess ESPN2 couldn't quite make room for it in between Trick Bowling and reruns of the 1998 World Pictionary Championships. And if it made the daily sports recap shows, which The Game rarely did, the anchors took it less than seriously: "Coming up, we'll have highlights from the Harvard-Yale game ... but first, this squirrel can water ski!"

That's why I don't think Harvard and Yale should be allowed to call their football match-up The Game anymore. It's false advertising, for one thing, and for another thing, it's pathetic. The fact that they're still calling it The Game has a Gloria-Swanson-in-Sunset-Blvd. vibe, two washed-up movie actresses with delusions of past grandeur; Harvard and Yale are ready for their closeups, Mr. DeMille.

So what should they call it? The Sweater Vest and Ascot Fest doesn't quite capture the irrelevance, while The This-Game-Would-Have-Mattered-in-1916 Cup is a little bit too long and just doesn't get the pomposity. The perfect name would have to be succinct while still capturing the complete ignorance these two schools seemingly have to the rest of present-day America. The Bull Moose Party Presents The Pretentious Bowl? I'm just not sure.

Is this really something we want to be a part of? There are many on campus who feel like a triangular Harvard-Princeton-Yale rivalry would make games more exciting, would legitimize us, etc. And there are still others who advocate a rivalry with Penn, arguing that if Harvard and Yale won't let us in, we might as well go with the next best option. "Well, CBS and ABC rejected our pilot episode," these people seem to be saying, "But UPN is ready to go!" It's tempting to have our show on UPN, folks, I know, but let's settle down a second: This is how shows like Moesha happen.

Look. Going to a school without a real rival can be lonely; just ask Emory University in Atlanta, who, in true Zell Miller crazy-talk fashion, recently challenged Washington University in St. Louis to be their rival. Wash. U. politely declined, though Emory has gone ahead and formed a Department of War designed to foster the rivalry and get everyone really riled up. In short, it's not working. The students don't like it, the faculty doesn't like it, and it makes the school look silly. Yet the higher-ups push on anyway, against the wishes of everyone involved. Sound familiar? I didn't think so. The Princeton administration would never do anything like that.

So let's not go the route of Emory by challenging Penn to be our rivals. That would be like Ken Jennings challenging Paris Hilton to a game of Trivial Pursuit. And let's not try to get in on this whole Harvard-Yale thing, either, because as long as they're still calling it The Game, they're both going to look like a pair of very old Miss Havishams sitting in the attic wearing their wedding dresses until their dying days. Let's just be content as Princeton University, where we don't play second fiddle to graduate students and where we can leave the campus without getting stabbed to death. Let's just let Harvard and Yale keep thinking World War I just ended, because, quite frankly, I'd rather be able to sit back and laugh at Harvard and Yale with the rest of America than be the punch line of the same Sportscenter joke November after November. Jason Gilbert is a freshman from Marietta, Ga. He can be reached at jogilber@princeton.edu.