Rethinking the game of the year

Attendance at last Saturday's game (of which we'll speak no further) was impressive. But is this sudden burst of enthusiasm sustainable? Is the undergraduate fan-base genuinely reenergized, recharged and recommitted to our teams — or will we abruptly lapse into the benign indifference that has characterized the past decade of bonfireless seasons?

Bandwagons being what they are, I suspect that future turnout at Princeton Stadium will continue to depend on the relative success of the football program. But I want to propose an innovation that might help preserve some small measure of spirit through winning and losing seasons alike. Let's call it the "Penn-Princeton Game."

The contest versus Yale last Saturday was billed here as "the game of the year," but it was in no way, shape or form a "rivalry game." The Yalies who came down for the weekend made that fact painfully clear. Yale's traditional rival, they reminded us, is Harvard. And just in case we didn't quite get the message, our Eli guests sported t-shirts that spelled it out: "Harvard sucks. Princeton doesn't matter."

Alas, there's no point in arguing. It's true: We can't count, year in and year out, on being the most important game on any of our opponents' schedules. We may matter if we happen to be leading in the standings, but we never matter just because we're Princeton. Harvard-Yale has no analogue in the contemporary traditions of Princetoniana. And maybe that's the key to understanding why student support for Princeton football has been so erratic.

An entire book — "The Only Game That Matters" — is devoted to the (audacious) thesis that Harvard-Yale is "the most important" rivalry in college football history. Ohio State and Michigan might stake a stronger claim to that title, but let's give our peers in New England their due. When the Crimson visit the Yale Bowl this weekend, the Harvard student body will relocate en masse to New Haven for "The Game." Wholesale migration. Busloads and busloads and busloads of undergrads. Tailgating on a scale otherwise unheard of in the Ivy League. And they do it every year, on the third Saturday of November, regardless of the win-loss records of their respective squads.

It's probably blasphemous for a Princetonian to advocate direct imitation of Harvard and/or Yale. I'm convinced, though, that Princeton football badly needs a rivalry game.

But first, we'll need a rival.

Penn stands out as the most likely candidate. First, the logistics are unproblematic: Philadelphia is certainly closer to our campus than Cambridge is to New Haven. More importantly, though, Penn is already our leading rival in men's basketball. (According to the Princeton Athletics website, "Either Princeton, Penn, or both teams have won each of the last 17 Ivy League championships, and the two teams have combined to 48 of 57 total Ivy titles in men's basketball.") In general, Penn students take their athletic program as seriously as anybody in the Ivy League; they'd surely embrace the notion of an annual Penn-Princeton football extravaganza a la Harvard-Yale.

We might worry that an artificially engineered tradition will never catch on. We tend to think that traditions — and especially traditions grounded in athletic rivalries — must develop organically if they are to develop at all. Teams become rivals not because they "want" to, but because the competition between them happens to become particularly intense at a particular historical moment.

Granted. But we should try anyway. After all, the plan I envision is really not so difficult to conceive or execute. Next fall, Princeton football will host the Quakers; I propose simply that we invite Penn students to spend that weekend here and that we do our best to show them a good time. The following year we'd all head down to Philadelphia. The student governments of the two schools would jointly take charge of arranging transportation, accommodations and tailgate parties. And if we're willing to swallow our pride, we can always consult the folks at Harvard and Yale for tips on how to pull this sort of thing off.

Penn-Princeton would not, of course, replace the Bonfire. But it does seem to me that the Bonfire tends to breed fair-weather fans, since the event only becomes a real possibility when the football team is relatively good. Penn-Princeton, on the other hand, will engage the campus even if our Tigers find themselves at the very bottom of the conference. And — unless you root for the Yankees — isn't that what being a fan is all about? Jeremy Golubcow-Teglasi is a religion major from Potomac, Md. He can be reached at golubcow@princeton.edu.