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.)
No comments:
Post a Comment