Banker Ralph W. Ellis of Springfield, Mass, was graduated from Harvard in 1879. Of the 51 football games that Harvard and Yale have played, he has seen all but one. But even Banker Ellis had never seen a Harvard-Yale game quite like the one last week. A gusty south wind from Long Island Sound lashed rain into the Yale Bowl by the cloudful. The 50,000 people (who contributed only $2,315 to solicitors for an unemployment fund) kept away from the field till the last minute and then piled into the Bowl wearing oilskins, rubber boots, blankets, with newspapers folded around their necks for scarves and wrapped around their hats. The storm made it all the more likely that. like most Harvard-Yale games, this one. between two teams with almost equally erratic records, would be decided by a stroke of fortune.
The first thing that looked like a break came five minutes after the game started when John Dean, Harvard punter, whose kicks averaged more than 47 yd., fumbled on his 45-yd. line. Yale recovered. Bob Lassiter. the black-haired North Carolinian who has been Yale's outstanding halfback this year, threw a pass to Dud Parker for a 25-yd. gain. Joe Crowley smashed through Harvard's left guard for 12 yd. With a first down on Harvard's 3-yd. line, it was three plays before Walter Levering splashed through tackle for the touchdown. Sullivan scuttled around end for the extra point.
After that, the teams settled down to a game which was sometimes brilliant, strategic football, sometimes a sort of exaggerated water-polo. Harvard's attack, with Jack Crickard running the ball three times out of four, got under way in the second period. Yale stopped it, as it had stopped Princeton's the week before, once in the 13-yd. line and again 2 yd. from the Yale goal. In the third period, Lassiter began to find soft spots in the right side of the Harvard line. In Yale's 55-yd. march to its second touchdown, he gained 45 yd. in four rushes. Drenched and determined, Harvard was disgusted by the first play of the last quarter. On fourth down with 10 yd. to go Lassiter tossed the soggy slippery ball to Marling who waded 24 yd. for a touchdown. A few minutes later the game was over, Yale 19, Harvard o, most decisive score since 1915 when Harvard won 41-to-0. Yale men, apparently bewildered by rain, wind, mud and the excitement of seeing their team win its second game this year, rushed down and tore up their own goalposts.
At Berkeley, Calif, the sun blazed down, hotter because of a characteristic mist, on Stanford and California. A crowd of 78,000 in light summer clothes watched the two teams, oldest football rivals on the Pacific Coast, end their conference seasons with a scoreless tie in which Stanford, picked to lose, rushed 208 yd. to 124, made seven first downs to the six that California got in the last six minutes.
Not since Michigan's famed Benny Friedman has the Western Conference had a forward passer like Michigan's Harry Newman. Last week, Harry Newman executed his wiliest play of the year.