In the world of Ivy League football, it might not be a coincidence that New Haven, Conn., is almost exactly halfway between Philadelphia and Boston. For while Penn and Harvard may be the favorites to take this year's Ancient Eight football title, it is Yale that may pose the biggest threat to upsetting their dominance.
The biggest threat that the Elis pose comes from their offense, which lit up the scoreboard last season with 43 touchdowns. That was two short of the school record, set in 1968. Yale also had the fewest number of turnovers of any team in all of Division I, losing possession only 11 times in 10 games.
Against the two nationally ranked teams it faced last season -- Penn and Colgate -- Yale scored 71 points. Twenty eight of those points came in the fourth quarter at Franklin Field last year, when the Elis rallied from a 24-3 deficit to send the game to overtime, only to fall to the Quakers, 34-31.
Yale coach Jack Siedlecki is well aware of what it will take to upset the Quakers and Crimson and bring a championship to the Yale Bowl for the first time since 1999. That year, the Elis split the title with Brown, with each team finishing the season at 6-1 in Ancient Eight play. It remains the only title Siedlecki has won in his eight-year tenure in New Haven.
"Our first strength should be leadership and experience," Siedlecki said in an e-mail interview. We have 31 seniors on the team."
Among those upperclassmen are running back Robert Carr and quarterback Alvin Cowan. Carr ran for 800 yards and 10 touchdowns last season, with an impressive average of 4.7 yards per carry.
"Robert Carr is an outstanding young man as well as a great football player," Siedlecki said. "He is one of the most upbeat and hard working players I have ever been around."
Cowan, a finalist for last year's Walter Payton Award as the best player in Division I-AA, can run with the ball quite a bit himself. He gained 435 yards on the ground last season, including seven touchdowns. The Austin, Texas, native also threw for just under 3,000 yards, with 22 touchdown passes.
"Alvin is a player that his teammates believe is going to lead them down the field and score every time he steps in the huddle," Siedlecki said. "He is a risk taker that has the ability to turn bad plays into good ones."
But for all that firepower, Yale had serious issues on defense last season. The Elis gave up an average of 28.4 points per game, including 52 at Colgate and 55 against Brown at home. Siedlecki acknowledged that his team has to "get our defense back to being one of the best in the league" in order to be successful this season.
Although it is not necessarily surprising that Yale was picked to finish third in the Ivy League preseason media poll, Siedlecki does not put much stock in that as an accurate measure of his team, or any other in the Ancient Eight.
"Preseason polls do not really mean much, but Penn is top dog until someone knocks them off, and we certainly have the talent to compete," he said. "Last year we took the first-place team, Penn, to overtime and we also went into overtime with the seventh-place team, Princeton."
Siedlecki did, however, acknowledge that the team's league schedule may have an impact on how it finishes. The Elis will host Penn, Columbia and Princeton and travel to Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown and Harvard. As has been the case for many years, the annual clash with the Crimson will be the last game of the season.
"We have only beaten Penn at home once since I have been here, and two of our three wins versus Harvard have been at Harvard," Siedlecki said. "We play three of our first four games on the road, and how we handle that stretch is going to have a huge impact on our season."
In the end, Siedlecki's formula for success is much simpler than all of that.
"Staying healthy, being ready to play each week and having the ball bounce our way on occasion are the elements that make up a championship team."
If that happens for Yale this year, there might just be a new challenger to the Ivy League throne.
