Yale seniors glad they came back
When the pandemic hit last year and canceled Ivy League football in 2020, Yale’s senior football players had a choice: finish classes, graduate and go out into the “real” world, or take time off from school, come back and play.
Everyone sacrificed something over the past 20 months. Yale’s seniors might’ve been beginning their careers this fall, perhaps coming back to Yale Bowl on Saturday at noon for the 137th game between Yale and Harvard, or watching on ESPNU.
They’re instead preparing for one more game in a season where they’ll likely come up short of repeating as Ivy League champions. Was that choice worth it?
“When it matters so much to you, it’s not a sacrifice at all,” captain John
Dean said earlier this week at the Bulldogs’ weekly media availability.
“We would have given anything that it took to play our senior season. So for us, it wasn’t a matter of coming back, it was just, you know, adapting to the new situation.”
Yale (5-4, 4-2 Ivy) entered last week in a three-way tie for the Ivy lead but lost at Princeton. Saturday’s winner between the Bulldogs and Harvard (7-2, 4-2) will finish no worse than third, but to finish any higher would require Dartmouth or Princeton (both 8-1, 5-1) to lose in some sizeable upsets. Now, if they both should lose, The Game’s victor joins a three-way championship tie.
Whatever happens, Yale senior Melvin Rouse was glad to have this year, for which all but one senior came back.
“Coming off the 2019 Ivy championship season — every champion wants to defend their title,” Yale senior Melvin Rouse said.
“Every champion wants to get everybody’s best again. So having 2020 stripped from us almost kind of felt like a punch in the face.
“And nobody in our senior class wanted to leave on that kind of note. Because when you’re a champion, you either want to defend your title, or (if you) give it up, you want to have the opportunity to do it.”
Dean said the team had a sense that 2021 would be a go.
“It was just a matter of, OK, these are the steps that we have to take to be able to play,” he said. “In terms of, you know, sacrificing anything? I mean, I don’t think there’s anything I’d rather be doing right now than being on this team. So I would hardly call it a sacrifice.”
This team has ridden a roller coaster just this year, let alone over the past two, losing one game in overtime and two others by six points or fewer (the second at UConn in Week 5). They’ve been through a change at quarterback, with sophomore Nolan Grooms taking over at midseason, and they’ve had injuries at key positions.
But Dean said there’s no looking back right now: They have one more game together.
“I’m glad I came in with this group of guys because you see how competitive and how hard-working everybody is,” Rouse said. “To see that one more year, that helped me out a lot, because I grew as a leader and as just a person this year as well.
“I definitely wouldn’t change it for the world.”