Defending Ivy champ Yale reports for camp Thursday
When the Yale football team takes the Yale Bowl field Sept. 18 for the 2021 season opener against Holy Cross, about 22 months will have passed since its last game, a thrilling and bizarre overtime victory over Harvard to clinch the program’s 16th Ivy League championship.
The Bulldogs, like every conference team, have been in a holding pattern since, riding out the pandemic behind Ivy reaction to the pandemic that resulted in the cancelation sports through 2020 and well into this year.
“The perspective we have is that our season didn’t get canceled last year, it just got delayed,” senior linebacker and captain John Dean said Monday during the Ivy’s preseason virtual press conference. “So the urgency stayed every single day. We were working out whether it was at home, on campus. We still had goals set, to be an elite team the next time we ended up playing football.”
Yale players report for preseason camp on Thursday, marking the unofficial kickoff — and a return to normal. The Ivy in July 2020 announced the cancelation of sports through the remainder of the calendar year, making football among the first losses caused by health concerns generated by COVID-19. The cancellation of winter and spring sports followed.
“We enter this preseason with renewed anticipation and excitement following
the unprecedented journey that we have all been through over the last 18 months,” said Robin Harris, the Ivy’s executive director. “I am incredibly proud of the way our coaches and student-athletes handled the adversity of the past year. While COVID-19 is still very much a part of our daily lives, we believe in the campus policies that each Ivy league institution has put in pace for a safe and successful return to competition.”
Harris noted that all football players and coaches will be fully vaccinated — other than “very limited” medical or religious exceptions.
During a year without competition, and long periods of being separated from players, Yale coach Tony Reno said the program and team improved. All but one Yale player who would have been a senior in 2020 elected to take a semester off during the pandemic to delay graduation and return to the team this season.
“You had to have the opportunity look at the man in the mirror and say, ‘How can I be better for my team?’ in a very different world or situation,” Reno said of leading the program during time away. “And, how do you challenge your players to be that for each other and for themselves? When given the opportunity we had in the fall and early in winter, when we were doing a lot of things we probably didn’t ever think we’d be doing in the fall or winter, we did look at it internally as a staff and then as a team to challenge ourselves to be better
leaders and find different ways to connect.”
Yale in 2019 finished 9-1 overall, 6-1 in the league, to win its 16th Ivy championship. The 136th playing of The Game to close the season was delayed for about an hour and a half as hundreds of protesters from both Yale and Harvard rushed the field at halftime and remained until police intervened.
With darkness threatening an early end to the game, Yale erased a 19-point fourth-quarter deficit to force overtime and won, 50-43. Dean, a senior linebacker from Wrentham, Mass., was named captain the next day. Senior quarterback Kurt Rawlings, who also led Yale to the 2017 Ivy championship, was named the league’s 2019 offensive player of the year.
Rawlings had missed the final four-plus games of the 2018 season while injured. Griffin O’Connor, then a freshman, started the final three and was Ivy League rookie of the year. Now as a junior, O’Connor will lead an offense that also returns running back Zane Dudek, who in 2019 rushed for eight touchdowns and an average of 75 yards a game. The Bulldogs return six of their top seven tacklers on defense.
“We’re just excited to be back, excited to be playing football again,” Reno said. “For all the players in this league, all the fans, all the administrators, it’s a great time in Ivy League football. There are a lot of players that weren’t given the opportunity to play in 2020 that have fortunately come back all of our rosters. So it’s going to be an exciting brand of football. We’re just
happy to be a part of it and I look forward to us growing.”
Princeton, which shared the Ivy title in 2016 and won it outright in 2018, was voted the preseason favorite in a 16-member media poll, receiving eight first-place votes. Yale received six first-place votes and finished second. Dartmouth was third with one firstplace vote.
“Not doing something that you’ve done for so long as a player and a coach, it’s ‘Let’s get this up and running,’ ” Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens said. “It’s like riding a bike. You knock the rust off a little bit and you’re right back at it.”
Yale’s Ivy Opener is Sept. 25 against Cornell at Yale Bowl.
Yale plays five home games and six in Connecticut this season, including an Oct. 16 matchup with UConn at Rentschler Field, the 50th meeting between the teams. Yale and UConn haven’t played since 1998. Yale leads the all-time series 32-17, though UConn has won 14 of the past 16.
“I feel like we’re making progress we need to with the team each day when you see incremental growth in all areas,” said Reno, who is 47-33 at Yale, 23-7 the past three seasons. “You’re going to have setbacks in certain areas, on certain days. But when you get to the end, the last practice before you get to game week, you want to feel like whatever areas you’ve targeted, you feel like you’ve made progress and you’re close and really ready to play well together.”