Harvard vs. Yale, by the numbers

On Saturday, thousands of fans clad in red or blue will descend upon Harvard Stadium for the 140th edition of “The Game,” the annual football matchup between Harvard and Yale. For nearly one and a half centuries, the weekend before Thanksgiving has marked another battle in this historic rivalry. Yale leads the overall series 70-61-8, but it’s the Crimson who have the higher stakes this year: with a win on Saturday, they will win their first undisputed Ivy League title since 2014. First, though, let’s take a look at some of the numbers that explain The Game.

0.468

This is Harvard’s all-time win percentage against Yale. But what Old Eli doesn’t want you to know is that his best days are behind him. Here’s a graph of Harvard’s cumulative win record (wins minus losses over time) against Yale since their very first meeting:

Things did not get off to a great start for the Crimson. In 1875, Harvard won the first matchup, in New Haven, by a score of 4 to 0, but Yale dominated the early proceedings shortly after that. By 1910, they were up 22-5-3 on their opponents from Cambridge. It’s hard to believe now, but before the days of the Georgia Bulldogs, the Yale Bulldogs were the premier team in college football, winning over 20 national championships during this period. Harvard, too, won 4 or 5 championships in the 1910s (depends on who’s counting).

By the 1920s, Harvard-Yale was no longer one of the most important games in college football, but it has never lost its importance for these two schools. In 1956, Yale won the first-ever Ivy League conference title, beating Harvard in New Haven to complete their undefeated season. Twelve years later, Harvard Stadium saw one of the most famous moments in the history of the tie, a 16-point comeback in the final 42 seconds to produce the notorious Crimson headline “Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29.”​

The Crimson and the Bulldogs were fairly well-matched for decades to come, but at the turn of the 21st century, Harvard was down 19 games to Yale. Then, the unthinkable happened: a mirror image of Yale’s late-19th-century dominance, as the Crimson beat Yale every year but one from 2001 to 2015 under head coach Tim Murphy, who took charge in 1994. Since then, the Bulldogs have won five out of the past seven, but through the modern era as a whole, Harvard’s been the better team in the rivalry.

0.489

This is the win percentage of the home team across the entire history of Harvard-Yale. It turns out the home fans haven’t really been a factor in this rivalry. There’s no better example of this than the 2004 edition of the game, when a couple Yale students got hundreds of Harvard fans to raise placards that spelled out “We Suck” – at Harvard Stadium! (To be fair, Harvard did win that game.)

The chart below shows Harvard’s win percentage against Yale at home and on the road, before and during the Tim Murphy era. For the first 120 or so years of Crimson football, the team won slightly less than half their games against Yale no matter where The Game was held. Since then, however, they’ve mostly dominated Yale in their own stadium, with a win percentage of 0.733 compared to 0.538 at Harvard Stadium. This year’s game is at Harvard Stadium, but it’s hard to tell if that’s a good thing for the Crimson!

4-0

This is Harvard’s record against Yale when they’ve come into the game with 5 wins against their Ivy opponents to Yale’s 3. That’s the situation this year: Harvard has gone 5-1 in their conference games, while Yale has gone 3-3 (against the same opponents). Is four games a small sample size? Of course. But the heat map below shows that Harvard’s been pretty good at taking care of business when they’ve come into The Game with a formidable record:

In fact, the Crimson are 16-5-1 when they win at least 5 games before playing Yale. They’ve never blown an undefeated Ivy season against the Bulldogs. And as the locations of the colored squares show, it’s usually the case that both teams are at least decent. After all, since conference play kicked off in 1956, both teams have won 18 Ivy League championships, second only to Dartmouth’s 21. By the way, with Harvard’s win against Penn this past Saturday – coupled with Dartmouth’s loss to Cornell – it’s confirmed that Harvard will break that deadlock, winning their 19th title.

14

Speaking of last Saturday’s game, it delivered a first title – and hopefully the first of many – for rookie head coach Andrew Aurich. But can he join the fourteen-strong list of Harvard head coaches to have won The Game?

No coach has frustrated the Yalies more than Tim Murphy, who beat Yale in 19 of his 30 seasons and was in charge of that huge 14-out-of-15 win streak. But perhaps surprisingly, the best record of Harvard’s longtime head coaches belongs to Percy Haughton, who left the Bulldogs barking up the wrong tree 6 out of 9 times from 1908 to 1916. In terms of raw number of wins, though, Haughton follows each of Harvard’s most recent coaches. That’s right – Aurich is just the fourth Harvard head coach of the past 75 years! We’ll see if he can join his predecessors on this list.

66.8

Finally, let’s look at how Harvard and Yale have measured up this season. 66.8 is the number of points the two teams have combined to score per game in 2024, reflecting the fact that their offenses are ranked #1 and #2 in the Ivy League. This year’s game could be a shootout.

Yale put up 98 points across its last two games, against Brown and Princeton. Harvard, meanwhile, has been remarkably consistent, scoring no less than 26 points in any game this season. The Crimson have the better defense, allowing their opponents to score just 20.2 points per game compared to Yale’s 28.0; they outstrip the Bulldogs by pretty much every defensive metric. Yale has the more formidable rushing attack, but Harvard gets more of its work done through the air. The Bulldogs do have a slight lead on the turnover margin front, with just as many takeaways as giveaways.

However, Harvard could be without its starting quarterback and kicker against Yale this Saturday, throwing a wrench into the works. After Jaden Craig was stretchered off in the first quarter against Penn, Charles DePrima took over at quarterback. The game-winning kick was scored by backup kicker Dylan Fingersh, who came in for Kieran Corr. Will injuries hamper Harvard’s chance at victory? I’m going to go ahead and say no: I’m predicting a 28-24 victory for the Crimson.

You, too, can make your own forecast for The Game in our semesterly Predictions Game here, starting Tuesday! Will Harvard defend home turf? Or will Yale’s high-powered offense find a way to win on the road? We’ll find out this Saturday at noon.

Data on Harvard and Yale’s season-by-season records, plus results from The Game, was sourced from here, here, and here. 2024 season statistics were sourced from here, here, and here. The thumbnail image was found here. You can find the code used to produce the plots in this article, as well as compiled statistics from The Game, in this Google Drive folder.