At Harvard-Yale, thou shalt not sully The Game with vuvuzelas

Harvard and Yale haven't commanded much attention on the field for generations, but the old boys have always put on a ripping show of rancor, you know. This year, inevitably, that antipathy was to be personified in the prevailing novelty of the time: The vuvuzela.

A pair of Harvard students set out to bathe today's edition of "The Game" in Cambridge with the infamous buzz that drowned out the World Cup in July, under the very logical premise that Yale fans "sound like failure": "During the upcoming Game, Cambridge cannot afford to endure the noise pollution produced by so many whining Harvard rejects," they wrote on their Facebook page. At one point, they'd sold 2,000 of the noisemakers at $6-$8 apiece. Yale students countered by selling several hundred vuvuzelas of their that read "Harvard Blows" on the side, promising a non-stop, three-hour whine across Harvard Stadium.

Alas, the stuffed shirts have triumphed again against the encroachment of such an undignified aural experience on such as solemn occasion as The Game:

The war between Harvard and Yale won't be filled with vuvuzelas, thanks to a last-minute ban passed at Harvard.
[...]
"In keeping with Department of Athletics' commitment to conduct athletic contests in a manner that promotes good sportsmanship, artificial noisemakers will not be permitted inside the ticketed footprint of Harvard Stadium," wrote Associate Director of Athletics Timothy Wheaton in a statement on Tuesday.

The stuffy ban came after students introduced the Silence Yale campaign two weeks ago, a noise-making effort by two undergrads who planned on distributing the noisemakers before the game.

Actually, the initiative was led by students on Harvard's Undergraduate Council, who complained that "If you're on offense, you can't hear your own team" over the omnipresent hum. Bulldog quarterback Patrick Witt agreed in the Yale Daily News: "As quarterback, if I can't communicate in the line of scrimmage, the game won't take off." Most places, disrupting the offense's communication would be considered the point. Here, well, it's just not done.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

Source: http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday/post/At-Harvard-Yale-thou-shalt-not-sully-The-Game-w?urn=ncaaf-287659

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