Facing another year where the Stanford University football team will be crushed by Cal’s, the fifth consecutive time for those keeping score, our school stands at a bit of a crossroads. Berkeley coach Jeff Tedford is consistently producing top-25 football teams with Heisman candidates. We find ourselves in ESPN’s Bottom 10 rankings. These two facts mean that we won’t be beating Cal in football for the foreseeable future, which begs the question: should we continue to care about Cal? They have a much larger student body and lower academic standards for athletes. One Cal newspaper even declared that we were unfit to be rivals. We’re happy to take our rivalry elsewhere. Cal clearly lucked-out having us a rival; if they would prefer UC Davis, well, they can have them. We always knew that we could do better than Cal.
The task now is to find a new rival, one much more like our fine school (meaning a private school), a school that we can fairly compete against, and beat on occasion, and sometimes badly. There are a few options. We could adopt Duke as a rival; their football team is as hapless as ours. Northwestern’s is almost as bad. But both of these schools already have rivals of some sort, especially Duke with the University of North Carolina, a model similar to Stanford-Cal. But unlike Stanford, the Blue Devils don’t seem to want to get out of that rivalry. Both Duke and Northwestern are academically rigorous and have high standards for their athletes, meaning that we would be competing on even ground. But neither is quite in the academic stratosphere that Stanford is in. MIT is also an option, lacking a clear rival; but we’ll let them wage a war of nerdiness with Caltech and exchange clever pranks (Caltech student posing as MIT tour guides, for example). No, only one school would suit Stanford as its new rival: Princeton.
It all makes sense. They too don’t have a real rival—the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) claims to be their rival, but it’s clear that Penn cares much more about it than Princeton does. The Tigers care about Harvard and Yale. They hold a giant bonfire every year they beat both of them, but this seems to run against the singular nature of a rivalry—shouldn’t you hold a bonfire after beating just one school? Harvard and Yale will always hate each other more, and as Yale’s saying goes, “Harvard sucks and Princeton doesn’t matter.” We realize that Princeton would be going outside the Ivy League for its rival, but it’s worth it. It is Stanford after all: the chance to play a worthy and willing rival every year.
We, unlike Penn, would be Princeton’s equal, or slight better. The way a rivalry should be. Penn is a pretender, like a younger, petulant cousin, better off playing with Columbia and Dartmouth than the big boys of the top five. Why is this such a brilliant idea? First off, we’d for once like to have a school that would be in the same academic league as us, and Princeton, with their #1 position in the U.S. News rankings, certainly fits the bill. We still have a higher yield and lower acceptance rate, so we’re about equal in the academic category. Second, we need to face the facts, and schedule Division I-AA teams for our football team to have a chance. We should play at least a couple of games that we have a chance in every year to keep morale above the “nihilism” level. Third, we’re sure that Princeton students, fans, and the football team would love to take a weekend in California during a frigid late November or early December, where the footwear du jour is Rainbows, not REI snow boots. They can stop pretending that Harvard and Yale care about them because, frankly, they don’t. “The Game” will always use the article only as long as it’s between Harvard and Yale. And fourth, we already play Princeton in a number of sports some years, including field hockey, women’s soccer and men’s basketball (we satisfyingly thrashed them 58-34 last year), so the rivalry can be incorporated into our schedule rather easily.
The next four years we have scheduled a pair of home-and-home series against Texas Christian and Wake Forest. It’s hard to imagine schools that would pose less of an interest to Stanford students than those two. Princeton, also a Div. I-AA school, would. If top teams like Florida can get away with scheduling a Div. I-AA school, so can we, because a) we need to and b) it’s our new rival school. And they might very well beat us. Forget Wake and TCU and put Princeton in instead. We won’t lose 41-6 and 27-3 to Princeton, and very well might win. This will be far more inspiring than getting thrashed by Cal every year. Both schools could get into this rivalry of equals. So we’d like to extend an invitation to Princeton University to be our rival. It’s in the best interest for both schools, and would make for an exciting cross-country rivalry. We’ve had enough of the Bears. And they have had enough of us, apparently. Bring on the Tigers.
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