Rivalries games are rough, especially in the Ivy Leagues. There’s no such thing as civility in some of our nation’s oldest universities — we all know that — and some of that bad behavior found its way onto the football field on Saturday.
A game between Harvard and Yale was marred by vulgarity, and a Harvard player was punished properly for the crimes against decency. Harvard and Yale played The Game at Fenway Park on Saturday, and Crimson running back Devin Darrington had himself an afternoon.
The sophomore running back had nine rushes for 91 yards and a pair of touchdowns. He actually had one more score before he offended the hallowed grounds of Fenway Park by flipping off a Yale defender on his way to the end zone in the fourth quarter. Yes, in the same park where David Ortiz once eloquently assigned ownership of Boston to the people that reside in it geographically, Darrington flipped the dang bird in the middle of a game.
Counterpoint: Harvard deserved two touchdowns for this pic.twitter.com/u15LRzbXZa
— Andrew Joseph (@AndyJ0seph) November 17, 2018
Darrington seems to be aiming his finger at Rodney Thomas II, who was in pursuit of Darrington but clearly wasn’t going to catch the speedy tailback. His presence did, however, lead to a stop — Darrington was called for an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on the play, and since it happened before he crossed the goal line, the touchdown didn’t count.
That made it 28-27 Harvard, instead of the Crimson potentially going up by eight points. Jake McIntyre would kick a 36-yard-field goal to add onto the Crimson’s lead, and they eventually won in a blowout, 45-27. But Darrington took his own score off the board, which is definitely hard to do. Hope it was worth it. (It’s a rivalry game and his team won, anyway, so if you ask him a few years down the road, he’ll probably say it was.)
