Harvard Football Fans agree...

That they suck!



Enterprising Yale students dressed in Harvard Pep Squad outfits tricked the Harvard fans into admitting their abilities. The game was played on Saturday the 20th.

See the full explanation:

[pantheon.yale.edu]

I edited this to show the web page that the picture is derived from. I meant to do this yesterday but pasted the wrong link.

I was at the game, couldnt figure out what was being written. Are you sure this isnt a photoshop at all? Too bad Harvard kicked yale's butt...hehe

My son was there and knew what it said at the time. He provided me with this link today.

If true, that is a world-class hack. Bravo, Yalies!

Kyle

yeah, i dont think so.
i was at the game, and there were definitely 3 letters in the top word. we were pretty sure it said "the game"
no way in hell it said "we suck," i would have seen that.

mike

The "full explanation" link is just a link to the picture. For what it's worth, it seems like other than changing an "M" to a "C" and pasting in crowd over the "T", it might be pretty simple to Photoshop "THE GAME", as Mike suggests, into "WE SUCK". Zooming in with Paint, some of the white placards at the bottom of the "K" look kinda fishy. It's a pretty convincing Photoshop if it is one, though.

Bad PhotoShop aside (shouldn't they have whited out all those National Championship banners?), you've got to tip your hat to Sucks, and be glad that it's only on the football field that they've had such a run. Two undefeated seasons for the class of 05 is pretty amazing. I heard somewhere that they and the other State Ivy have gone something like 46-2 vs. the rest of the league

[Q]JohnnieAg'99 Wrote:
the other State Ivy[/q]
That school in Philly is actually a private instution, but please feel free to mistake them for a state school.

I fixed the link on the original post to this:

[pantheon.yale.edu]

And for the record my son was astonished that the picture isn't being taken as genuine. I hope a few more examples show up for us to enjoy.

Harvard had a super season and won't get the recognition they deserve because the Ivy League prohibits post-season play in football.

For example, Harvard is the highest-achieving 1-AA football team according to the Sagarin Ratings. What's even more amazing is that the Sagarin Ratings place Harvard number 38 nationwide, 1-A and 1-AA combined. (Although it is hard to believe that Harvard rates higher than Ga. Tech, Stanford, and Nebraska.)
[www.usatoday.com]

Despite its high rating, Harvard's ranking is less than spectacular. According to the latest ESPN/USA coaches poll, Harvard moved up to #12. I would think that the only undefeated 1-AA football team deserves more respect.
[www.usatoday.com]

I understand that some of the schools above Harvard in the poll have only lost to 1-A opponents while Harvard played none, but this is no excuse to ignore the analytical Sagarin system. Are the Sagarin Ratings for real? Perhaps some of the INCH folks here can comment on the statistical valildity of Sagarin. Me? I just look at the schools and the numbers.

Why do I care? I think it hurts the eroding esteem of Ivy League football. No tears shed for Hahvahd.

[Q]Scott Kominkiewicz Wrote:
(Although it is hard to believe that Harvard rates higher than Ga. Tech, Stanford, and Nebraska.)[/q]

Then you clearly haven't had the joy of watching Stanford play this year.

A little self-congratulatory? Perhaps...

But the website reveals all. Check it out here:

[www.harvardsucks.org]

Photoshop that, why don't you?

--The younger Marty

i just watched the video. i am still not entirely convinced, though i wasn't in the best seats at the game to see the words clearly. the photo still looks artificial, as if some parts were photoshopped in, especially when comparing it to the "actual" result in the video. then again, it's hard to fake a video, so i have no idea. it really didn't look like "we suck" from my firsthand view.

in any case, maybe a better prank would have been yale actually winning the football game. and i'd be more impressed with the yale prank if they too didn't think cornell was a worthless adversary (on and off the field).

They're just ripping off Cal Tech anyway, who did roughly the same prank 20-30 years ago when USC played UCLA at the Rose Bowl.

And now that Harvard went 10-0 officially, I really want the NCAA-provided timekeeper (ie he wasn't hired by Dartmouth) at the Dartmouth-Harvard game to be shot. I'm not saying we would've won, but it would've been nice to have at least had a shot at a game-winning field goal. The ball was spiked with at least 1.5 seconds left on the clock (not to mention the 5-8 seconds that ran off a minute earlier when he didn't start the playclock on time).

Of course why the referee was too chicken-**** to put any time back on the clock in either instance is beyond me.

why dartmouth went (unsuccessfully) for the 2pt conversion instead of the game-tying PAT playing at home with momentum is beyond me

Whenever you think you've come up with something clever - a cheer, a flip-card hoax - somebody else may have been there first. Cal Tech definitely did it first with the flip cards.

Regardless of possible Photoshop enhancements to the version passed around online that makes We Suck seem more legible, it's often hard at the field to tell just what many flip cards say, just as it's hard to tell what the marching band is spelling out on the field or, for that matter, what the announcer is saying about what the band is playing. OK, there are exceptions. When the Harvard band (is this real or urban legend?) saluted famous Harvard graduate graduates and got to Ted Kennedy, when the band struck up the BeeGee's How Deep Is Your Love, that was crystal clear.

[Q]A-19 Wrote:

why dartmouth went (unsuccessfully) for the 2pt conversion instead of the game-tying PAT playing at home with momentum is beyond me[/q]

Because our kickers have missed more PAT's than field goals in their combined careers, including the one earlier in the game. The starting kicker actually has a better pecentage kicking 50-yard FG's than he does PAT's. He's basically football's answer to Chuck Knoblauch or a golfer with the yips.

I actually thought going for 2 was the correct call, but the play call itself stunk. The quarterback didn't have the skill to throw a fade to a corner. I would've done the play that worked all game, spread the field and then throw a little 3 yard pass to the running back in the flat.

It's beyond me why people seem to think that just because another school has already pulled a particular prank means no other school is allowed ever to pull it again, even forty years later. Unless of course all you're trying to do is put down Yalies, which seems pretty obvious.

I personally admire the enormous amount of thought and work that must have gone into it. Cornellians, if you think originality is so damn important, come up with an original prank to pull on Hahvahd.

(Just don't pull it at the Lynah East game this January, I can't be there for the first time in a decade.)

Beeeej

Exactly my thoughts Beeeej.
Makes me think of South Park and "Simpson's did it". Enough pranks have been pulled over the years the ability to find a real original prank never attempted is pretty rare. Even ones that people think are new probably have been attempted somewhere.

I personally thought it was a pretty impressive feat.

[Q]A-19 Wrote:

i just watched the video. i am still not entirely convinced[/q]


I therefore must ask, is A-19:

a) your seat number
b) your interpretation of a famous Steely Dan song
c) the number of Advil you need to quash the headache that the Yale prank caused you
d) what you saw at the optometrist's office when he/she asked you to read the top line
e)all of the above?!?

Here's more:

[www.yaledailynews.com]

i used to sit in section a, seat 19.
the yale prank didn't cause me any headache. all i said was that i was there in person and it didn't look exactly that way to me. and for the record, all of those around me couldn't read it either. we were sitting across the stadium in the endzone.

The photo in the Yale Daily News shows characters that could be WE SUCK or OE SOCH or who knows what. It's a little raggedy around the edges. Would have benefitted from anti-aliasing or something.

The story suggests the suspicions were not that Yale students were pulling a prank, but that it was MIT students all over again. MIT circa 1980 (?) planted a device on the sidelines that popped up during the game and spewed steam or smoke during a regional TV broadcast and the announcers -- this was pre-terrorism, remember -- went ballistic, saying if this was a prank, it wasn't a very good one because somebody could have been killed, or caused a panic, or something.

The story also says the students created fake IDs because they were questioned by Harvard security and that questions were asked as to whether Harvard really had the pep squad the Yale students concocted.

Mike, was your viewpoint straight ahead or to a side? Either way, I dont see any use of Photoshop.

todd,
i was in section 16, looks like the signs were up around 33. bad view, but it was still unclear

Here's the story of the original flipcard prank by Caltech, it's a good read:

[www.museumofhoaxes.com]

Here are two pictures, one from harvardsucks.org, and the other from the Yale Daily News:

[www.yaledailynews.com]

Judging from the positions of people on the field, they're not taken from exactly the same time/angle, but it's pretty close. It seems to me that the harvardsucks.org one is much more legible than the YDN one. Also, it seems that the last frames of the video look remarkably like the YDN photo.

My conclusion: either the person taking the video decided to stop rolling just before the picture got good, and the YDN photographer missed that moment as well, or the hardvardsucks.org still image is a little doctored.

Incidentally, this picture: [pantheon.yale.edu] is a little bit different yet (look at the very left edge or the bottom edge of the 'S'), but closely resembles the harvardsucks.org photo.

Just my 2¢.
-Shorts

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

The story suggests the suspicions were not that Yale students were pulling a prank, but that it was MIT students all over again. MIT circa 1980 (?) planted a device on the sidelines that popped up during the game and spewed steam or smoke during a regional TV broadcast and the announcers -- this was pre-terrorism, remember -- went ballistic, saying if this was a prank, it wasn't a very good one because somebody could have been killed, or caused a panic, or something.

[/q]

[hacks.mit.edu]

The harvardsucks.org and pantheon.yale.edu versions are indeed doctored to improve legibility. Look at the bottom edge of the U and C --those are *identical* rows of white cards. Another example: look at the left edge of the S, in the harvardsucks version there is an identical cluster of three white cards (one above two forming a small, slightly scewed to the right, triangle) that appears twice. The pantheon version appears to be further reworked; it has that cluster three times.

[Q]JasonN95 Wrote: The harvardsucks.org and pantheon.yale.edu versions are indeed doctored to improve legibility. Look at the bottom edge of the U and C --those are *identical* rows of white cards. Another example: look at the left edge of the S, in the harvardsucks version there is an identical cluster of three white cards (one above two forming a small, slightly scewed to the right, triangle) that appears twice. The pantheon version appears to be further reworked; it has that cluster three times.[/q]

Where Harvard men once made history, they're now reduced to doctoring it. Perhaps Professor Henry Kissisnger lent a hand, or at least provided inspiration. Next time, if the Cantabs want the job done right: Farm out the work to MIT or Caltech.

[Q]billhoward Wrote:
Where Harvard men once made history, they're now reduced to doctoring it. [/q]
Um - don't you mean "Yale men?"

Shorts,

The photos are from a different angle but they were taken at almost the exact same time. Look at the ref in the lower left hand corner walking up field. He is at the 34 or 35 in both pictures. Also, look at the huddle at mid field and the other ref on the right hand side of the field. The harvardsucks picture was most likely touched up but it makes sense that it would be--they are selling it.

Fun prank either way.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the older fans in the film: specifically the old man in the hat:

"What do you think of Yale?"
"They don't think good!"

[Q]Robb Wrote:

billhoward Wrote: Where Harvard men once made history, they're now reduced to doctoring it. [/Q]
Um - don't you mean "Yale men?"
[/q]

Serves me right for trying to be insightful on four hours sleep. It was hard enough as an undergrad. Yes, Yale getting an incomplete on the prank and trying to optimize the result via retouching. Photoshop is so much better than Spot Tone retouching fluid.