Where shall I start?

Well, Harvard really kicked Yale's asses all over the field—even as Witt is supposedly NFL quarterback material.  The score was 45-7 in Harvard's favor (the game was tied 7-7 after the first quarter).

But that wasn't the worst thing about the game.  A guy driving a U-Haul from Yale filled with beer ran into three women outside the stadium, killing one of them. And, according to two Yale students, "their friends drank and listened to pop music—in some cases in view of the scene of the deadly crash—before entering the stadium to see the Crimson best the Bulldogs by 38 points."

Let's work our way back to the Yale athletic department.  Yale's football coach, Tom Williams, had been forced to resign around Witt's Rhodes candidacy.  Williams had given interviews saying that he was a perfect confidant to Witt over his forced decision, since he (Williams) had to make the same kind of decision two decades earlier when he chose professional football over a Rhodes.

Only it turned out that Williams was never a Rhodes candidate, and had inflated his CV.

Now, back to Witt.  It turns out Witt wasn't scheduled for an interview by the Rhodes committee either.  That was because—well—a Yale woman had accused Witt of sexually assaulting her (Witt's attorney said it was actually consensual sex the two had).  As a result, the committee had insisted that Yale recertify Witt's cadidacy, which it had not done, and so Witt was no longer in the running for the award.

Remember that feel-good story, about the great athlete-scholar who chose his team over his personal glory?  Here is how that story went down:

"With the Rhodes scholarship, you know, I think that's just kind of the mold that I try to live by as a student-athlete," Witt said.

"No enmity towards the Rhodes committee," he added. "It was just one of those things where it was an unfortunate set of circumstances in terms of timing, but I was very humbled and honored to have been selected just in the finalists."

Acclaim for a Quarterback

During the fall, Witt had been lionized as the hero of a badly needed feel-good sports saga - the "perfect antidote," one newspaper said, to the allegations of child sexual abuse at Penn State. Bloomberg News described his as a Hamlet-like choice. A glowing NBC Nightly News  profile called him "an extraordinary individual." On ESPN, Witt said he would pray on the decision.

"We have become a society tied to numbers," Jeff Jacobs, a sports columnist, wrote in The Hartford Courant. "Yes, you need a scoreboard to determine a winner. You need a GPA to measure academic achievement. This is no argument against competition, not at all. Rather it is an argument on behalf of something that cannot be measured by numbers. And that's character."

You know, it had everything—the guy's religious, he's a great athlete and scholar, he's so loyal to his teammates and his university (see below), his African-American coach was in his corner because he had a similar experience—you can't beat a story like that (especially with anything that's true).

Following on the appearance of this story in the New York Times, "Yale refused to confirm or deny the existence of the complaint."  That's not the only institutional see-no-evil response at Yale: Yale's award-winning newspaper suppressed the story—I mean, the original tale was SO good, WHO would want to pour water on it?

But that's not the end of the tale—since then, I have confirmed that there is no Yale!  I personally drove up there on the Wilbur Cross/Merritt Parkways—and (imagine my surprise) there was no New Haven either!  The whole thing—the Ivy League, Bill Clinton and George Bush attending Yale—it's all a big hoax!

(Okay, I admit—I always get lost on that damn Merritt Parkway.  That's how come I missed my interview for a Rhodes scholarship.)

Anyone remember Lucinda Williams' song, "Change the Locks," where she disappeared her town so she wouldn't run into an ex-lover she couldn't resist?

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P.S.  Oh, today I learned that there is no Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute either:

The president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York is in a billion-dollar dispute with his former workplace, a cancer institute at the University of Pennsylvania, over accusations that he walked away with groundbreaking research and used it to help start a valuable biotechnology company.