Yale Daily News

I first heard about this on the web Monday, November 24, where it was described as a resignation to accept an assistant AD's job. No one in college football resigns as head coach of a program to take a "promotion" to assistant AD. This was a firing done the gentlemanly, Ivy League way. Coach Jack will be off the Yale campus as soon as he secures either another head coach at a Division I-AA (I personally hate the "new" BCS division designations) or a top assistant's position at a BCS school.

Siedlicki's record over the past three years of 23-7 will assure he does not want for work. It is the 1-7 record against Harvard which will be his albatross.

sid is heading home to syracuse - that is my guess - he was born and raised in upstate ny - and the ony direction that SU can go is up!

Smart to jump before he was pushed. With his meal ticket and a flock of other seniors graduating, there is no place for Yale to go but down next year.

Whether Jack Siedlecki was fired or retired on his own, this was the right move for Yale football. When he accepted the job in 1996, Siedlecki said “The goals of the program are clear to me: beat Harvard and win the Ivy title." Winning a share of two Ivy titles in 12 years isn't great but not terrible either (especially when you compare Yale's record in other sports over that time period, which ranks near the bottom of the Ivy League). But 4-8 against Harvard, especially after getting off to a 3-1 start, isn't going to cut it.

Harvard and Yale have had a remarkably even record against each other beginning in the 1920s (Harvard dominated the 1910s and Yale dominated every decade before that) up to but not including the 2000s. Consider:
1920s: 4 (Yale)-5 (Harvard)- 1 (Tie)
1930s: 6-4
1940s: 5-3 (no games in 1943 and 1944)
1950s: 5-4-1
1960s: 4-5-1
1970s: 5-5
1980s: 5-5
1990s: 6-4
2000s: 2-7

Carm Cozza finished with a 16-15-1 record against Harvard (and yes, as someone who witnessed that one tie, it sure felt like a loss) and in his coaching career, Harvard never won more than two in a row (nor Yale more than three in a row).

As a fan you obviously want your team to win every year but truthfully it is far better for a rivalry for the teams to alternate wins regularly (witness the diminishment of the Yale-Princeton rivalry after the 14-year Yale winning streak from 1967 through 1980). After dropping seven of eight, Yale is at risk of falling further behind Harvard and future Yale (and Harvard) undergraduates might lose out on one of the great joys of attending these two stellar universities.

I am confident that Yale can find a coach who can improve upon Jack Siedlecki but a change in coaches isn't the whole story. The current state of the football program (and the athletic program more generally) should not be satisfactory to anyone. The lack of championships is one issue but far more important is the increasing separation of many of the teams from the overall undergraduate student body. Student attendance at football games is depressing (and the obsession with the tailgate outside the game - to the exclusion of the game - embarrassing) but so too is the self-isolation of the football players and other athletes in fraternities and other off-campus housing arrangements that are antithetical to the residential college ideal. There is much for the administration, admissions office, faculty and alumni to consider and reform, but there are also things today's students - intercollegiate athletes and all others - need to address as well. If they don't, they likely undermine the willingness of Yale (and the rest of the Ivies) to provide intercollegiate opportunities to future generations of students comparable to (or preferably better than) that offered today.

As a Notre Dame alumnus (and Father of a Y graduate 2008), please hire ND's coach, Charlie Weiss as soon as possible...

RJN

It sounds like Alum (#4) read "Reclaiming the Game" by Bill Bowen. Perhaps, it is the remainder of the University that forces the athletes to isolate themselves. There is bias among professors and dining halls and other resources make it easier to live off campus.

#6
Agreed. The dining halls are usually closed by the time the players return from practice. Also, the location of the practice fields makes it preferable for athletes to live off campus where they can have free and and convenient parking.

Give them credit: the Administration is trying its best to pump up athletic recruiting by filling 2/3 of each class from the early admissions pool - hopefully coralling as many recruits as possible before they have applied or admitted to Princeton and Harvard.

A 6-4 record in any other league is a bowl-bound team. Why the Ivy's don't participate in post-season play is another discussion, but the question remains, what decent coach in his right mind is going to want to come to coach here, when all that matters is one game? The energy and even the hyperbole around The Game needs to be spread out across the season. You can't be a Yale football fan for one game a season. Students, alumni, and local New Haven residents should be out there enjoying the Bowl and those players every Saturday they play. (As they should with basketball, field hockey, and as many other sports as there are fans.) This myopic view of what constitutes a successful season (beating Harvard) is unsustainable. Coach Sid and his coaches recruited the players and led them to a 9-1 record last year. When he started 12 years ago, the team was 1-9. Would detractors of the coach prefer that record if the one win was against Harvard? This is a stellar group of athletes that deserve respect, as does this coach. They also deserve some continuity going forward. As Tim Murphy said in the Boston Globe, he was shocked because his feeling was that our program was in such great shape. I certainly hope that there is a concerted effort on the part of the Athletic Department to keep as many of the coaches who have contributed to this success with the program. Go Bulldogs!

Bulldogs, go big or go home! Ha!

#10

Obviously the bulldogs will need to go home. The Yale team is vastly undersized and underpowered. It's amusing that McCleod's 500 lb squat is considered legendary. Still, with Yale's selectivity, I'm sure its tough to recruit very large dudes.

#11, 6-5 290 across the offensive line, how much bigger do you want them? Across the league, Yale is one of the biggest teams if you look at who is on the field.

I SPOKE W/ COACH SIEDLECKI BRIEFLY THIS SPRING IN FRONT OF COX FIELD HOUSE. CONVERSATION WENT SMOOTHLY UNTIL I SAID " HARVARD IS YOUR NEMESIS" JUDGING BY THE LOOK ON HIS FACE HIS SPHINCTER MUST HAVE CLOSED.I'M SURE THIS FEAR WAS TRANSMITTED TO HIS ASST. COACHES AND PLAYERS.THEIR PLAY LAST 2 YEARS ARE THE PROOF.