Youth is served

Following up on the story I wrote regarding the impact the freshman class is having on the Yale football team, I decided to do some number crunching.

Last year when Yale lost at Fordham in the fifth game of the year, of the 49 players appeared on the game participation chart 20 were seniors while Jordan Haynes and Jake Stoller were the only freshmen to get into the game.

In Saturday's 7-0 win at Lehigh, again 49 players were entered into the game participation database. This time, however, nine were freshmen including starters Chris Smith (receiver), Jeff Marrs (offensive guard), Jordan Capellino (fullback) and Mordecai Cargill (tailback). I understand that the numbers were altered by the flu bug which hit the Yale team in the last week and a half but it is worth noting that in the fifth game last season, juniors and seniors accounted for 21 of the 22 offensive or defensive starters against Fordham. Sophomore receiver Jordan Forney was the only underclassman to start against the Rams.

In the Lehigh game, six seniors, eight juniors, four sophomores and four freshmen were the 22 starters on offense and defense.

Another thing I noticed from the boxscore were serious discrepancies in the defensive stats. Not only were Adam Money and Sean Williams not credited for forced fumbles, I found it curious that Yale was given eight assisted tackles while Lehigh defenders made 40 assisted tackles. At the risk of piling on, I had to chuckle when I saw that Lehigh had 32 solo tackles and 40 assists. If you have to wonder why tackles are not an official statistics in the NFL need only to look at the Yale-Lehigh boxscore.