Quarterback Patrick Witt walked away from a full scholarship at one of the most-storied college football programs to spend $47,000 a year at one of the top U.S. universities.
Witt was poised to compete for the starting job this season at the University of Nebraska, winner of a share of five national championships. Instead, he enrolled at Yale University, where he had to try out for the team.
He made the squad and earned the starting position after recovering from injuries. Witt no longer takes snaps in front of 86,000 people at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln; he leads the Bulldogs before an average of about 12,000 people at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut. The 20-year-old sophomore said he couldn’t be happier.
“I love football and want to be successful,” Witt said. “But I’m a student here. I’m the guy leading the class discussion. My identity isn’t entirely based on football.”
On Saturday, Yale (4-5 overall, 2-4 in the Ivy League) lost to the Princeton Tigers (3-6, 2-4) in New Jersey as Witt passed for 290 yards and one touchdown, but had three interceptions.
Witt graduated early from Wylie High School in Wylie, Texas, and enrolled at Nebraska in the spring semester of 2007. In 2008, he was the backup and played in five games, completing 6 of 8 passes for 48 yards. He scored one touchdown on a running play.
On to Yale
After the team’s 26-21 victory over Clemson in January in the Gator Bowl, Witt decided that he wanted more of an academic challenge, and as a straight-A finance major, left Nebraska and enrolled at Yale, which has educated five U.S. presidents. U.S. News and World Report ranked Yale No. 3 in the U.S.; Nebraska No. 96. Yale’s endowment was $16.3 billion on June 30, Nebraska, a state school, had a $964.9 million endowment, according to Nebraska Foundation spokeswoman Dorothy Endacott.
“Had football ceased to exist, I wouldn’t have been happy there just being a student,” Witt said. “I knew football was going to end.”
Witt’s father, Gene, a captain for Delta Air Lines, and his mother, Kathy, a captain for American Airlines, approved of his decision. As did his brother, Jeff, 23, who played quarterback at Harvard University, Yale’s chief Ivy League rival, until a shoulder injury ended his football career.
Matt Davison, a former Nebraska football player and now analyst for the Husker Sports Network, said Witt learned the offense quickly and had a bright future with the team.
“People weren’t real happy about him leaving for Yale,” Davison said. “It was a little shocking. He had the potential to play a lot this year.”
Happy surprise
For Yale first-year coach Tom Williams, to have a Big 12-caliber quarterback was like finding money. The Big 12 is one of college football’s elite conferences, with its champion getting a berth in the Bowl Championship Series. Ivy League schools don’t play in postseason games, don’t offer athletic scholarships and have higher entrance standards, making it more difficult for top-flight athletes to attend. Only eight of the NFL’s current 1,700 players hail from one of the eight Ivy League schools.
“He needs experience,” Williams said. “He can look at a defense and understand what their weaknesses are and get us into the right play to exploit that.”
Football savvy
Williams said one of the first things he realized about Witt is that he has football savvy; a quality that’s not always shared by academic overachievers.
“I’ve been around guys that had a hard time spelling ‘Cat’ if you spotted them the ‘C’ and the ‘T,’ but they could explain a play as if it was a theorem,” said Williams, who was a defensive assistant for the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars last year. “And I’ve been around genius IQ types who have a hard time grasping spatial relationships on the field. Patrick gets the football part and has the ability to make it happen on the field.”
Witt, who had a shoulder injury in the preseason and a concussion against Cornell on Sept. 26, has completed 123 of 218 passes for 1,279 yards and eight touchdowns in seven games this season.
Yale isn’t the only Ivy League school that landed a transfer quarterback this season. Andrew Hatch, 23, started at Harvard in 2006, transferred to Louisiana State in 2007 and started for the Tigers in 2008 before he was felled by injuries.
Hatch, 6-foot-4 and 224 pounds, went back to Harvard this fall, where NCAA rules required him to sit out a season.
Faster cornerbacks
Witt says that most fans assume that there is a big difference in the level of play between the Big 12 and Ivy League, but aside from speed at cornerback and overall depth, he hasn’t seen it.
“You play to the level of your competition in terms of the speed of the game,” said Witt, who’s 6-4 and 220 pounds. “I think there are some guys here that could have played at Nebraska.”
Nebraska and LSU play in college football’s top level, what the NCAA calls its Football Bowl Subdivision. Ivy League schools are one level down in the Football Championship Subdivision.
Witt is applying to an honors major titled “Ethics, Politics and Economics.” If he isn’t accepted into the program, he’ll double major in political science and economics, he said.
Course load
He’s currently taking classes in the Political Philosophy of Abraham Lincoln, Comparative Welfare Policy in Developing Countries, Readings in American Literature and the History of the French Revolution.
“I enjoy the anonymity of being a football player at a place like Yale, where people don’t necessarily identify me as a football player,” he said.
Earlier this season, one of the students in Witt’s eight-person residential suite asked if he was going to the football tailgate. “I said ‘No, I’m on the team.’”
“I’m starting to identify myself outside of football, and Yale is giving me the opportunity to do that,” Witt said.
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