Yale Quarterback Chooses Harvard Game Over Rhodes Scholarship

Patrick Witt, star quarterback of Yale's football team, decided to pull his Rhodes Scholarship application in order to play in the Harvard-Yale football game this coming Saturday, Bloomberg News and the Yale Daily News are reporting.

Patrick Witt, star quarterback of Yale's football team, decided to pull his Rhodes Scholarship application in order to play in the Harvard-Yale football game this coming Saturday, Bloomberg News and the Yale Daily News are reporting. Witt faced a very enviable dilemma this Saturday that made for some good college-football headlines to balance out all those bad ones: choose between going to Atlanta for his last interview as a Rhodes Scholarship finalist and quarterbacking Yale's football team in its last game of the season against Harvard, known on the two Ivy campuses as simply "The Game." "If he had chosen to stay in the running for the Rhodes, Witt would have had to travel to Emory University in Atlanta for the interview, which was to begin at 8 a.m., just four hours before the Bulldogs’ kickoff against the Crimson at noon in New Haven," the Yale Daily News reports. Instead of making that 900-mile Atlanta-to-New Haven commute, Witt told the world in a press release, "I have withdrawn my application for the Rhodes Scholarship. My focus this week is solely on preparing for the game alongside my teammates and coaches." But don't cry too much for Witt: he's already been offered a job at Boston Consulting Group, and at 22, can still reapply for the Rhodes next year before his 24th birthday, Bloomberg reports.