NEW YORK (AP) — Having waited 63 years for an Ivy League football title, Columbia had to stand by for another 40 minutes.
The Lions had beaten Cornell 17-9 but needed a Harvard loss against Yale to secure a share of first place on the season’s final day. So Columbia players retreated to their locker room on a hill a few hundred feet from Wien Stadium to watch the game in Boston on TV as a few hundred fans remained and gazed at the gold-and-orange foliage of Inwood Hill Park glowing in Saturday’s afternoon sun.
When Yale recovered onside kick with seconds left to ensure a 34-29 Harvard defeat, players let out a scream and streamed back onto the field to celebrate, smoke cigars, lift a trophy and sing “Roar, Lion, Roar” with family and friends.
Who would have thunk it?
“You had the realization of, oh, I’m a champion, which is something that hasn’t been said here in a while,” co-captain CJ Brown said.
Harvard dropped into a tie with Columbia and Dartmouth at 5-2, the first time three teams shared the title since 1982 — the conference doesn’t use tiebreakers.
“It was nerve-wracking, for sure, but definitely exciting because that’s something that not a lot of people have experienced, especially here,” running back Joey Giorgi said.
There have been several top players at Columbia — Sid Luckman, Marty Domres, Marcellus Wiley among them — but the school is perhaps better known for owners such as the New England Patriots’ Robert Kraft and former Cleveland Browns head Al Lerner.
Columbia’s only previous championship in 1961 also was shared with Harvard. That Lions team was coached by Buff Donelli, a former Pittsburgh Steelers and Cleveland Rams coach who scored for the Americans in soccer’s 1934 World Cup.
Columbia set a then Division I-AA record with 44 consecutive losses from 1983-88, a mark broken by Prairie View’s 80 in a row from 1989-98. Since 1971, the Lions’ only seasons with winning records until now were 1994, 1996, 2017, 2018, 2021 and 2022.
Al Bagnoli, who won nine Ivy titles in 23 years at Penn, couldn’t manage one at Columbia from 2015-22. He quit six weeks before the 2023 opener, citing health, and was replaced on an interim basis by Mark Fabish, his offensive coordinator.
Jon Poppe, now 39, was hired last December after working as a Bagnoli assistant at Columbia from 2015-17 between stints at Harvard from 2011-14 and 2017-22, plus one season as a head coach at Division III Union College.
He led the Lions to a 7-3 record overall, their most wins in a coach’s first season since George F. Sanford’s team went 9-3 in 1899.
Poppe had wife Anna and 7-year-old daughter with him in the locker room watching the countdown to the title.
“Sixty-three years of whatever into now,” he said. “Just seeing a lot of that history myself, personally. This is a hugely — a feeling of elation, seeing my dad on the field, a lot of emotional things with that.”
Before a crowd of 4,224, quarterback Caleb Sanchez’s 1-yard touchdown run put Columbia ahead in the second quarter. Giorgi’s 1-yard TD run opened a 14-3 lead in the third and Hugo Merry added a 25-yard field goal in the fourth, overcoming three field goals by Alan Zhao.
Giorgi rushed for 165 yards and finished his career with 2,112, second in school history. He and Brown missed what would have been their freshman season in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. Given Columbia’s athletic history — the most successful sport is fencing — it is not an obvious football destination.
“I saw the dedication, whether it resulted in wins or losses,” Brown said. “I saw their dedication to the product that they put out on the field and also the athletic department, the facilities that we had here, the busses on schedule and stuff, I was like, OK, they care about their athletes. People here want to win and it doesn’t matter what’s happened in the past, it matters what we’re going to do now.”
Poppe cited a mindset.
“You get 10 opportunities, unlike other sports, it is a grind to play this sport and prepare the way we do just for 10,” he said.
As the final whistle sounded in Boston, Brown noted an unusual initial reaction in the locker room.
“It was like kind of awe when they recovered the kick,” he said. “It was a lot quieter than you would think it would be, but you could feel the joy and the elation.”
They accomplished what more than six decades of their predecessors had failed to.
As the players headed out, Poppe had a final word.
“Day off tomorrow,” he said.
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