Ah, the heyday of football. Leather helmets, salaries that rivaled the best that gas stations and indentured servitude had to offer, and the unfettered freedom for players to bash their skulls into other players’ craniums in the hope of achieving glory. Were we ever that great? Alas, Jim Brown, we hardly knew ye.

Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune seems to think differently. Chapman wants Harvard and Yale to bail on intercollegiate football. After all, “Ivy League football is no longer a big deal on the intercollegiate sports scene.” (Was it ever? ‘There goes Barnaby Farnsworth! Touchdown! Harvard wins the Pudding Bowl!’) To continue to support football at these glorious ivory institutions would render the Ivies, in Chapman’s estimation, “oblivious to growing evidence that it does grave and irreversible harm to mental functioning.”