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In This Issue

• Facebook News Feed Charts Relationship's Ups, Downs, Wrongs
• Dr. Doom Next CU GOP Speaker
• Old Dogs, New SAT Rubrics
• Columbia U. Celebrates Halloween
• Cooch Drinks Hootch, Scootches
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Meanness
• Interviewing Marauder
• Escalators: Now at Your Local CIA Black Site
• Celebrity Trading Cards
• Real Parties for Which You're Not Voting
• Sound Advice for Celebrity-Starved Democrats
• A New PAC a Day Keeps the Devil Away
• Tables Turn on Foley's Accuser
• Five Senate Races to Watch
• Santorum v. Santorum
• Ten Things Not to Call an Opponent’s Campaign Staffer
• Forbidden Love
• Socialism Creeping
• CU Football Confesses Famous Losing Streak “Never Actually Ended”
• AVG
• The Fed Caption Contest
• Superman!
• Would You Know My Name If I Saw You in Prison?
• THEY Watch

Liam Carney

1996: A Columbia receiver makes a brilliant catch on a near-perfect play that would have given the Lions the lead. He is tackled by his shoelaces.

Columbia head football coach Victor Zimmerman shocked the campus yesterday with a public statement about the team's famous mid-1980s losing streak.

"After this long, we figured that it was about time to give up the ruse," Zimmerman said, "The losing streak never actually ended.  The football team hasn't won a game since the late seventies.  And even on those wins, some of the documentation is questionable."

"We would simply report scores to the Spectator, which would print them without question because there wasn't anyone at the games to verify them," Zimmerman explained.  "One day, one of the players told the Spec, as a joke, that we'd won, and it ended up on the front page the next day."

"I guess we were all too happy with the positive attention to admit the mistake," he concluded.

Stuck without pictures of the team's historic "win," Spectator editors apparently Photoshopped together a picture that could be construed as fans celebrating the victory.

"I think the picture was actually just a shot of a frat party, crudely pasted over some bleachers," Zimmerman remembered.

The Spectator has yet to comment, but some in the picture purport to remember the occasion.

"Oh, man, that day was great," said James Larson, CC '89, a member of Pi Kappa Alpha. "I remember just how I looked when they won.  I was doing my victory dance: one eye closed, left arm out to the side for balance, right arm holding a ping-pong ball, looking at some red cups."

Larson is doing precisely that in the picture, but he seemed to have little knowledge of the game's details.  He did not remember the score, and when asked who Columbia's opponent was, responded, "Um... hunh.  Oh, the Mets?"

Albert Aaronson, junior captain of the football team, said that the topic of publicizing the lie had come up several times in the past few years.

"We've been making up scores, faking a few wins occasionally since that day.  Some of the people who were more in favor of-so to speak-coming out about the secret, they started reporting more and more ridiculous scores to the Spec, hoping that we'd get caught.  First it was 72 to 69, then 11 to 1, then 45.7 to -3.  Nobody called us on it.  Damn if we didn't make a gross overestimation about how many people read the Spec sports page."

"Of course, it's not like I really knew what the scores were," Aaronson added, "I haven't actually gone to any games.  A lot of the players don't."

Asked whether the games are actually played, Aaronson "really [didn't] know."

"That type of thing is kind of what pushed us to the breaking point," he went on, "A bunch of us from the team were hanging out in EC, drinking some beer and watching college football, and somebody suggested that we go to a Columbia game some time.  It was pretty awkward when we realized that we were the football team.  But that's when we decided that the lie had to end, officially."

On how he retained his captainship with such poor attendance, Aaronson laughed as he explained, "Oh, the captain thing.  It goes to the first guy on the team alphabetically.  When I graduate in a couple years, Ben Anders will take it, unless somebody ‘before' him joins the team by then."  Aaronson added that the captainship is "mostly for show."

"Actually," he went on, "the coaching position works the same way.  Didn't you notice that Zimmy was a student?"  Victor Zimmerman is, in fact, a College sophomore.

"It's a pretty good system: first alphabetically - captain; last alphabetically - coach," Aaronson explained.  "It works."

"The craziest part of all is that I've heard some people suggest that Baker Field doesn't exist, and I don't know what to say to them," he continued, shaking his head, "I just don't know what to say."