This week the NFL season resumed after a one-week hiatus and all over Washington University’s campus, students were tossing around the old pigskin in both pickup and IM games.
Fraternity Row also has its own football intramural league which participates in inter-fraternity competitions every year. The two fraternities pitted against one another on this particular day were Zeta Beta Tau and Phi Delta Theta. Phi Delt usually stacks up as the fraternity to beat every year, so they were obviously the favorites in this matchup.
“I expect us to win considering how we did last season. I expect the game to be close but I expect us to rise to our full potential. Really the goal is to win the whole thing, not just this game, but the whole IM championship,” said Marcus Thorpe of Phi Delt.
Already Phi Delt has played in one match against SAE and won by the score of 14-13. The game against ZBT was supposed to be just as close. This meant that even though the games are good-natured, there would be some intense competition.
“Games get pretty heated sometimes. There is more of a rivalry between frats compared to just a group of friends playing. Everyone tries to look good and wants to win,” said Thorpe.
The stage was then set for a showdown between two groups of men trying to represent their fraternities to the best of their abilities. The weather could not have been more perfect for football-cool and overcast. The teams seemed evenly matched at kick-off time.
However only minutes into the game it became apparent why Phi Delt had the reputation as the team to beat. Their dominance could be seen even on the first defensive series when the sacked the ZBT quarterback and then forced the ZBT center to pitch a handoff well over the quarterback’s head in consecutive downs.
ZBT did have their moments, mainly due to the scrambling abilities of their quarterback, but in the end they were just beaten by the better team by the score of 26-12. The interception of the ZBT quarterback during the final play epitomized the whole game.
Despite the fact that some people in Phi Delt predicted the game would be closer no one was surprised that the game turned out to be a rout.
“We heard they are a little better this year than last year, but so are we, so we thought we could take them,” said Phi Delt’s David Dantzler. “We just try to go out there and have fun. The cornerbacks were giving us a large cushion so we were exploiting the short stuff.”
Paul Scolds, also of Phi Delt, seconded that opinion. “They were giving us eight to 10 yards so we were using a lot of slants and hitches,” he said.
It was true that the passing game of Phi Delt was crisp but there may have been more to it than just the 8- to 10-yard cushion ZBT gave Phi Delt receivers.
“Our quarterback [former varsity footballer Joshua Schubkegel] always told us that when we take the field pretend that the football is like a roll of toilet paper and it is a lot easier to catch,” said Scolds.
In general the game was very cleanly played but a lot of Phi Delt players complained about the ZBT quarterback, whom they accused of deliberately diving to draw penalties.
“Their quarterback did take a lot of fake falls,” said Dantzler.
“He was probably upset, he was getting really disappointed,” said Scolds.
“We were kind of being jerks out there too at some points, yelling at the refs a lot during plays,” added Dantzler.
No one on ZBT wanted to comment after the game. Just another week in the crazy world of IM fraternity football.
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