Juilliard to Add Football Program in 2026; Renowned Cellist Yo-Yo Ma to Lead Search Committee for Head Coach
Reported by Geoff Wolfe. Special to the Loser Chronicles
Lost in the controversy surrounding the financial and competitive failures of Rutger’s football team a decade after it joined the Big Ten, is news that another fabled school from the New York Tri-State area is launching an exploratory committee to field a football team in 2026.
If you can knock out two flawless etudes, break off a dazzling solo and nail a representative sampling of standard orchestral excerpts – all under the withering scrutiny of the school’s famously demanding faculty -- you stand a chance of playing Juilliard football in the fall of 2026. With more musical prodigies per square inch than anywhere else on earth, Juilliard is the last place one would expect to have a football program. But in just three years, the Juilliard campus will fill with the sounds of Chopin, Mozart, and the violent cacophony of helmets colliding in ¾ time.
“For years, famous alums and board members lobbied for a football program on par with the Ivies,” said Juilliard President Damian Woetzel. “We’ve resisted since the fierce contact you tend to see in football is not automatically conducive to world-class musicianship. I don’t care if you’re a 275-pound French horn player or an oboist built like a brick shithouse, you get caught under a pile of Harvard undergrads, you’re putting your fingering technique at grave risk, grave risk.”
But influential alums, like celebrated cello virtuoso Yo-Yo Ma, prevailed upon Woetzel to consider adding a football program, after a three-year intra-campus experiment with an organized flag football league.
“Granted, you’re not going to see a classically trained bassoonist taken out by a late hit in a flag football game, but it gave skeptics an idea of how football could help shape a young musician’s ability to perform in the rough and tumble of the recital hall,” said Ma. “The task before us is to find a head coach that understands Juilliard’s mission and values and can work with highly-talented, emotionally fragile youngsters who can be taught to apply proper bowing technique to pass defense. We may have to think outside the box on this since the only person that immediately springs to mind is Zubin Mehta, and he’s booked through 2028.”
In 2012, Big Ten Commission Jim Delany, who had led the conference for 30 years and was widely viewed as a visionary, brought in several mediocre football schools – specifically, Maryland and Rutgers. Since joining the league, Rutgers has compiled the worst record in the Big Ten; opponents have shut them out 14 times in that span.
Juilliard Board Member Julian Barnes says that Juilliard has studied Rutger’s program and has learned from its missteps.
“We are committed to building the infrastructure required to support a quality football program,” said Barnes. “A place to play is obviously our first priority, and a place to train, and a staff with a background in high-level collegiate athletics. We will also ensure that the players have the right medical coverage. There’s a big difference in how a trombonist is treated for tennis elbow and how a trombonist who plays fullback on Saturday is treated for a traumatic head injury.”
Barnes is optimistic that Juilliard will be up for the challenge. “Going from the bright lights of the concert hall to the bright lights of big-time athletics will be a challenge, but so is negotiating a Bach fugue.”
While eleven-year-old violin prodigy Sasha Rabinowitz will have graduated before then, he likes the “idea” of Juilliard’s finest suiting up and “knocking the snot out of Princeton and Yale,” though he has concerns. “Put us up against the Princeton marching band, no prob. But real football with real tackling? I don’t know where we’re going to get players from. There are tons of kids like me running around who couldn’t even attend a game unless accompanied by an adult. Woodwinds and strings, they’re wimps even by music geek standards. I’ve seen some beefy brass players walking around campus and a percussionist or two who might have game. And there are a handful of tenors in the opera section that are pushing 300 pounds.”
Rabinowitz paused as if mentally working through a knotty Schoenberg suite. “But let’s be real: if we were to play MIT tomorrow, we’d get crushed. And what can possibly be more embarrassing than getting pounded by a bunch of chemical engineers who don’t know a bass clef from a cleft palate?”
Yo-Yo Ma adamantly refuses to “in any way compromise the school’s rigorous standards of musicianship” in order to field a competitive football team.
“I don’t care if you’re 260 and can run a 4.2 forty…if you can’t handle the subtleties of a Chopin nocturne or a difficult Liszt sonata, there’s no place for you at Juilliard. But if you are 260 and do run a 4.2 forty, you may want to consider a less demanding musical passage for your entrance audition – an imaginatively re-arranged Billy Joel composition, for instance. Or apply to our drama division. On second thought, you may want to apply to the dance division, which is probably the easiest to get into, but then again, I don’t know how many parts in the classic dance repertory call for men that size.”
Geoff Wolfe is a great writer...and I love his spelling :)
this piece reminds of the glory days of the Sportsman's Daily!!