E to the U du dx,
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E to the X dx.
Cosine, secant, tangent, sine
3-point-14159.
Integral radical mu dv
Slipstick, sliderule, MIT.
Go Tech!
— An official MIT cheer
This is what Justin Wallace did last summer, as he describes it:
“I worked as an intern at Ball Aerospace putting together essentially a front-end visualization in a web browser to take satellite data and view it on 3-D projections of the globe, creating a vision for a potential ground system where you could view real-time (space) events without special, custom hardware.”
This is what Justin Wallace has been doing with some of his time this fall:
Rushing for the fifth highest yards-per-game average (156.9) in Division III and scoring 17 touchdowns for an unbeaten Massachusetts Institute of Technology football team that has not only made the post-season for the first time in its history but also won its first game in the NCAA Division III tournament last week.
What Fremd High School graduate Wallace did over the summer is expected of a student at a place where the attention-getting record of intellectual success includes 81 Nobel Prize winners.
That unexpected football success also can be a noble calling at MIT has attracted a slew of recent media attention, so irresistible is the contrast between the school’s egghead image and the seemingly hard-boiled reality of its 10-0 football team.
That portrayal is both exaggerated and a trifle condescending, even if “Nerd Pride” is a registered MIT trademark.
“The ‘nerds playing football’ trope that seems to drive most of the outside coverage is so far from reality as to be uninteresting to most MIT students,” said senior Austin Hess of Mechanicsburg, Pa., editor of the twice-weekly school newspaper, the Tech. “After all, most of us know people in technical majors who do all sorts of activities.”
The so-called trope fails to recognize Wallace and his teammates for the dedication and talent that has MIT playing at Wesley (Del.) in a second-round game Saturday.
“I think we are taking this as being teased in a good-natured way,” MIT Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart said.
Wallace, a senior named the New England Football Conference’s offensive player of the year, chose MIT because he was a space junkie who wanted to keep playing football at a school with a renowned aerospace engineering program.
The school’s career rushing leader, Wallace switched majors last year to computer science and engineering.
“I realized the stuff I enjoyed doing in aero/ astro always involved computer science,” Wallace said.
Wallace is among five Chicago area players on the team . The others are junior QB Danny Callahan of Hinsdale Central, sophomore receiver Matt Lindsay of Wheaton Academy and junior offensive lineman Matthew Hildner of Oswego East and Joe Cunningham of St. Ignatius, all reserves, all majoring in computer science, engineering and math.
“We are at MIT, so academics obviously has to come first, but we spend as much time as we can on football,” Wallace said.
That time also helps Wallace during the frequent occasions he feels swamped by schoolwork.
“Football is the calming point, the thing where I can forget about academics for couple hours a day, just play and hit people,” Wallace said.
MIT limits its players to to two hours of practice and football activities per day, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., a window when there are no classes. Even then, sixth-year coach Chad Martinovich sometimes won’t have his full team because players sometimes miss practice at moments when the academic burden gets overwhelming.
That Martinovich’s job before this one was four years as defensive coordinator at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) made him familiar with what Wallace calls “the worthwhile challenge” MIT football players face.
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“I had a pretty good understanding of the engineer mentality, the math-science mentality, how analytical they are and how seriously they taketheir academics,” Martinovich said.
“But until you get to MIT, you don’t understand the commitment level in terms of academic work load. It took some trial and error the first couple seasons until we got a system inpace that allows them to spend the time they need academically and still prepare to win football games on Saturdays.”
Martinovich is just the second head coach in the official modern era of MIT football, which began in 1988. (A club team founded in the 1970s had revived a program that previously existed from 1881 through 1901.) This year has produced not only MIT’s first perfect regular season since 1881 (3-0) and first conference title but a third straight winning record after having gone 12 seasons without one.
“We have a different morale now,” Wallace said. “You don’t see peoples’ heads dropping when we face adversity. Where last year, we lost a couple close games, this year we didn’t flinch and ended up winning.”
That was the case at Maine Maritime, when Wallace’s career-high 261 rushing yards on 213 carries rallied MIT from a nine-point deficit in the third quarter, as well as in the first-round playoff game at Husson (Maine.) MIT fell behind Husson three times, sent the game to overtime on a field goal as time ran out in the fourth quarter and won 27-20.
The triumph hasn’t exactly caused football fever among the 4,500 undergraduates at MIT, where home games are played in a stadium with a seating capacity of 1,200. But interest has increased: An overflow crowd of 1,500 watched the fourth of five home games, and the home finale drew 1,156.
“The student-athlete population here really supports each other,” Wallace said. “Outside that, everyone is so wrapped up in academics, they don’t have too much recognition or awareness of (MIT) football.”
So it seems ironic the team’s success has drawn coverage from the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Newsweek and national newcasts of NBC, CBS and ABC. And it even has come up in recent staff meetings with faculty.
“Unusually,” Chancellor Barnhart said, “football is the first topic of conversation.”
So MIT apparently can have its pi and eat it, too.
Twitter @olyphil