Yale’s head football coach Thomas Williams ’92 M.A. ’95 is being investigated by Yale University following a Nov. 17 story in The New York Times questioning whether Williams was a Rhodes Scholar candidate, as he said on his resume.

Williams, who was a starting linebacker and team captain his senior year when the Cardinal finished No. 9 in the national polls, also spent three years as an assistant coach at Stanford from 2002 to 2004.

The controversy began when Yale quarterback Patrick Witt was nominated for the scholarship. An interview for the scholarship fell on the same day as the Yale versus Harvard game, and Witt sought advice from Williams who said he faced a similar situation at Stanford. Witt eventually decided to stay and play the game.

However following a question by The New York Times, the Rhodes Trust said they had no record of Williams ever applying. The Rhodes Trust said it keeps records for people even if they end up withdrawing their application.

Williams maintains Stanford did endorse him, however he did not advance as far as Witt, claiming the interview was informal. John Pearson of Stanford’s Bechtel International Center, which is in charge of advising students about the Rhodes Scholarship on campus, declined to give information to The New York Times.

“We feel that we cannot provide information that pertains to the record of someone who was a Stanford student unless we received permission from that student,” Pearson told The New York Times.

Williams said he has never claimed to be a Rhodes finalist, and wasn’t surprised that the Rhodes Trust had no record of him because he didn’t ever formally apply after receiving a nomination from a faculty member.  Numerous articles over the past few weeks have listed him as a Rhodes scholar finalist, and a Yale alumni magazine in 2009 also says that Williams was a finalist.

-Brendan O’Byrne