Position of Power

HANOVER, N.H.—For the last 13 years, a date with Dartmouth has meant an almost-guaranteed easy win for the Harvard football team. The Crimson didn’t think it would come so easily this year, but for the first half of play at Memorial Field, it seemed that nothing had changed.

Harvard (5-2, 3-1 Ivy) overpowered the resurgent Big Green (4-3, 1-3) early, jumping out to a 24-0 lead and cruising to a 30-14 victory—its seventh straight against Dartmouth—on Saturday afternoon.

“They’re a good football team,” said Big Green coach Buddy Teevens. “They played well, better than we did today. We spotted them a bunch of points early on and played better in the second half, but just didn’t convert enough to close the gap.”

In his first start of the season, junior Collier Winters guided the Crimson to 480 yards of total offense in its most balanced performance of the season. Harvard gained 233 yards on the ground and 247 in the air.

“We felt like we wanted to diversify and balance our offense,” Harvard coach Tim Murphy said. “We’ve been a pass-first team for a long time, and after the Brown game this year and the injuries to all of our quarterbacks, we became a run-first team. And we’re getting back now to being the type of team we want to be—as balanced and as unpredictable as possible.”

The Crimson received the opening kickoff and used a 14-play drive—seven run plays and seven pass plays—to get into the endzone. After a reception by senior Mike Cook brought Harvard to the one-yard line, Winters punched the ball in himself for his first of two rushing touchdowns on the afternoon.

Harvard followed up with a run-dominated, 87-yard drive that culminated in another Winters dash into the endzone. In the first quarter of play, Harvard held the ball for 11:17, limiting Dartmouth to just 39 yards of offense and silencing the homecoming crowd.

“We knew going into the game that this was probably going to be the biggest game they’ve had in a while—at homecoming, they’re playing really well,” Winters said. “That was our focus, to just come out and really take that momentum and take the spirit out of them, and just really get on top of them in the first half. I think we accomplished that.”

On the first drive of the second quarter, freshman David Mothander booted a 43-yard field goal—the longest of his young collegiate career—to extend the lead to 17-0.

The bulk of the Crimson’s yardage on that drive came from a trick play that put the ball in Cook’s hands.

The wide receiver found junior Adam Chrissis, who led the team with seven catches for 86 yards, 35 yards downfield.

As the offense was rolling, the defense got into a groove as well. When the Big Green’s offense—led by star tailback Nick Schwieger—began to settle in early in the second quarter, sophomore linebacker Josh Boyd made a big stop by intercepting a Connor Kempe pass at the Harvard 29-yard line. Boyd ran the ball back 45 yards to set up the Crimson’s third touchdown of the day.

“You still have to stop the run, and you’re not going to completely do it against a team like this,” Murphy said. “But we never really gave them a chance to be in a rhythm. There were a lot of second and longs. We did a great job, at least in the first half, of converting our defensive stops on third down, and those things were huge.”

Rushes by senior Gino Gordon and sophomore Treavor Scales set up a 10-yard touchdown pass from Winters to Chrissis for the 24-0 lead.

Dartmouth got on the scoreboard for the first time with 2:24 left in the first half when cornerback Shawn Abuhoff returned a punt 82 yards for a touchdown.

Mothander split the uprights with an easy 27-yard field goal as time expired to give Harvard a 27-7 lead heading into the half—and ensuring that the Crimson scored points on each of its five first-half drives.

“We struggled a little bit defensively, we didn’t tackle particularly well,” Teevens said. “They just had a lot of plays in that first half.”

Riding its big lead, Harvard let up a bit in the second half. Mothander’s third field goal of the afternoon—this time a kick from 35 yards out—put the Crimson up by 23, but the Big Green fed off the crowd’s energy and the excitement of a televised game to orchestrate a bit of a comeback.

Near the end of the third quarter, a series of runs by Schwieger—who leads the league with 129.7 rushing yards per game—and a long pass to Tim McManus set up a 40-yard field-goal attempt by Foley Schmidt.

Although Schmidt’s kick went wide right, Dartmouth found the endzone on its next possession.

Long completions to wideouts Michael Reilly and Tanner Scott set up a five-yard score by Dominic Pierre, who was called into action when Schwieger went down with a minor injury.

Pierre’s run made it a two-score game with 10:46 to play, and once the Big Green got the ball back, it drove all the way down to the Harvard seven. But Kempe threw three straight incompletions to turn the ball over on downs and seal the win for the Crimson.

Scales picked up 24 yards rushing on the drive to finish the game with 124 total. In the battle between the Ancient Eight’s two most prolific rushers, Gordon came out on top, amassing 93 yards to Schwieger’s 69.

“It’s a shame, because it was a good turnout, certainly being on TV and everything else, but Harvard is a good football team, and they didn’t help us,” Teevens said. “They didn’t turn the football over, they didn’t make mental mistakes. They had one coverage lapse, and unfortunately we missed the throw. And outside of that, they played a pretty solid football game.”

—Staff writer Kate Leist can be reached at kleist@fas.harvard.edu.