Behind Hempel, Harvard Dominates Princeton, 49-7

Time off has been proven to improve job performance. If you don’t believe that, you weren’t at Powers Field Saturday.

After missing a month with an injured back, senior quarterback Conner Hempel returned to put together a career performance while guiding the Harvard football team to a 49-7 thumping of Princeton. He finished with a career-high 382 yards and three touchdowns.

Hempel’s first pass failed to find the hands of wideout Andrew Fischer, but 20 of his next 22 passes moved Harvard down the field. One of those came after Hempel evaded two free rushers to find Joseph Foster for a 39-yard score—the first of the game. Another put Harvard up 14-0 after hitting Seitu Smith in stride down the sideline on a 49-yard touchdown pass.

Hempel also scored twice with his legs in the first half, showing no signs of injury-related limitations, before entering halftime with a 28-0 lead.

Of course, Harvard boasted a big lead the last time the Crimson faced the Tigers in New Jersey, too. Then-quarterback Colton Chapple ’13 broke the Harvard passing record in that game after helping Harvard build a 24-point fourth-quarter lead. He was garnering Athlete-of-the-Week talk in the press box before that lead began to corrode.

Princeton went on to score 29 unanswered points to stun the previously-undefeated Crimson, 39-34.
Harvard coach Tim Murphy said he will remember that collapse to his grave. Hopefully he remembers Hempel’s performance Saturday too. The senior made sure there would be no sequel to 2012’s tragedy, putting Harvard up 42-0 in the fourth quarter before being pulled from the game.

Afterwards, Tigers coach Bob Surace said he expected Hempel to return Saturday, and even still could not stop him. He could only think of one other player who had impacted a game as much as Hempel did Saturday.

“We have free rushers on him, he escapes us and throws a touchdown pass. There’s two or three times he scrambles for first downs. A couple times, I thought he was going to throw into an area where I thought we had him covered, and he held it and pumped the ball and threw it the other way,” Surace said. “Credit him, that was probably one of the two finest performances against us.”

Surace added that he saw a fresh Hempel on the field. His Tigers defense tallied seven sacks of Hempel in last year’s 51-48 triple-overtime win in Cambridge, but brought him down just once Saturday.

That had a lot to do with a Harvard offensive line which boasts two future NFLers in the eyes of Surace, who spent five years as a Bengals line coach, but Hempel also displayed some tendencies the Princeton coach had only seen in another pro player.

“I played with Jason Garrett, and unfortunately we didn’t block as well as we could have at times, and he had that same unique ability to spin out, like he’d sense a guy coming free and would have the same unique ability to do that,” Surace said. “Not every quarterback can do that."

Murphy said his coaches were excited to reinsert Hempel’s improvisational ability back into their offense. They needed it, too. In the team’s four games without Hempel, it scored fewer than 26 points three times. You would have to go back to 2009 to find a season in which Harvard scored fewer than 26 points three times in an entire season.

Despite the lack of production in his absence, Hempel said he was not surprised by how much success his offense had Saturday.

His performance earned him Ivy League Offensive Player of the Week honors, though he has to share the award with Yale quarterback Morgan Roberts. Roberts is second in the FCS with 334 yards passing per game. After topping last year’s offensive player of the year, Princeton signal-caller Quinn Epperly, Hempel will have an opportunity to indirectly prove his superiority to Roberts when Harvard travels to Dartmouth.

The still-undefeated Big Green beat Yale, 38-31, two weeks ago, intercepting Roberts three times in the process.

—Staff writer Jacob Feldman can be reached at jacob.feldman@thecrimson.com.