Jonnie on the Spot: After Strange Plot Twists, Football Finds Happy Ending

One year ago, the Harvard football team wrapped up an unbeaten, untied season in New Haven, Conn.

Yesterday afternoon was just as perfect, even if the season that came before it wasn’t.

“We wanted to go out the right way,” said senior tailback Nick Palazzo after his team’s 20-13 win before a sellout crowd of 30,323 at Harvard Stadium. “Some of us seniors are going to be lucky enough to play again, but a lot of us won’t. We didn’t want to go out on a somber note. Coach said before the game, ‘You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you earn.’ And we earned this.”

You bet they did. The Crimson was up against two tough opponents—a determined Yale team that had won three games in a row and an angry Mother Nature that arrived at the Stadium with swirling, 35-mph winds, bringing the wind chill well below the innocuous game-time temperature of 43 degrees.

The cold, gray day and a stingy Bulldog defense combined to limit Harvard to 127 total yards and zero points in the first half. But, strangely enough, the decision that eventually won Harvard the game had been made by then.

With less than five minutes to play in the second quarter, Crimson coach Tim Murphy replaced pocket-passing senior captain Neil Rose with the more mobile Ryan Fitzpatrick. The change proved to be exactly what Harvard needed.

The Yale defense, which had been dominant up to that point, could no longer hang back and double-team do-all wideout Carl Morris, who had been limited to just one catch for 11 yards in the first half.

The result was a big second half for Morris (4 catches, 106 yards) and a 20-point third quarter for Harvard that gave it all the offense it needed to secure its first home defeat of its archrival since 1996.

“In the first half, we probably played the best defense we had all year,” said Yale linebacker Ken Estrera. “But then the quarterback change threw us off. It shouldn’t have, but it did.”

Just like that, the Crimson had its perfect ending, one it deserved after a difficult season that didn’t always go according to plan.

In the end, Harvard wasn’t very far off the mythical mark. But while the difference was small, it was there.

“When you win every game,” Murphy said, “you need to have three things. You need to have a great team, have great health, and get all of the big breaks. Last year, we had all of that.”

Last season, everything went right. This season, most things did, and the difference between “everything” and “most things” seems to roughly equate to the difference between a 9-0 record and a 7-3 mark.

After watching his 2002 team play for the last time on Saturday, Murphy was asked if he was as proud of this season’s team as he was of his champions last year.

His response was emphatic.

“Absolutely,” he said.

“As a class, this team has won more back-to-back games than any team in Ivy history,” Murphy said. “And today, I was just so pleased with how our guys responded. There was no championship on the line, but our guys played like it was.”

In many ways, Rose was a microcosm for this team. His season didn’t go exactly according to plan. He was hurt, missed games and, in the end, found himself on the sidelines for much of his final game while Fitzpatrick led his team to victory.

That’s an unbelievably difficult situation for someone who took last spring off to play in The Game one last time.

Rose, though, is a class act. When Murphy made the switch to Fitzpatrick on Saturday, it was easy to tell that everyone—including Rose himself—probably understood why.

“We talked about it last night, with the weather report,” Murphy said, “and it was a foregone conclusion that if we got into this type of game plan, [Fitzpatrick] was going to be the guy because he gives you that extra option that you don’t have with a pro-style quarterback like Neil.”

It will be hard for Murphy to watch this senior class leave, after all of the success he has enjoyed with them.

And it’s just as tough for the players themselves.

“I’m definitely going to miss this a lot,” said Morris, his place in the NFL Draft all but assured. “This team is like a family, and it hurts because I’m going to lose a lot of friends. We’re a real close team.

“It’s my time to go.”

Maybe so. The legacy of this senior class, though, will be sticking around for some time.

—Staff writer Jon P. Morosi can be reached at morosi@fas.harvard.edu.