Crimson Seeks Return To Former Glory

No one wants to look back and have to confront the specter of What Could Have Been.

After all, revisiting the past—effectively poring over every mistake and decision gone awry—is disappointing, fruitless and more than a little frustrating.

But for the Harvard football team, just two years removed from a perfect season, that is exactly what Saturday’s return to the storied and familiar Yale Bowl will do.

For if everything had gone the Crimson’s way this year—and most certainly, it didn’t—the historic 120th edition of The Game would have had the potential to be the finale of Harvard’s legendary 2001 season all over again, right there on the Bulldogs’ (6-3, 4-2 Ivy) home turf. The Crimson (6-3, 3-3) would have gotten the highly-anticipated, championship-determining send-off in New Haven that so many had initially projected this year’s Game to be.

“We certainly expect it to have title implications,” Harvard coach Tim Murphy said less than two weeks ago, when both Harvard and the surging Bulldogs were still in the thick of the Ivy League race. “It has the potential to be one of the biggest Harvard-Yale games in recent memory.”

But of course, that was then and this is now.

Such excited conjecture has long since faded away, disappearing with the waning days of mid-November and a heartbreaking 2003 campaign.

For Harvard, “potential” is now nothing more than the maddening memory of What Could Have Been.

And though it may seem like some time since the Crimson last was undefeated, the very recognition of that reality is still disconcerting.

Especially when one looks back and sees a team that once had every reason to expect it all.

Falling from Grace

In the alternate universe where an undefeated Harvard didn’t drop two straight games against the weakest part of its schedule, you get to muse about how beautiful it will be for the Crimson’s flawless season to wrap up on a frosty afternoon in a certain Connecticut ghetto, and this paragraph isn’t being written.

But throw in a couple of turnovers, some select injuries, poorly timed penalties, a few botched field goals and voila, there you have it: a legitimate championship-ruining formula.

Junior quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick kicked off the Crimson season leading the unranked team to four straight wins—including a victory over preseason No. 1 and then-No. 10 Northeastern—on the strength of a stratospheric four-game stretch in which he led all of Division I-AA in total offense and passing efficiency.

With averages of 282.3 yards per game through the air and a stunning 96.5 yards on the ground—accumulating 16 total touchdowns and an early slot on the Payton Award watch-list—let’s just say that you didn’t merely want Ryan Fitzpatrick on your Ivy League fantasy football team.

You craved him.

You needed him.

And then, imagine if, right then and there—at the height of that feeling, as you drooled at the prospect of 40 touchdowns prorated to the Crimson’s 10-game season—you lost him.

Silently, and on the helmet of an unknowing Cornell defender who hadn’t even known what he’d done, to boot. In a fluke collision of hard Riddell plastic to golden right hand, there was an impact that Harvard players still have trouble grappling with.

“I don’t really like to look into the past,” freshman tailback Clifton Dawson says. “I think that each game, we go in with a great game plan and with great guys who can make all the plays at each position. And with the games that [junior quarterback] Garrett [Schires] played in [replacing Fitzpatrick], he worked very hard in preparing, and worked very hard at giving us a great chance to win…Ryan brought a lot of things that Garrett may not have, but we still had a great opportunity to win.”

And ultimately, Dawson’s right. The Harvard Crimson, after all, is a team—not just one man—and the players competed hard, as they always did, even though No. 14 was missing.

“Many people blame our losses on the injuries we’ve sustained,” says senior safety Chris Raftery. “However, I really believe that is not the answer at all. Everyone that has had to fill in for a spot has played very well, showing that our depth is definitely a strength.”

Dawson exemplifies that fact.

The Northwestern transfer stepped up time and time again in Fitzpatrick’s absence, scampering for an amazing four touchdowns on 219 yards against Lafayette, the first game after the Big Red Mishap.

In fact, since the Cornell game, Dawson has averaged 137 yards rushing for Harvard, finding the end zone on 11 different occasions—compared to the meager 57 yards per game and three touchdowns tallied beforehand while he was still being integrated into the Harvard offense.”

And the Crimson did the job, for a time. Schires, Dawson, junior wideout Brian Edwards, the injury-plagued offensive line, senior cornerback Benny Butler—who leads the Ivy League in interceptions—and captain linebacker Dante Balestracci eked out victories. The wins weren’t pretty, but they were gutsy. The team, on both sides of the ball, had their troubles—field goal kicking and pass protection, to name a couple—but when all was said and done, Harvard rolled to a 6-0 record, even hovering around the 20’s in the Division I-AA polls.

And just when the Crimson seemed to shift to cruise control, the wheels came off.

As Fitzpatrick made his first return to the field midway through the Dartmouth game on Nov. 1, the Crimson fell apart around him. Harvard suddenly seemed unable to find its previous momentum, dropping two in a row to the formerly cellar-dwelling Big Green and then Columbia.

Those two teams had a combined four wins to Harvard’s six at the time of their respective match-ups with the Crimson.

Harvard’s point output in those two contests compared to that of its lowly opponents? 29 to 46.

“Every game there was something different that contributed to us ultimately losing games,” Butler says. “I think for the past three games we just could not get all three units—offense, defense, special teams—to play well as a whole.”

Raftery agrees.

“More than anything else, it has been those breakdowns [on both sides of the ball] that have lead to the losses,” he says.

But as Dawson frames it, that’s how things go sometimes—even though, when the dust settled, the Crimson couldn’t really believe its eyes.

“I would be lying if I said that I didn’t expect to be 9-0 going into the Yale game,” Dawson says. “But that’s just not how things work out within this league, especially with the talent on each team so close together. You can’t take anyone too lightly—not that we did—but I just don’t know whether we did the things we needed to in order to win those games like we had with the first six.”

Factor in a final, valiant eight-point loss against then-No. 8 Penn that culminated in a failed comeback bid somewhere on the Quakers’ five yard line, and they all imply that it is indeed tough.

It’s tough not to head into this Saturday feeling like this was the season—for all its initial hype and potential—left unfinished.

Battling for Position

So The Game admittedly isn’t going to be worth much in the grand scheme of lofty Ivy League standings, championships and statistics. There’s no three-way tie for first, no share of the conference title to be had—though everyone would obviously like things to be a little more dramatic for No. 120.

What it is going to be instead is a battle for second-place in the Ivy League, for the second straight time. But Harvard’s entire season will be at stake—at least numerically.

Harvard and Yale currently sit at 6-3 overall, with Harvard No. 3 in the Ivy League, and Yale No. 2. Both squads are distantly behind the 9-0 Quakers—who have long since wrapped up the Ivy League crown—but a look down the Ivy standings reveals something intriguing.

On the one hand, a Harvard victory at the Yale Bowl this weekend would ensure it second place, and drop Yale down to No. 3.

But alternatively, a Crimson loss—and a victory by Brown, Columbia, or Dartmouth, all of whom have losing overall records—would officially give Harvard a sub-.500 Ivy record and no higher than a fourth-place finish behind one of those “lower-tier” teams.

Players like Butler, though, dismiss the numbers and continue to focus on the only goal in mind.

“The fact that those teams finish ahead of us means nothing to me motivation-wise,” Butler says. “[That we’re playing] for first place and second place in the league means nothing. Our motivation is to win our last game and to send my senior teammates out on top.”

Winning The Game, though, is more easily said than done. And then there are the ranks of seniors who will be playing the last game of their college career.

Of Dogfighting and Aerial Assaults

Not the least of those seniors is Yale quarterback Alvin Cowan, who will guide the Bulldog attack against Harvard counterpart Ryan Fitzpatrick on Saturday.

And interestingly enough, the teams of these two dynamic signal-callers have followed strangely similar paths on the way to their deceptively good seasons.

Yale got out to a fast start behind Cowan, New Haven’s own Payton Award-candidate, who led the Bulldogs to a school-record 62-28 victory over Towson in the first contest of the year. Following that game, Yale reeled off three straight wins, and the senior—over the full nine-game span to date—has been averaging 284 passing yards per game and has tossed 20 touchdowns, adding an additional seven trips to the end zone on foot.

“Yale [is] a tremendously balanced and outstanding football team. They’re good on special teams, they’re good on defense, they’re especially good on offense,” Murphy says. “[And Cowan is] not unlike Ryan Fitzpatrick—very mobile, very versatile, and he’s been a tremendous catalyst for their offensive success. You throw in a couple of outstanding running backs, a tight end that’s an NFL prospect, big wide receivers, arguably the best offensive line in the Ivy League—there’s a lot to contend with there.”

And still the similarities between the squads extend far beyond their depth charts.

Yale—like the Crimson—also lost a narrow game to Penn, the Bulldogs’ contest decided by a single overtime field goal.

Yale—like the Crimson—also edged out a scrappy Princeton team, needing one more overtime period than Harvard did to defeat the Tigers.

And finally, the Bulldogs have also struggled of late, dropping three of their last five games while the Crimson has notched three straight losses.

Indeed, if the comparable rise and precipitous falls of these two squads’ parallel paths have shown us anything, it’s that The Game is definitely going to be a competitive one—despite the absence of the aura of 2001—or even 2002—when a fortuitous Quaker loss would have still given Harvard a share of the Ivy League title.

“Obviously, we aren’t pleased with the way things have turned out,” Raftery says. “But we still are confident that we are a premier team in this league, and this nation for that matter.  We know we can play with the best in [Division I-AA], and we want to go out and show that this Saturday.  We really don’t need any more motivation than that.”

In the Air Tonight

Nevertheless, it’s still distressing to look back.

It’s hard for Murphy, Fitzpatrick, Dawson, Butler and Raftery—and especially all the seniors—because while they look forward to Saturday, they know that this year could have been that undefeated season they had hoped for and expected.

And The Game, in that context, could have been the ultimate way to end a career.

But there’s a reason that Harvard-Yale remains one of the premiere rivalries in all of sports. There’s a real reason that it has been the highlight for more than a century’s worth of frigid autumns.

As you step foot in dodgy New Haven, Conn. on Saturday afternoon, with thousands of your classmates around you, at least take solace in this fact.

Because if there’s anything redeeming about this contest, anything that separates Harvard-Yale from all other games of its kind, it is that on this day, The Game will be the one game that truly matters.