THE COMMISH: Fitzpatrick Shines In First Game With Rams

Somewhere Harvard coach Tim Murphy sat and watched his TV. He must have known what was going to happen. Brian Edwards ’05 had to be thinking the same thing. Bobby Everett ’05 and anyone else who had been a part of Harvard football recently had to know how the game would end also.

In the back of my mind, even I knew. And it still seemed unreal when it happened.

We had all seen Ryan Fitzpatrick ’05 win games that already seemed long lost while wearing Crimson. It just didn’t seem right to think that a different uniform—or a different level of play—would make him forget how to do it.

Fitzpatrick’s performance on Sunday in his NFL debut was one of those moments in sports that comes straight from Hollywood. In fact, even Tinsel Town might have rejected this script for being too predictably cheesy.

If you’re still a little fuzzy on the details of what the former Harvard signal caller actually accomplished in his first meaningful professional game, here’s a condensed version to bring you up to speed.

Fitzpatrick entered the game for the Rams in the second quarter to replace the concussed Jamie Martin. Down 24-3 at the half to the Houston Texans, he engineered a dramatic second half comeback, which included scoring 10 points in final 30 seconds of regulation.

Fitzpatrick threw a 43 yard touchdown bomb to Isaac Bruce with 26 seconds left in the game, and then after the Rams recovered an onside kick delivered a 19 yard strike to Torry Holt to set up the game tying field goal.

He then capped the performance with a 56 yard game winning touchdown pass to Kevin Curtis in overtime.

Fitzpatrick ended the day with a gaudy 310 passing yards, three touchdowns, and a passer rating of 117.4.

To put Fitzpatrick’s performance in perspective, recall that Eli Manning—the first overall pick in 2004 and now the starting quarterback for the Giants—only has two career 300-plus yard passing games in his career. And that during his senior year for the Crimson in 2004, Fitzpatrick only managed one game in which he threw for more yards than he did on Sunday.

In an interview on ESPN radio Sunday night, Fitzpatrick jokingly commented that he hoped people would begin to learn his name now instead of just calling him “Harvard boy.” Although the FOX announcing team of Curt Menefee and J.C Pearson couldn’t immediately get his name straight—introducing him to the national TV audience as Ryan Patrick and then later referring to him as Brian Fitzpatrick—it’s safe to say that after the numbers he put up against the Texans, everyone in the NFL will know who Ryan Fitzpatrick is now.

The impressive statistics may have turned a few heads, but the result of the game—that Fitzpatrick found a way to win—seemed incredibly normal.

If you ignored the uniform and the new number, you could have imagined that this was Fitzpatrick leading Harvard to a comeback over Brown or Princeton. The magnitude of the stage didn’t seem to matter at all.

It was still football and it was still Fitzpatrick—as anyone who watched him over the past four years knows, that combination generally leads to a win.

After the game, Fitzpatrick told reporters that he wasn’t surprised at all.

Actually, neither were we.

Staff writer David H. Stearns can be reached at stearns@fas.harvard.edu