FOOTBALL PREVIEW 2005: Can Two Play at This Game?

The story starts even before “the other guy” left.

“The other guy,” of course, is how Harvard coach Tim Murphy refers to Ryan Fitzpatrick ’05, the 2004 Ivy Player of the Year who captained the 2004 Harvard football team to a 10-0 season and became the first Ivy quarterback to be drafted since 1984. It’s unfair, Murphy said, to put a new signal caller up against

that standard.

But before Fitzpatrick made his triumphant departure, and before last year’s perfect season was even completed, the fight to fill his vacancy was already begun. It has continued from last fall’s junior varsity games through winter conditioning, from spring ball to summer practices and into the 2005 preseason.

The season begins Saturday. The quarterback search has been narrowed to two.

The story? Not even close to over.

FIRST AND TWO

Sophomore Liam O’Hagan had the chance to play Division I-A ball. A standout two-way athlete from the Breck School in Minnesota, he was recruited as a safety by Boston College, Colorado, Minnesota, and Vanderbilt.

His heart lay with the quarterback role, however. As a senior he threw for 55 touchdowns and 3,812 yards, leading his team to a state championship. He was considered the top Minnesota prospect at that position and a top 40 recruit nationwide.

When Harvard came calling, the offer of a job solely on the offensive side of the ball was too enticing to pass up.

“There’s nothing like running around hitting guys, tackling guys, making interceptions and stuff,” O’Hagan said, “but being the leader of the team and being in charge out there is really something that I love doing.”

Last fall, while the Crimson embarked on its title campaign, O’Hagan was essentially the third man on the depth chart, behind Fitzpatrick and senior Garrett Schires. He didn’t attempt a single pass in his three games of garbage time. His practice came with the JV squad, where he was in competition with classmate Chris Pizzotti for that third quarterback slot.

Like O’Hagan, Pizzotti saw almost no action in 2004, with his one appearance coming at the end Harvard’s season-opening 35-0 blowout of Holy Cross. And like O’Hagan, the 6’5 native of Reading, Mass., boasted an impressive high school resume. He was the Reading Memorial school record holder with 40 career touchdowns and 3,300 passing yards.

During the 2004 season and the winter conditioning that followed, the identity of Fitzpatrick’s successor was far from settled. Nevertheless, said offensive coordinator Dave Cecchini, “it was going to be definitely those two guys competing.”

Between the Ivy championship and the first practice of spring, two things would happen to change that. One was that Pizzotti would injure his back lifting the week before spring practices started, putting him out of commission until fall.

The other was the backup quarterback from Tulane University, who would decide to take a long second look at the Ivy institution that had aggressively recruited him out of high school.

“SOMETHING BETTER”

The first time Richard Irvin visited Cambridge was in his senior year of high school, and he didn’t know what he wanted.

The second time was during his second year at Tulane, and he knew exactly what he wanted: to transfer to Harvard.

Irvin, who averaged 369.2 passing yards per game in his senior year at John Muir High in Pasadena, Calif., liked what he saw in Cambridge his first time out. Ultimately, however, he chose to head south to play for the Division I-A Green Wave.

There, the 6’2, 205-lb. Irvin redshirted his freshman season behind J.P. Losman, now quarterback for the Buffalo Bills. The next season, he played in all nine games, starting two. His five TDs and 282 yards passing in his first start against Texas Christian gave him a Conference USA offensive player of the week nod.

Mid-way through the season, though, Irvin’s thoughts began to wander northeastwards. Keeping within NCAA regulations, he had his high school coach contact the Harvard program about transferring.

His reasons for the switch were both academic and athletic.

“I wanted to play more than the opportunity [at Tulane],” Irvin admitted. “I guess it was just the whole package that Harvard provides, honestly.”

It was Harvard, and only Harvard, that appealed to him.

“I really had no other interest in transferring anywhere else than to here,” Irvin said. “Tulane’s a great school, it provided me with a lot. I got to play there, and I got to learn from a guy like J.P. And New Orleans is a great city.

“I had a really good thing going there,” he went on, “so the only thing that would make me leave would be something better. I perceived this to be something better.”

A “DILEMMA”

Irvin’s transfer application was accepted, but he wasn’t due to matriculate until September. Back at Harvard, the O’Hagan-Pizzotti race had become slightly one-sided due to Pizzotti’s injury. Coach Murphy had to convert then-sophomore wide receiver Mike Jones back to his original position at quarterback just to provide some depth behind center, and even enlisted Fitzpatrick to help with drills.

With Pizzotti out, O’Hagan took all the snaps during the spring. He improved rapidly, becoming more familiar with the complex Harvard offense. In the spring game on April 30, O’Hagan was 12-of-14 for 202 yards and four touchdowns against the second team defense. His play during the spring led wide receiver Corey Mazza to remark that, “Liam in his pads looks like a clone of Fitzy.”

When Irvin showed up on campus for his first official involvement as a member of the Crimson at the beginning of July, O’Hagan appeared to have the upper hand and, most importantly, Cecchini said, “a good grasp on the offense.”

“It’s interesting—I don’t know if ‘dilemma’ is the right word,” Cecchini said during the preaseason. “While Richard is a more experienced quarterback overall, Liam is more comfortable with the system right now.”

Still, the experience Irvin had in Division I-A was significant.

“Richard obviously is an incredible talent throwing the football,” Cecchini said. “Any time you get a guy who has played against that kind of competition, and played very well, he deserves a good look. So even though Liam had done a good job in the spring, we wanted to give the other guy a good solid look once he got here. And that’s what we’ve done.”

BEING CHOOSEY

The competition began almost as soon as Irvin arrived, O’Hagan said.

“It was even competitive in the summer, with lifting and running,” O’Hagan said. “And then it carried over into preseason practices. When someone messed up, the other guy would jump in, and back and forth like that.”

To get a handle on the new system, Irvin watched hours of video—but NCAA regulations prevented him from watching with a coach until preseason practices began.

“That gave me some kind of a foundation, a base to go off of,” Irvin said, “but I really just started processing the information in the offense at the start of camp.”

In preseason practices, both saw the same number of snaps, but O’Hagan took 70 percent of his reps with the first team. In the two preseason scrimmages—against Columbia on Sept. 3 and an intra-squad practice Sept. 10—both saw equal time.

The coaches evaluated the two players constantly, and Murphy repeatedly called the situation “fluid.”

Sunday before the season opener, Murphy picked his starter. The statistics from the scrimmages favored Irvin slightly, pushing the Harvard coach to give him Saturday’s start.

O’Hagan, Murphy added, would definitely see considerable playing time.

“There’s no big disparity,” Murphy said. “If there was, it would make our job easier, but on the other hand, I prefer having two good quarterbacks to one.”

“The fact that I got the nod for the first game doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily the starter,” Irvin said. “I still gotta prove myself in a game situation.”

KICKOFF

The story of the 2005 Harvard quarterback started back when “the other guy” was still here. His accomplishments are hard to forget, and when the first snap of the season happens Saturday many of the people watching will undoubtedly be thinking of Fitzpatrick—including, possibly, his replacements.

“This year I’m just trying to sort of mimic the way he played in this offense,” O’Hagan said. “It was awesome to listen to him during practice, to watch him, to pick up on the little things he does really well. Any other guy—I don’t think I’d be where I am today.”

That guy who goes without saying is gone, though. For his successors, everything leading up to the 2005 season has been, in essence, merely a prologue.

The rest of this story? Up to Irvin and O’Hagan to finish.

—Staff writer Lisa J. Kennelly can be reached at kennell@fas.harvard.edu.