Coach Suspends QB For 5 Games

NEW HAVEN—Add the quarterback to the list of embattled—and suspended—Harvard football players.

Harvard head coach Tim Murphy announced Tuesday that junior signal-caller Liam O’Hagan, last year’s starter, has been suspended for the first five games of the season due to an unspecified violation of team rules.

The offensive reins will be handed off to untested classmate Chris Pizzotti, Murphy said at Tuesday’s Ivy League media day, which was held at Yale University.

“The bottom line is that Liam O’Hagan has been suspended for the first five games for a violation of team rules,” Murphy said. “It’s not a legal issue, it’s not a public issue, so in that case it’s a private team matter.”

The preseason media poll, released at the event, picked the Crimson to win the Ivy League, awarding it nine of 16 first-place votes and a comfortable margin over defending champion Brown and perennial favorite Penn.

But coaches and the media were caught by surprise by the announcement of O’Hagan’s suspension.

“[Harvard is] picked number one for a reason,” said Brown head coach Phil Estes, whose Bears—the class of the Ivies last season at 6-1—are slated to meet Harvard in both teams’ league openers on Sept. 23. “Liam O’Hagan is a very good quarterback, he has a lot of tools, he’s a year better.”

O’Hagan emerged as the No. 1 QB early in the 2005 campaign, improving steadily as the season went on. A threat with his arm and his feet, O’Hagan finished with 2,448 yards of total offense, tied for the most in the league and good enough for the second-highest single-season total in school history.

But now the job falls to Pizzotti, a six-foot-five local product from Reading, Mass., who was sidelined last season with a back injury. Pizzotti impressed while taking most of the snaps with the first-team offense during the annual spring game, completing 20 of 40 throws for 192 yards.

“I have confidence in Chris, but there’s no substitute for experience,” Murphy said. “He did some good things in the spring, but 12 spring practices, only about eight or nine of which are in pads, doesn’t give you a whole lot to go on.”

The latest imbroglio comes on the heels of the controversy surrounding former captain Matthew C. Thomas, suspended indefinitely in June and now off the roster. Senior Ryan Tully replaces Thomas as the 133rd captain of Harvard football.

The voids left by the two suspensions come on top of natural doubts surrounding the loss of three starters from the offensive line, serious inexperience at the linebacker position, and a revamped coaching staff.

“When you consider that we have a new captain, a new quarterback, a new offensive line, a new linebacking corps, [and] five new assistant coaches,” Murphy said, “we have a lot of questions to answer for a team that’s picked to win the whole thing.”

Amid all the uncertainty, one thing is more sure: senior tailback Clifton Dawson. Dawson stands on the brink of history, with the chance to become to first offensive player in league history to be named first-team all-Ivy for four straight years. He is on pace to break the all-time league mark for rushing yards—with 4,715 yards, he is 1,087 yards off the mark—and touchdowns, established by Brown’s Nick Hartigan last season. If Dawson gets 1,000 yards on the ground, he will become just the eighth player in Division I history to crack quadruple digits four times.

Dawson, a pre-season All-American, is one of the major reasons Harvard leads the poll with 116 points. Penn and Brown trail in second and third, respectively. Fifth-place Yale was the only other squad apart from those three to receive first-place votes, one spot behind dark horse Cornell. Princeton, Dartmouth, and Columbia rounded out the pack.

“We take nothing for granted,” Murphy said. “I’ve seen teams that were first in the polls end up back in the pack. Pennsylvania was a good example last year—things happen. It’s all about flexibility and adapting because things change. Things have changed for our team a great deal just in a couple months.”

—Staff writer Jonathan Lehman can be reached jlehman@fas.harvard.edu.