NOTEBOOK: Quick Start Sparks Crimson Victory

NEW YORK—As The Crimson indicated in Friday’s Around the Ivies column, Harvard football couldn’t rest on its laurels Saturday against Columbia. In the early weeks of the season, the Lions embarrassed their opponents and positioned themselves in the Ancient Eight’s upper echelon. This weekend, the Crimson answered the call.

“You think they can become a little emotionally fragile, so you’d love to get off to a good start and jump on them,” Harvard coach Tim Murphy said. “We got some breaks…and were in a good position in the first half.”

For the Crimson, the ability to strike early bodes well, as it takes on the league-leading defense in Penn next weekend.

For Columbia, it exposed the problems plaguing a program beleaguered by injuries.

“I thought that we played about 45 minutes of football. I didn’t think we played very well at all the first 15 minutes of the game,” Lions coach Norries Wilson said. “We are still unfortunately growing into that and haven’t learned enough from our mistakes of turning the football over and not tackling well and understanding that although it’s a team sport, as an individual you have to take care of your responsibility, because you’re responsible to the other ten guys on the field at the time and the remaining of the team that’s on the sideline.”

In those first 15 minutes, Harvard ran all over the Lions to the tune of 146 total offensive yards and 21 points, while shutting out the Columbia offense.

AIRING OUT

Saturday’s contest featured two of the top wide receivers in the league: the Lions’ Austin Knowlin and the Crimson’s Matt Luft.

Both have inspiring career numbers. With his 64 yards on Saturday, Knowlin set a new Columbia record for career receiving yardage—previously held by Bill Reggio ’84—of 2,417 yards.

Though his totals on Saturday were relatively tame, Knowlin was far from willing to attribute that to tight coverage from the Harvard secondary.

“I didn’t think they were any different from any other secondary that we’ve seen all year, to be honest,” Knowlin said. “Sizing them up, we watched film on them all week and we weren’t really that impressed. We’ve seen better secondaries from Harvard.”

For his part, Luft made his first reception since the Princeton game two weeks ago. He’s only managed 148 yards this season, partly because the opposition generally tends to double cover him and partly because he runs the deep route in an offense geared towards short passes.

The Lions put man coverage on Luft, and Crimson junior quarterback Collier Winters exploited that. The two connected on two passes for 40 yards.

“Anytime you can get Matt one-on-one or try and get him the ball, we try to,” Winters said. “This week we had some situations where the corner played man-on-man, so we had some playcalls where we tried to get the ball to Matt. I have all the confidence in him, and you know these last two games, I’m sure he’ll be a big part of the offense.”

JUMPING THE GUN

As well as Harvard played Saturday, the one aspect that needs to be fixed heading into the final two weeks is penalties.

The Crimson got flagged four times for false starts, twice for illegal procedure, and three times for offsides—one of which got declined.

All told, Harvard accrued 11 penalties for 78 yards.

“I’m still looking for that game where I come into this media conference and say, ‘We really played a perfect game,’” Murphy said. “We’re solid on special teams, not perfect, very solid on defense, and pretty solid on offense. If you do those things and try to eliminate mistakes, we feel like we have a chance against anybody.”

—Staff writer Dixon McPhillips can be reached at fmcphill@fas.harvard.edu.