Football Season Recap

Two minutes into the fourth quarter at Tigers Stadium, the Harvard football team looked invincible. Senior quarterback Colton Chapple had just fired a pass to junior tight end Cameron Brate, who broke two tackles en route to a touchdown that put the Crimson ahead of Princeton, 34-10.

A win, then seemingly a foregone conclusion for a dominant Harvard team, would solidify the Crimson atop the Ivy League as the only undefeated squad. But then things came apart.

Five plays after a sack was negated for an excessive celebration penalty that gave the Tigers a first down, Princeton’s second string quarterback, Quinn Epperly, threw for only his second career touchdown to give the Tigers their first lead of the game with thirteen seconds left.

“That sort of dismantling as an offense, the miscues that I had personally, it makes me sick watching that film because there’s so many opportunities, where you feel as if, ‘If I had made that play right there...’” senior running back Treavor Scales said. “It was a very humbling experience. We were rolling at that point, obviously, but it was a tough one to stomach.”

The following week, Cornell downed Princeton and Harvard responded with a victory over Dartmouth, giving the Crimson control of its own destiny once again. A 69-0 obliteration of Columbia the next week seemed to put Harvard back on track, setting up a title showdown with Penn.

But the team that had so convincingly demolished the Lions seemed absent from Franklin Field. The Quakers recorded 227 rushing yards against the top-ranked rush defense in the FCS and sacked Chapple six times to hand the Crimson its second defeat.

“There really isn’t necessarily an explanation for it, it just wasn’t working for us,” Scales said. “Whatever reason that was, you look back at the film, there were just certain mistakes that we didn’t usually make. It was just things that we knew exactly what to do, it just didn’t get done. And give a heck of a credit to Penn…they hit us in the mouth before we hit them.”

With losses to the Killer P’s, Harvard failed to meet high expectations set at the beginning of the season despite record-setting performances from key players.

“In all honesty, this is probably the best team we’ve had that didn’t win a championship, and that’s absolutely no one’s fault other than my own, and it’s as simple as that,” Crimson coach Tim Murphy said. “This is a real good football team, and we had an inexplicable series of events in the fourth quarter of the Princeton game that ultimately stood between us and the championship. It would’ve been our fourth championship in six years.”

Chapple surpassed Neil Rose to snag the top spot in the record books for passing touchdowns in a season, shattering the previous record of 18 by throwing for 24 scores. Meanwhile, Scales recorded his first 1,000-yard season and the dual threat of senior tight end Kyle Juszczyk and Brate combined for over 1,200 yards receiving. But even these performances couldn’t return the Ancient Eight title to Cambridge.

“Talking to my roommate, the captain next year, Josh Boyd, we’ll just say, ‘What the hell happened? How, with the weapons, the mentality that we all had, how did we let that slip away?’” Scales said. “It’s still a question in all of our minds, how we don’t have a second ring on our finger. It boils down to should’ve, could’ve, would’ve, but it’s bizzare. It really is.”

With the championship now out of the Crimson’s control, one game remained—arguably, the biggest game of the year outside of the scope of the season. The Crimson didn’t disappoint.

A disjointed first 30 minutes led to a 3-3 tie at halftime, as Yale stifled the top offense in the Ivy League. But Chapple found his stride in the second half to complete clutch plays that ensured the Crimson would never trail in the game before Scales clinched the win with a breakaway 63-yard touchdown run.

“Essentially, there was nothing miraculous. We just weren’t doing a good job executing, and all of a sudden it just came together,” Murphy said of the second half resurgence. “We sustained drives, and we had to be at our best—fortunately, the latter part of the third quarter, the fourth quarter, we were.”

And for Scales, even without another ring, that final push was all that mattered.

“Five years from now, I’ll look every Yale football player in the face and say, ‘I beat you every year I was there,’” Scales said. “I’ll chalk that one up as a win. There were shortcomings, there were things we didn’t get done, but I don’t think it was ever a question of lack of effort.”

—Staff writer Samantha Lin can be reached at samanthalin@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter @linsamnity.