Picking up the beat

This is the school that invented the Flying Wedge, which was assault and battery with a pigskin, and the Multi-Flex, which was fantasy football before its time. The present Harvard offense hasn't got a name, but it does have a number -- 33.8 -- which is the number of points the unbeaten Crimson have been averaging Saturday after Saturday this fall.

ADVERTISEMENT

"We are an uptempo, no-huddle, balanced multiple offense," said coach Tim Murphy, whose 13th-ranked varsity (9-0, 6-0 Ivy League) will finish with its best record in 103 years if it beats archrival Yale (5-4, 3-3) tomorrow afternoon at the Stadium.

It's the same system that Murphy used when he coached at Maine 16 years ago and Cincinnati 11 years ago, and that he's had at Harvard for the past 11 seasons. But it has come to full flower this autumn as the Crimson have piled up 304 points and yielded just 131. If they get their usual 30-plus tomorrow, they'll have averaged more than any squad since 1891, when Harvard was fattening up on the likes of Andover, Stagg's Team, and the Boston A.A.

This isn't just a one-year aberration. Since 1997, when Harvard won its first league title in a decade, the Crimson have averaged more than 30 points five times. "The better players you have, the better your offense," said Murphy. And this team arguably has the best collection of skill-position players in school history.

Ryan Fitzpatrick, whose teammates are 17-3 in games he's started, could be the first Harvard quarterback drafted by the NFL since Brian Buckley in 1981. Clifton Dawson, the fleet sophomore running back, should own every Crimson rushing record by the time he's done. And Brian Edwards and Corey Mazza, who have 91 catches, 1,311 yards, and 10 touchdowns between them, are as good a pair of receivers ever to grace the Stadium.

"In 2001, even with [All-Ivy quarterback] Neil Rose and [All-America receiver] Carl Morris, we had to push the ball down the field," said Murphy. "We had to be extremely efficient to get 30 points."

This team gets them in bursts -- 22 in the second quarter against Holy Cross, 18 in the third quarter at Brown, 34 in the middle two quarters against Northeastern, 19 and 17 in the second and fourth quarters at Princeton, and 17 in the third quarter of each of the last two games, against Columbia and Pennsylvania.

Only Dartmouth, which held the Crimson to 13 points, has managed to put the brakes on them. Nobody else has been able to keep Fitzpatrick and his mates from blowing games open.

"It's all about containing them," said Yale coach Jack Siedlecki, whose squad gave up 37 points in the Bowl last year as Fitzpatrick threw four touchdown passes and Dawson ran for 174 yards. "Don't give up any big ones.

"Make them earn it."

Almost everybody has contained Harvard for a while this autumn. Brown had the Crimson down, 21-3, at the quarter and, 31-10, at the half. Princeton was up by 11 points after one quarter, Cornell was up by 8 in the second. But nobody has been able to solve all the variables for 60 minutes.

"When you have a quarterback like Fitzpatrick and a tailback like Dawson, it forces defenses to make some tough decisions," said Harvard offensive coordinator Dave Cecchini. "We can find the weakness in a defense and exploit it. Some games, that means handing off to Dawson 35 times. Or if they've got single coverage on the receivers, we can put the ball in the air 45 times. We don't have to force anything."

Harvard's offense is an all-terrain, all-weather scoring machine and its main gear is Fitzpatrick, who set the school record for career offense (6,530 yards) in last week's 31-10 demolition of defending champion Penn, Harvard's first victory in Philadelphia in 24 years.

"More than Dawson, more than Edwards, he's the guy who makes their team go," said Penn coach Al Bagnoli, who said Fitzpatrick is the best improviser he's seen in his 13 years in the league. "An awful lot of their offense comes out of the spontaneity of him."

It was a bit of improvisation out of a scramble that produced the killer 43-yard touchdown early in the second half of last week's victory that assured Harvard a share of the Ivy title. Fitzpatrick was under pressure and on the run. "Ninety-five percent of quarterbacks would have been sacked," said Bagnoli.

But Fitzpatrick spotted Mazza open in the end zone after running a deep fade, and somehow got him the ball. "Like backyard football," Fitzpatrick said, "drawing routes in the dirt."

Impromptu is part of the plan at Harvard, where quarterbacks are given wide latitude to change plays at the line of scrimmage. "The quarterback has a lot of leeway to make something up," said Fitzpatrick, whose role model growing up in Arizona was former Arizona State standout and current Denver Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer.

Trickery is part of the package, too -- receivers throwing to receivers, holders throwing to linebackers on fake field goals, linebackers running for first downs out of punt formation. "Even if the trick plays don't work," said Murphy, "people have to prepare for them."

What's remarkable about the Crimson's flying circus is not that it scores so many points but that it makes so few mistakes doing it. Harvard, which leads the league in scoring by a whopping 9.6 points per game, also leads in turnover margin, with a plus-8 on the season.

Ball security is Priority 1, ever since the Crimson lost the Yale game with seven turnovers four years ago. "The next year, we held a meeting at 5 a.m. on the first day of spring football and gave each player a laminated edict," said Murphy. "We told them, if you give up the ball, you will not play. Nothing personal."

When Dawson fumbled last week for the first time in 396 carries, he and everybody else on the Crimson sideline was in shock. "What is it with you?" Murphy needled him. "Every 20 games, you fumble."

The object of Harvard's uptempo, no-huddle, balanced multiple offense is the same as it was back in the Flying Wedge days: go from one end of the field to the other and put at least 3 points on the board. Thus far, the Crimson lead the league not just in scoring and total offense but also in third-down (42.1 percent) and fourth-down (56.3 percent) conversions, are second in average time of possession (31:03), and score 81 percent of the time (27 touchdowns, 11 field goals) in the red zone.

That's the formula for 304 points . . . and counting. The school record is 765, set by the 1886 varsity, which played 14 games. Maybe if Murphy can schedule another four playdates with Exeter, Stevens, MIT, and the Graduates before the holiday break, this team will get its shot at history.