The Hamilton Block Party Is Back Together Again in Milford

Joe Restic and his three subalterns, assistant coaches Chet O'Neill, George Clemens and Bob Horan, are all neighbors in Milford. Right now they probably wish they were all still neighbors in Hamilton, N.Y., so they could have spent Sunday morning playing a foursome at Colgate's Seven Oaks Golf Club instead of huddling to rewitness Saturday's 38-21 loss to Colgate on the game films.

In recent years, Colgate has been a windfall for Crimson coaches even if the Red Raiders showed little of the milk of human kindness Saturday on the football field. Joe Restic did a stint as Colgate's offensive coordinator from 1959-62 while O'Neill, who is currently Harvard's defensive coordinator, was an assistant coach at Colgate from 1964-72. Horan, who is the Crimson's offensive backfield coach, left Colgate to come to Cambridge seven years ago, the same year that Restic first arrived on the scene. O'Neill came to Harvard the following year after Horan brought him to Restic's attention.

The most recent transfer from Hamilton to Cambridge is Clemens, who, before becoming Harvard's linebacker coach three years ago, served as the Red Raiders' defensive coordinator and coordinator for recruiting.

Clemens points out ruefully, "I personally recruited 18 of those kids on the Colgate roster and to be perfectly honest, someone else is getting the benefit."

While Clemens wasn't fretting last week over the gridiron monster he had helped to engender that was now coming back to haunt him, he was providing Restic and the rest of the Harvard team with detailed scouting reports on Colgate's starters.

Freshmen are eligible to play on the varsity at Colgate, so that Red Raider standouts such as linebackers Doug Curtis and Gene Doherty and leading rusher Henry White all started as freshmen while Clemens was still coaching at Colgate.

Unlike at Harvard, Clemens says that at Colgate "the football office tells the admissions office who they want. The admissions office left 30 places open for us."

Since coming to Harvard, Clemens and O'Neill have implemented a complex defense that is almost Byzantine in comparison to Colgate's basic alignment.

Clemens explains, "We are as multiple on defense as you can get without going haywire. You're multiple because you are not blessed with the best players in the world. Certainly, at Harvard we don't have to worry about native intelligence but at Colgate you get more kids with real innate football savvy."

O'Neill puts the benefits and drawbacks of the different defenses in perspective when he says, "We can do more things with our defense. At Colgate they teach total execution because they play everything the same down after down. Naturally, if you do more things you don't do them all to the tee."

Restic, in cahoots with his former Hamilton neighbors, mapped out a game plan which avoided trying to run the ball up the middle and concentrated instead on Colgate's more suspect secondary.

Harvard stuck to its original intentions, but Restic provide the following post-mortem. "I thought we would run a little more effectively to the outside," he said. "The thing that exasperated me was that they threw on us long. What will give people a problem from now on is when we alternate the shotgun with our regular offense once Buckley gets adjusted so they won't be able to put in extra defensive backs."

Despite Colgate's revamped football program, Restic and his triad of major-domos have no regrets about forsaking Hamilton for the confines of Dillon Field House. As Horan put it, "In our minds as coaches, Harvard is a step up the ladder. It's as attractive to a coach as to a student. Year in and year out over the long run you're going to do better than at Colgate."