The multiflex meets middle-age

In the fall of 1971, local papers were filled with speculation about who would replace retiring Harvard football coach John Yovicsin. Among those favored to win the job was a pro quarterback whose credentials included a Ph. D. in math.

But Frank Ryan, Yale's current athletic director, didn't get the job.

The man who did win control of the Harvard football program had just coached the Canadian Football League's Hamilton Tiger Cats to a divisional title. In three years there, Joe Restic amassed a 22-17-3 record.

But despite his success in the Great White North, Restic remained far from satisfied. Everything was too forced, too mechanical.

"It's cold," Restic recalls, and he's not talking about the weather. "It's calculated; it's one-dimesional. In the pros, it's a job, it's a business and it's run like a business." The time had come for Restic, formerly an assistant at Brown, to return to the Ivy League.

Restic found what he was looking for, and almost 13 seasons later, he has coached the Crimson longer than anyone but Yovicsin, who served 14 years.

In the meantime, Restic has led his squads to three Ivy Championships, including Harvard's only outright league title in 1975. He earned Eastern Coach of the Year honors in 1974 and was named New England Coach of the Year in 1974 and 1975. Entering Saturday's showdown with Yale, he's just seven wins shy of Yovicsin's school record 78 career victories.

Restic attributes his success to his players. "They come and they give you what they have," Restic says. "There are many other things that they could do here. You want to make [the program] the best, so when they do want to contribute it'll be for the championship," the 52-year-old adds.

"He's an extremely dedicated person," Defensive Coordinator George Clemens says. "That's probably one of the reasons I'm here." Clemens is Restic's opposite number: Restic acts as his own offensive coordinator.

"People come out here and they get very little playing time but they stay," Restic says. "We don't lose people. It becomes very boring running the same plays every week. In our case it's never boring because we have changes every week."

"He made offense a game in itself," says Don Allard '83, last year's quarterback. "He made the X's and O's interesting. He could walk across the river and teach a class at Harvard."

Restic employs standard "I" and "I" formations as well as more bizarre nobody-in-the-backfield configurations. As the bumper stickers say, "Harvard football is in motion," with players shifting all over the place before the snap. The epitome of it all is the quarterback-in-motion play, where the man behind the center stands up and jogs off towards the sideline before cutting upfield to receive a pass from the fullback, who takes the shotgun snap from the center.

When the Harvard offense works, it's not hard to understand why Alva Kelly, Restic's boss at Brown, told Harvard officials that Restic had "the best football mind in North America."

That statement was made over a decade ago, but football cogniscenti have continually repeated their faith in Restic's coaching abilities by widely circulating rumors that he has received coaching offers from professional teams.

He was reportedly offered the head coaching jobs of the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Eagles, and in the spring of 1982, speculation abounded that Restic would become the offensive coordinator for the Los Angeles Rams.

Yet his career at Harvard has been no fairy tale. The focus on the multiflex occasionally hurt his relations with his players. Some claimed that Restic spent so much time preparing his offensive that he didn't have enough left to deal with his personnel.

In the spring of 1982, some players wrote a letter criticizing aspects of Restic's coaching performance. Most of the graduating seniors on the team signed the letter or said they intended to sign it. The Crimson reported on May 14.

The major complaint was that Restic was difficult to comunicate with and remained unacceptably aloof. "You never see him in the locker room, win or lose," James P. Mullen '82 said at the time. Some players felt they were competing with the multiflex itself. "If we win, it's the multiflex's gain. If we lose it's because we don't have the personnel," one player said..

Restic says the whole problem arose out of "a few selfish people." "Anybody that has a selfish interests in my program, I can't help them. I can't become concerned about people like that," he adds.

"Looking back it's easy to see how complaints could be made," says Allard, who was a junior when the letter was written. "We just came off a terrible [28-Q] loss to Yale. It's a tremendous crutch when you lose to say that the offense is too complicated."

Whatever the merits of the complaints made in the letter, the problems mentioned do not seem to exist to any great degree this season. Restic frequently makes appearances in the locker room after games, and has publicly complained of inadequate personnel at only one position--quarterback.

Time continues to be a problem. "We don't have much time with the people who play the game," Restic says. Preparation, analysis and practice take up almost every hour in the week. "Saturday night is the only free minute," Restic adds.

All that time pressure eases after this weekend, after he puts his strategy to its most important test of the season. Restic, like his team, tends to be judged by The Game's result. The alumni were grumbliong loudly about the multiflex two years ago, after Yale had won its fifth Harvard game in six years with its second straight shutout. Forty-five Crimson points last year changed some minds.

But motivating players for The Game is never a problem. "They'll play with canes and crutches." Restic says. "Everybody wants to play Yale. They're really two different seasons. You play all your other games, and then you have Yale."JOE RESTNE