It's Recovery Time

Vin Ferrara seemed as dead as air.

The big, stately-looking quarterback ambled into the press conference after the Crimson's 42-23 loss to Bucknell looking like a walking mummy; if you had poked him with a needle, he probably would have bled blue gook.

The Crimson had suffered a loss nothing less than devastating. It had been soundly destroyed by Bucknell, outplayed, as Coach Tim Murphy said, "in all areas." Ferrara, having gone a mediocre 13-for-30 for 167 yards through the air, seemed to bear the full weight of the loss on his shoulders.

Seeing some form of relief in a query about the game's foul weather, he lit up.

"It's interesting that you ask that," he said. "I'm not much of a mudder. The weather worked to our disadvantage, for sure. I was born with small hands...."

He seemed to trail off. Catching himself, he added: "But you can't say that any one thing made us lose. We were beaten badly."

The moment captured something haunting about the game. There was no one or two specific problems with the Crimson's play--missed coverages, poor passing, missed assignments, etc. It was worse than that. The team was dominated in every area, including such inaccessibles as speed, size and talent. Only one thing came to mind: William and Mary.

The Crimson played William and Mary for the last time last season. I say "last time" out of hope rather than knowledge. For the past two seasons, Harvard has been nuked by the Tribe. Last season, the Crimson lost 45-17, the score being friendly.

William and Mary games have set the stages for the past two seasons. Utter defeat has given the Crimson an acute awareness of its profound deficiencies, the type that can't be can't be remedied in gutty practice sessions and late-night strategy sessions. For the past two years, the William and Mary games--both in the second week of the season, have muffled even the loudest pre-season hype.

Murphy has said that his biggest challenge is changing attitudes. He's right. Crimson teams in the past have admittedly been prone to late-season head-hanging. It has cost them a number of close games--to Princeton, Dartmouth, Penn and Yale last season alone.

But if fans think that last week's comeback victory over Columbia sounded an end to those late-game blues, they are wrong. No team ever gives up the first game. It's only after utter defeat, after a team painfully realizes its limitations, that it is tempted to throw in the towel and call it a season. That time is now--the vultures are circling.

For many Harvard fans, Saturday loss represented the end of the Murphy honeymoon proper. If that be the case, the Crimson's end is truly its beginning.