Black Saturday

You would have thought that someone had died.

That pretty much sums up the looks on their faces and the words out of their mouths at the postgame postmortem (otherwise known as a press conference) after Harvard's 24-21 loss to Fordham.

Senior captain Justin Frantz and junior tailback Eion Hu were thrown to the media hounds and they both looked empty, desolate and upset.

And why not? Harvard, which seemed positively unstoppable after ripping off three consecutive touchdowns in 20 minutes, just deflated on the football field. The Crimson, perhaps too confident about its early 21-point lead, watched helplessly while Fordham tallied 24 unanswered points.

Now, it was Frantz and Hu's turn to explain what had happened--how the Crimson had melted in front of the home crowd, how the defense could give up so many points in a row, how Harvard could lose to a team that was 1-14 in this season and the previous.

Who could blame them if they didn't want to do it?

"I don't know what happened," Hu said. "It's what we did against Columbia. We just died."

"We went into the game with a bad attitude," Frantz said. "We just thought we were just going to be so much better than them that we wouldn't even have to show up to play. In the first half, we sort of proved it to ourselves--falsely--and then we just let down. That's really what happened."

Fordham, a team previously termed a "disgrace" on these pages, had come roaring back from that 21-point deficit and, in the last seconds, had transformed a 21-21 tie game into a three-point win.

In the process, senior quarterback Joe Moorhead, a polite, soft-spoken chap from Pittsburgh, Penn., had picked the Crimson apart, racking up nearly 250 passing yards in the second half and doing more damage to Harvard's collective ego than anyone could imagine.

In the process, the defense simply flattened Hu, fellow tailback Troy Jones and quarterback Vin Ferrara, shutting down an attack that had more than 130 total yards in the first quarter alone and 28 points last weekend.

It was hard to fathom and even harder to swallow.

"In the first half, we just controlled them in every which way on offense," Hu said. "In the second, I just don't know what happened...It just didn't work for us."

"Our defense was good enough to stop them, as we showed in the first quarter," Frantz said. "But we just weren't playing well enough to stop their offense.

After the firing squad had receded and Hu and Frantz had left, someone leaned over and whispered, "It's going to take Tim Murphy more than a year to turn this team around."

That seems like the bottom line here. Last week's 28-8 massacre of Colgate was the exception, not the rule, for the 1995 version of Harvard football. The rebuilding process is a long one, and no one knows that better than the man himself.

"We have a lot of work to do and no one knows it more than I do," Murphy said before Hu and Frantz had gotten to the room.

It was the third game of the season and it was the second game that Harvard coulds, shoulda and woulds won. It was the same story against Columbia; it was just two weeks later.

But that doesn't prevent a lot of Harvard fans from thinking about what might have been. Three-and-zero is a world different from 1-2. And everyone knows it.

On the Friday before the Fordham game, Harvard coach Tim Murphy had pronounced the Colgate game "ancient history." On Saturday afternoon in Dillon Field House, the Crimson felt like it was.