The Rahooligan: No Moral to This Story

Upon losing a match to the negligible Tim Mayotte, former tennis great-cum-broadcaster John McEnroe once remarked, “This taught me a lesson, but I’m not sure what it is.”

McEnroe may as well have been speaking about the feeling after Harvard’s narrow 17-14 loss to Northeastern on Saturday. Because really, what did we learn from this game that we didn’t already know about the Crimson?

That it can match up well against top-ranked non-conference teams? Harvard already beat Holy Cross, then went down to Lehigh and almost snapped the Mountain Hawks’ 27-game home winning streak before losing by a point.

That the Crimson shouldn’t fumble the ball at the end of the game? Harvard learned that lesson the hard way two weeks against Lehigh. Senior tailback Nick Palazzo couldn’t handle quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick’s lazy lateral in that game, committing a turnover that killed any possibility of a game-winning drive. The only difference on Saturday was that Harvard had already completed most of the final drive before coughing up the ball, and this time the culprit was a different senior tailback, Rodney Thomas.

And if the Harvard team doesn’t hear about “ball security” at least a dozen times at every practice, it means somebody has kidnapped Harvard coach Tim Murphy and replaced him with a mannequin. Murphy places so much emphasis on not turning the ball over that I’m surprised he hasn’t yet created the assistant position “Director of Pigskin Security.”

And didn’t we already know that Fitzpatrick is pretty good at leading comebacks? He was on the field in 2001 for some of the Crimson’s impressive late-game heroics against Dartmouth and Princeton. The only thing is, Fitz, you need to direct one of those fourth-quarter comebacks this year.

And surely haven’t all Harvard fans figured out by now that the quarterback situation is, to put it nicely, fluid? Murphy will bench senior captain Neil Rose when Rose is injured, or nursing an injury, or recovering from a nagging injury, or healthy, but ineffective, or healthy but somewhat effective—you get the picture.

Saturday’s game against the Huskies was no different when it comes Harvard’s method of determining who plays and who doesn’t.

“They’re like clones,” Northeastern coach Don Brown said of Rose and Fitzpatrick. He must have meant “clones” in the same way Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito were “twins.” While the Crimson runs the same offensive sets for both signal-callers, the reason they have been effective for Harvard the last two years is because they bring different strengths to the game.

And frankly, though this poor guy has been much maligned already in these pages, did Saturday’s game only now teach us that senior kicker Anders Blewett is not exactly “lights out” on field goal attempts?

Blewett missed a 34-yarder as time expired in the first half that would have tied the game at 10-10. He has made 1-of-3 tries this season, if you don’t count the kicking contest against The Crimson’s Dan Fernandez (documented in Fifteen Minutes two weeks ago), when Blewett went 7-for-7. Maybe Harvard should hire Fernandez out to heckle Blewett during games.

There are a dozen other lessons that I’m sure the Crimson has already learned, but the bottom line is that it is now time to focus on the Ivy season, where Harvard already has a 2-0 record.

If the team feels down about this loss, it should heed the words of McEnroe, who made this comment later in the same press conference: “I will need to do something if I want to be No. 1.”

For Harvard, that something is to toss out the tape of Saturday’s game—the team already knows what needs fixing.

—Staff writer Rahul Rohatgi can be reached at rohatgi@fas.harvard.edu.