BEYOND THE BUZZ: Inside the World of Carl Morris

Pause everything for a second—the ball hanging above midfield, the receiver beneath it, the unfortunate safety behind him, the roaring fans in an unusually packed Harvard Stadium on a day when there aren’t any Yalies in site. Freeze it all and the whole thing looks like something out of high school physics.

Remember free-body diagrams? Here’s a problem for you. Object A, the ball, is about to hurtle downward at a 45-degree angle, and your job is to figure out whether or not it will make contact with Projectile A, a receiver shot out like a cannon from a slant-and-go route and accelerating with every step. Ignore Projectile B, the defender a few steps behind, for a moment. He doesn’t matter.

“At times it seems Morris simply can’t be stopped by Ivy defenses.”

—Pete McEntegart, Sports Illustrated

There are a lot of forces to calculate even without having to worry about Projectile B—the weight of the ball, the weight of the pads the receiver wears, the subtle friction of the field—but you don’t have to factor in the effect of the crowd’s breathing, which has for the moment been suspended in a stadium-wide gasp.

“The 6-foot-3-inch, 200-pounder isn’t a one-man team. He’s a one-man athletic program.”

—Bob Duffy, The Boston Globe

Okay, set things in motion. The ball has been overthrown, but this is where free-body diagrams seem to fail. Projectile A shifts into another gear and—with a body control that defies physics—extends fully to catch the ball over his shoulder while leaving the Penn cornerback in the dust.

“Carl Morris, we’ve heard a lot about this guy. He’s supposed to be a mid-round draft pick for the NFL. Is he that good?”

—D’Marco Farr, The Best Damn Sports Show Period

He streaks into the end zone. You may think the problem finished, but physics roars back with a vengeance and dictates that this is where things actually just start to get interesting. Newton says that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, so you might as well draw up a new diagram illustrating these responses as well—the crowd rising to its feet, Harvard clinching the Ivy League title and, a week later, its first perfect season since the Wilson administration. But you don’t want an “incomplete,” so you might as well get every reaction in there—the phone calls from strangers late at night, the defenses tweaked by men whose sole purpose for a week is to figure out how to stop him and reactions to the hype from those around him on the gridiron and elsewhere.

“He’s just a football player. He’s just a guy. Personally, I don’t jump on his bandwagon as much as you guys.”

—Dartmouth tight end Casey Kramer

Factor in a couple of forces that were already there—the rigors of a Harvard education, the heavy practice schedule and the child-like part of Morris that wants nothing more than to play every sport there is all the time, and it’s one of those problems best suited for the last part of the test—the big beast-of-a-problem at the end.

The Celebrity

Luckily, Carl Morris knows a lot about tests. A 62-year-old balding white man with a goofy grin and a Ph.D. from Stanford, Dr. Carl N. Morris has been a member of Harvard’s Department of Statistics for going on 12 years now. He’s edited two leading statistics journals and—what’s that? You want the sports Carl Morris?

Well, Carl Morris the professor was featured by ESPN.com a few weeks ago for creating a new statistical measure of baseball performance, one that proves that Barry Bonds’ 2002 season was the greatest offensive season of all time.

Still not good enough for you? Fine, we’ll get to the other Carl Morris in a second, but here’s the link for you—the first Carl Morris who set foot in Cambridge knows who the other Carl Morris is. (He says that he hopes the younger Morris enjoys a long professional career.) As do most people who strut back and forth around Harvard Yard all day long, lost in a world of classes, clubs and the occasional protest rally. In a place in which athletics lack the on-campus clout of a Notre Dame, Michigan or even Stanford, Morris’ name carries a level of campus-wide recognition.

It’s not that Morris is the only good football player to come out of Cambridge. Matt Birk ’98 is a Pro-Bowl center for the Minnesota Vikings. Isaiah Kacyvenski ’00 is currently laid up in his home with a high ankle sprain, but the Seattle Seahawks hope he’ll heal quickly and regain the team’s starting middle linebacker spot. Junior Dante Balestracci, a bruising linebacker from New Bedford, Mass., and senior offensive lineman Jamil Soriano may be better NFL bets in the long run.

But Morris is a glamour player—a wide receiver—and his highlight-reel catches make his level of play accessible to more pedestrian observers. Plays like that catch against Penn in last year’s Ivy title game tend to stick in people’s minds.

And the plays keep coming. You want to hear about Carl Morris—the football Morris—and how to measure the greatest offensive season of all time? Watch him obliterate all of the single-season Harvard receiving marks he set the previous season despite injuries to Neil Rose, the team captain and one of the most efficient quarterbacks in Ancient Eight history.

And this is why the fans have been showing up in $38 Morris jerseys available at the Stadium; why, in addition to scouts from across the NFL, ESPN GameDay and Sports Illustrated and hundreds of normally apathetic fans have shown up as well.

At the moment, Morris is very still, sitting in his room with The Simpsons on mute in the background. He sits up in his bed, calmly answering the same questions he’s answered most of the year to yet another member of the media. Yes, ESPN has gotten to this Carl Morris as well, and so have Sports Illustrated and The New York Times. And the result is the other polished, public Morris. The answers have been given a million times now—to publications, to scouts—and the prospect doesn’t hesitate while jumping from subject to subject. Right now, it’s basketball.

Basketball?

“I always wanted to play for the Knicks,” Morris says. “After I got here and was in the program for about a year, football just took over everything, and it was like, life doesn’t get any better than this. I think it’s the ultimate team sport. You can’t have anything without the other guys.”

Morris doesn’t run from his surprising fame. He seems to enjoy it—he keeps one of his uniforms in his common room and once posed for a campus magazine dangling playfully from the goalpost—but is guarded when asked about the NFL, about his role on the team, about agents and scouts. He’ll open up more when talking about the game, whatever the game is at the moment. Here it’s basketball, and Morris’ eyes light up as he talks about hitting the courts for pickup games—even though he doubts he’ll be able to hit the court much after the season because of “all that’s going on.”

The Handler

Tim Murphy remembers Carl Morris and basketball. The first time he saw his star receiver, Morris was playing for Episcopal High in Alexandria, Va. Murphy watched from the stands as Morris dunked from all angles and didn’t quite see the polished football player right then—couldn’t have, since Morris didn’t pick up football until 11th grade—but saw an athlete. Murphy, a master recruiter who has stolen players from the clutches of Nebraska and other big-time programs since taking over in 1994, has an eye for these sorts of things. Maybe he could sense the bloodlines—the grandfather who played for soccer’s Manchester United, the mother who played netball (a basketball derivative) in Britain, the aunt who played college basketball at Old Dominion and the sister who played scholarship ball at Wagner. Maybe he could see the raw ability of the school’s top striker in soccer or the agility of the shortstop who had been paid a visit by the Florida Marlins at age 17—only three years after he’d picked up that sport.

Murphy sits in his office in sweats and a T-shirt now, a portrait of controlled fatigue. He has gone from ESPN interviews early in the week to two Crimson reporters on Thursday—all the while with nationally-ranked Penn looming on the schedule. He has also seen the world’s reaction to Carl Morris—lived it the past few days—and so he’d be as good a person as anyone about the free-body diagram.

“I think it’s obvious from what he’s accomplished that Carl couldn’t have handled it better,” Murphy says. “Carl has the ability—and this is the case with anyone who is successful in anything—to focus. He narrows his scope of vision, and doesn’t let the peripheral things that are going on occupy his mind at critical times.”

Murphy and his staff worry about those peripheral things—like putting together video packages that best showcase Morris’ skills, getting the word around that he exists in the first place and facilitating visits and tape screenings by scouts at Dillon Field House early in the morning before practices. The coach sees the staff’s job handling Morris as an extension of their responsibilities to every kid under their watch.

“The thing we do is try to help these guys reach their full potential and then help them get to the next step,” Murphy says. “Whether that’s helping them get a job in the corporate world, writing a recommendation for graduate school or, in Carl’s case, helping him get into the industry he wants to.”

The “industry” has heard a lot from Harvard lately—Birk and Kacyvenski head a list of recent Crimson NFL signees that approaches double digits. In the decade before Murphy’s arrival in 1994, not one Harvard player had signed.

Like Morris, Ivy League football is being pushed by several forces at once. On one hand, its own increasingly intense recruiting has made it more legitimate in the football world. Dartmouth’s Jay Fiedler, Columbia’s Marcellus Wiley and Yale’s Eric Johnson all start in the pros. On the other, the Ancient Eight has clamped down on athletics—and football in particular—over concerns about maintaining the league’s ideal of the student-athlete. Recruiting limits were sliced last spring by the presidents of the Ivy League schools. Coaching staffs were slashed, and measures were put into place to limit time spent in practice.

Murphy is asked about ideals. “The ideal is in the mind of the beholder,” Murphy says. “Everyone seems to have a different idea of what that is.” He looks at the two reporters and notes how much time they’ve spent around Harvard football themselves. What makes them any different from his kids? “I think the reality of the 21st century at a place like Harvard is that if you can be a good student and a good something else, whether it’s writing for The Crimson or playing women’s basketball or football, well, that’s a lot. Everybody doesn’t have to be a renaissance man. It’s more about excellence than being a jack of all trades.”

Morris, Murphy’s excellence personified, is poster boy for the Ivy athlete at a critical juncture in the league’s history. Stereotype-filled debates over jocks and books litter the op-ed pages of school newspapers while his teammates feel frustrated that the Ivy League, out of concerns for those ideals, won’t let them participate in Division I-AA playoffs.

“Anytime somebody says you don’t belong somewhere, it bothers me regardless of what the context is,” Morris says. “I don’t feel their opinion matters. A lot of people don’t understand the level of commitment that any sport takes, and in the case of our sport it’s a little higher than most. But anytime you work so hard and so long just to be out there and people take away from that, it’s going to hurt.”

He remembers his sister’s days playing ball at Wagner. “My sister went to a scholarship school, and there were times when she said, ‘I don’t want to do this,’ but she had to,” Morris says. “Here, if that’s how you feel, there’s no obligation to stay. That’s overlooked in this.”

The Crimson Bloodlines

Morris pauses the interview to answer the phone. It’s Chris Nowinski ’00—and this, fellow physicists, is where our study of Carl Morris becomes as much a study in time as space, for Morris is supported by the growing network of Harvard alums who were once in his shoes. Nowinski has successfully broken into professional wrestling and is a regular in the WWE. He played defensive tackle in front of Kacyvenski, the Seattle Seahawk. Those two represent the lucky few Harvard alums that have somehow escaped the gravitational pull of I-banking and consulting. They get to play children’s games for a living, and Morris desperately wants to join them. Morris’ predecessors offer constant advice, if only because the games surrounding their dream careers are anything but kid stuff.

Morris knows.

“I kind of got contacted sporadically up until March, when whoever does the rankings put me on one of them,” Morris remembers. “That’s when they started calling.”

“They” are sports agents, and they called with increasing frequency well into this season. Now, Morris won’t answer the phone unless he knows who’s calling.

“I started cutting things off,” Morris says. “I mean, I got a call at the hotel before the Lehigh game at around 11 o’clock at night. It’s kind of a cutthroat business and it all comes out, and I just wanted to get away from all that.”

Given the specter of agents and uncertainty about their motives, Morris has turned to Kacyvenski and Nowinski for advice. And it’s not just the successful pros who advise Morris about how to run the gauntlet. Terrence Patterson ’00 was Harvard’s primary pre-Morris receiver, and has seen his protegé take an axe to his receiving records. Patterson, who worked out briefly for the NFL before winding up with a corporate job in the Walt Disney Company, never garnered the hype that surrounds Morris now, but he says that what chatter there was got to him.

“I’ve told Carl that if he needs a point of reference, I’m here, and to keep his head on,” Patterson says. “Don’t let the hype and the pressure get to you. Because it can—you see your name in a couple of magazines, read ‘Terrence Patterson’s a pro prospect,’ and you start thinking about the future.” Patterson says that his own nervousness hurt his performance late in 1999.

Of course, the calls are not all business. Patterson routinely reminds Morris that only one of them ever returned a punt for a touchdown—one of the reasons Patterson playfully clings to the “Greatest Of All Time” title. And it’s hard to conceive that very many conversations with Nowinski could be serious for long. But here is another force to be considered in all this—the stabilizing influence of Harvard’s football network.

Since we’re traveling through time, let’s go a bit further back, back to the 1970s and to the man who held most of Harvard’s receiving records before Patterson and Morris were born. Pat McInally ’75, was selected in the fifth round of the NFL draft and made his living as, of all things, an All-League punter. McInally had been the Crimson’s highest-ever Crimson selection until Kacyvenski in 2000. The laws of physics don’t change over time, presumably, and so it makes sense to ask someone who watched McInally grow.

Joe Restic, both the winningest and losingest coach in Harvard football history, answers the phone from his Milford, Mass., home. Retired now, Restic hasn’t been around the program much since 1993. But he is familiar with Morris—he works with the East-West Shrine Game, and was instrumental in getting Morris invited to that postseason showcase.

“They’re different types of receivers,” Restic says of McInally and Morris. “Morris has great speed and gets open, he runs really precise patterns. McInally had great jumping ability, size, great hands.”

And, when asked, Restic will tell you that McInally never had to deal with the same pressures. There weren’t late-night calls from agents, early-morning meetings with scouts. Unlike Morris, who saw teammates like Kacyvenski and Mike Clare ’01 visited by scouts as he grew up, McInally developed in a world largely insulated from such forces.

“It’s much more involved today,” Restic says. “More scouts, more combines. They test them, run them, weigh them. It really complicates it for the young man.”

Throughout his tenure, Restic worried publicly about the professionalization of college athletics. He saw it in the Ivy League’s demotion to I-AA status in 1981 based largely on TV revenue. He saw it in the elimination of Ivy League freshman football programs in the early 1990s. And he worries still. If ideals are in the mind of the beholder, Restic’s mind is made up.

“I worry about it at any school,” Restic says. “Once you buy into the professionalism, to whatever degree you do, you’ve bought into the system.”

Restic finishes his interview, and adds that he is very interested in how Morris will do at the Shrine Game. “It will give him a chance to test himself against young men from across the country. Our game is on Jan. 11.” And he says goodbye.

The Prospect

Eleven-year-old Jacob Friedman looks even younger as he bounces around the stands in Harvard Stadium, wearing a No. 10 Harvard football jersey he turned into a Morris tribute. He lovingly doctored it with masking tape so that the 10 became a 19 while adding “M O R R I S” in tape letters across the back for good measure. He and his family have driven in from Lexington, Mass., every week to watch the home games, and have left early to make many of the road games as well.

“Carl Morris is really good, so we like him a lot so we’re kind of crazy for him,” Friedman blurts. “So ever since he caught that 65-yard pass we’ve just been going crazy.” Jacob’s father, Bill Friedman ’79, called the sporting goods store in Arlington that supplies the team’s jerseys and bought the closest thing to a “19” he could find, only to discover a week later that Harvard sold its own at home games. Jacob’s older brother, Zach, proudly notes that Morris once tossed them his gloves.

And maybe here, in Harvard Stadium, is the only place where you can put Morris in perspective. Yes, Harvard benefits from the jersey sales—Bud Murphy, who sells them at the games, complains that he only has five left after opening the season with two big stacks. But they wind up in the hands of kids who watch football games at Soldiers Field, for goodness’ sake—not Notre Dame, not Florida State. Harvard. The games are rarely sold out, ineffective kickers aren’t booted right off the team and the national press comes once in a blue moon—although the lunar cycle looks to be quickening.

Sometimes the jersey buyers aren’t kids. Bud Murphy recalls the first “19” he sold this year. “A guy comes up to me and asks for a Harvard jersey,” he says. “I tell him the only one available is 19. He says, ‘That’s no problem. That’s my son.’”

Morris smiles when he hears that story. “He told me that one. I said ‘He’ll be the only one.’ It’s crazy. My mom cried when she first saw it.”

Morris talks a lot about family. Tim Murphy has described him as one of the most motivated kids he’s ever coached. Ask Morris what drives him. He’ll dish generically about wanting to be the best at everything he does. But press him a little harder on that point.

“I think it comes from my parents,” Morris says. “They’ve always just done a good job showing me the importance of hard work.” And the forces at work here become clearer. It’s about Vern Morris working three jobs and Jane Morris working two to send him to a boarding school Morris says was too expensive for them to swing. “Seeing them work so hard made me want to do the best I could while I was there,” Morris says.

And suddenly, the physics of the situation start to resemble those of any one of Morris’ neighbors on campus. People sacrifice for opportunities for their kids, and the kids try to live up. The pressure there is perhaps more compelling than any scout’s visit or looming draft date, and it’s something that makes Morris much like every National Merit Scholar in the dining hall or Intel finalist in the labs. Sure, the football paraphernalia is proudly displayed in his common room, but what Harvard student hasn’t displayed a science fair medal on the refrigerator, a debate trophy in the living room, a varsity letter on his jacket?

Throw out the free-body diagram—this sort of drive may not be measurable. Maybe the same will that sustains the fellow students who debate athletic recruiting at Harvard is the very same force that will ultimately propel Carl Morris to a long NFL career. Maybe Casey Kramer was more right than he knew when he whined that Morris was “just a guy.” And maybe that is the biggest reason to think Morris just might pull this NFL thing off after all.

—Staff writer Martin S. Bell can be reached at msbell@fas.harvard.edu