QB or Not QB: That is the Question

It got to the point where you could see Tim Murphy sitting on the sidelines plucking daffodil petals and flipping a coin between series. Against Princeton two weeks ago, he seemed to switch quarterbacks on every down. Eeeny-meeny-miney-mo, catch the Tigers by the toe. Rose or Fitzpatrick? Fitzpatrick or Rose?

Well, captain Neil Rose threw for 443 yards this week—257 of them to Carl Morris, whose eyes must have grown as wide as saucers when he saw how he and the resurgent Rose clicked in the early going. Rose completed 36 of 50 passes. End of controversy.

The Ryan Fitzpatrick era and its desperate, heroic QB crashes for first-downs-and-more will wait a year. The sophomore has shown that it will be a show worth watching. But this seems the only satisfying way for the Rose-Fitzpatrick controversy to resolve itself. Rose, the captain who took a semester off to continue his injury-extended career in Crimson, never could have imagined fighting injuries and a stunningly effective understudy to keep his job.

After sacrificing graduating with his classmates and battling a sciatic nerve condition, Rose’s presence back in the saddle seems the only fitting ending. The subplot was fun while it lasted—for a few drama-hungry fans, anyway.

But who knows? A different decision a year ago, a different resolution to one guy’s heart-to-heart with himself, and things may have been very different. These pages may have outlined the week-to-week developments in the Black-Rose controversy, much to the delight of headline and caption writers at The Crimson.

Black? What? Who? Come on, you’re a diehard fan. You remember Conor Black, don’t you? Not a very tall guy, backed up Rose in 2000, completed all four of his career passes? Black, now a junior, steadily rose up the depth chart as a freshman until he was the No. 2 option at quarterback.

And he left the team before seeing any action as a sophomore. He was one of a trio of quarterbacks who quit around the start of The Perfect Season—along with fellow backups Barry Wahlberg and J.C. Harrington—leaving behind the apparent dregs of the QB depth chart, some kid named Fitzpatrick.

So went that big break. And Black left behind a life that Rose went out of his way to hang on to.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Go on, ask Black if he has any regrets. He’ll tell you that in a way he misses football. If you play long enough and well enough to be recruited by Harvard, you have to. But actual regrets?

“There is an unbelievable competitive element to college football, or any college sport for that matter, that can’t be experienced in any other setting,” Black says. “Sure, you might feel competition in whatever class to succeed, but its not the same as that primal feeling you get when teamed with 10 other guys trying to sustain a touchdown drive. So I guess on a very basic level I miss the sheer exhilaration of being part of the game.”

You can sense the “but” coming.

“However, I must add that despite the fact that I miss it, I do not regret my decision in the least bit,” Black continues. He’ll tell you that as a Crimson quarterback, his social sphere was largely restricted to his teammates—not a bad thing, he’ll insist. “I met a lot of people through my football experience who I became friends with and learned a lot from.” Nor is this, he’ll point out, necessarily something every player suffers from. But the rigors of being a Crimson quarterback were simply too much after a while.

“My identity and relationships were largely defined by the fact that I was a football player,” Black says.

There’s something to that. At a press conference at the start of the season, a local writer asked Rose what an average day was like for him. There was class, and there were meals, but the day began and often ended with hours of watching game tape in addition to regular practices. Chalk some of this up to Murphy’s offense, one of the few in college football that allows quarterbacks to freely alter protection schemes from the line of scrimmage. Run properly, this allows the quarterback that much more time and vastly better reads. But in order to be run right, Murphy’s offense requires a lot more homework than most offenses even on the highest levels, as well as a surgeon’s dedication and attention to detail.

Rose is no social leper. No one’s saying that. But being a quarterback at Harvard takes a lot out of you. And sometimes, leaving can put a lot back in.

“A popular axiom when defining the Harvard experience is, ‘The best part about Harvard is the people,’” Black says. “The best part about not playing anymore is that I’ve met so many people I feel I’d never have met without quitting football…The highlight of my time here has been interaction with an array of incredibly interesting people.”

Hey, jock bashers and admissions pundits, you of the stereotypes and derision, are you catching any of this? You’re not the only ones who realize that there’s life after Harvard football even before there’s life after Harvard football. Black’s living it up, occupying his time with the Owl, the Ski Club, the Sierra Student Coalition, class and, yes, IM football. Harrington, now a senior, was a class marshal finalist and is the heart and soul of the Eliot House Grill. Wahlberg, also a senior, got his Ivy League championship after all, mowing down Princeton in the ninth to save the title game for the baseball team last spring.

They’re normal Harvard guys with normal Harvard lives—if such things exist.

If anything, Black’s reasons for having left are the same reasons why you have to be happy for the resurgent Rose, and the same reason why you’re happy that Fitzpatrick briefly enjoyed—and will again enjoy—his moments in the sun. It’s a labor of love, the quarterback game, and it’s always good to see that kind of sacrifice rewarded.

And it’s good to see people enjoying what they do. You get the feeling that Rose and Black feel the same in at least one sense when they step out onto the field—Rose at Harvard Stadium, Black in the dingy, unkempt intramural fields in the back—that yes, this is living.

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