SEASON RECAP: Second-Half Letdown Thwarts Championship Hopes

Riding an enormous wave of momentum from last season’s unforgettable triple-overtime victory over Yale in The Game, the Harvard football team stormed out of the gates on the shoulders of senior running back Clifton Dawson, living up to preseason expectations in finishing the first half of the season undefeated.

The Crimson surprised many with a 5-0 start, weathering the storm that took the form of instability at the quarterback position in the season’s early going. It began before the start of the season, when junior signal-caller Liam O’Hagan was suspended for the team’s first five games for an undisclosed reason, forcing junior Chris Pizzotti to assume the starting role for the first time in his injury-plagued career.

Pizzotti performed well in the team’s opener, a decisive 31-14 win over Holy Cross. But a knee injury knocked Pizzotti out of the game just over a quarter in, and sophomore Jeff Witt had to finish the rest of the game as well as start in Harvard’s next contest, the Ivy League opener at Brown.

Witt once again performed admirably in a 38-21 victory in Providence, R.I., but the game’s real story was the performance of Dawson. He rushed for a season-high 181 yards on just 25 carries and scored three times, helping divert attention from the shoulder injury sustained by Witt during the contest.

Midway through the following week, the Crimson was prepared to sink all the way down to its fourth-string quarterback—junior Richard Irvin—before Pizzotti made a surprise start and led Harvard to a thrilling 35-33 comeback against Lehigh in Bethlehem, Pa.

Home wins against Cornell and Lafayette followed, prompting whispers of a repeat performance of 2004’s undefeated championship run.

“If you could have asked me back in August, ‘Would you be pleased and proud to be 5-0 at this stage of the game?’ I would have said, ‘Absolutely,’” Crimson coach Tim Murphy said of his team’s early success.

But Harvard wasn’t the Ivy League’s only squad with a chance to run the table at the halfway point. Week 6 marked the showdown of two undefeated teams when the Crimson traveled to Princeton, the first time the two squads had played each other with records of 5-0 or better since 1922.

It also marked Harvard’s shot at avenging its gut-wrenching 27-24 loss to the Tigers of a year earlier. The end result, however, was a loss far more gut—or chest—wrenching than that of 2005.

For it was a seemingly innocent chest bump by senior safety Danny Tanner that swayed the momentum in Princeton’s favor, turning a late third-down incompletion into a new set of downs and the eventual game-winning touchdown in the Tigers’ 31-28 win.

“They’ve got a tough job, but I haven’t seen that call in college football, in the Ivy League,” Murphy said after the game. “I still don’t know, the kid just celebrated, it was a great play.”

A win at Dartmouth the next week—which also marked O’Hagan’s return as the starter—coupled with a Princeton loss gave the Crimson new life. An easy win against Columbia the following week set the stage for an Ivy League title and—with Dawson just 53 yards shy of the league’s all-time rushing record—a chance at history.

Dawson did his part, breaking Ed Marinaro’s 35-year-old record on a blistering 55-yard run during the first quarter against the Quakers, but the offense faltered, eventually losing, 22-13, and making the Ivy League title picture much murkier.

“The biggest thing is that we lost this game,” Dawson said after the Penn loss. “I wanted, first and foremost, to win an Ivy League championship.”

With The Game still looming and memories from the year before still fresh in Harvard minds, the Crimson still had a chance to share the league crown.

But Yale wanted its own shot at a title—and vengeance, too. It showed in a dominating Bulldog victory, a 34-13 win in front of a packed crowd at Harvard Stadium.

The Crimson failed to make it an unprecedented six straight wins against Yale, and the Bulldogs shared the Ivy title with the Tigers at season’s end. But Dawson’s cementation as the Ivy League’s most prolific running back—he finished with 4,841 career yards, 126 more than Marinaro—was a bit of saving grace for a lackluster end to the 2006 campaign.

“Our seniors had a great run here at Harvard during their four years,” Murphy said. “We were disappointed that we didn’t win the championship in their senior season, but they gave us great effort and great leadership and leave a very impressive legacy.”

—Staff writer Malcom A. Glenn can be reached at mglenn@fas.harvard.edu.