Crimson, Mountain Hawks Meet Again

Fresh off the Crimson’s first-ever night game, a historic 24-17 win over Brown last week, the Harvard football team will take to the road this week to play Lehigh tomorrow afternoon at 1 p.m. at Goodman Stadium in Bethlehem, Pa.

Tomorrow’s game will be the 13th time the two teams have met, as the rivalry between Harvard (1-1) and Lehigh (2-1) goes back to 1928. The teams have split the first 12 games, and Harvard won last season in a 35-33 comeback victory in Bethlehem, the third of five straight wins to begin the 2006 season for the Crimson.

This season, Harvard enters the game already with a blemish on its record, after suffering a season-opening loss to Holy Cross in Week 1.

“I think we’re a solid team,” Crimson coach Tim Murphy said. “On the plus side, we’re literally one play away from being 2-0 against two real solid teams. How much more than that? I think that’s what we find out down at Lehigh.”

Much of the attention tomorrow will be directed towards Mountain Hawks quarterback Sedale Threatt.

“His strengths are his mobility and ability to get out of the pocket,” Harvard captain Brad Bagdis said. “He really excells on sprint motions and options. We’re trying to make sure we contain him and keep him in the pocket.”

Murphy said that the biggest challenge Threatt poses to the Crimson defense is his ability to improvise.

“This is a guy that we have to know where he is at all times,” he said. “Kind of like Ryan Fitzpatrick, a little bit like Liam O’Hagan, he’s a guy that if you don’t keep an eye on him, you don’t have him in your radar, then he’s going to improvise some plays that you can’t necessarily set up defenses for.”

The Crimson will try to keep Threatt from making any big plays, and it will also attempt to prevent the Lehigh running backs from moving the ball. The Harvard defensive line struggled in the opener against Holy Cross, but responded last week by only giving up 49 yards on the ground.

Since Lehigh’s season opening defeat against Villanova, the team’s offense has outscored its opponents 60-20.

Besides Threatt, there are several other players Harvard will be on the lookout for.

One of them is junior receiver Nick Johnson, who has averaged more than 27 yards per catch this year. Junior punter Jason Leo’s 43.3 yards per punt will also be a challenge for the Crimson. His record for average yards per punt stands at eighth in the nation and he has a personal long record of 65 yards.

Mountain Hawks running back Kwesi Kankam scored an 88-yard touchdown last week in Lehigh’s 37-6 win against the Virginia Military Institute. They are just a few of the players the Crimson will have to keep in mind tomorrow.

“They’re a very strong team,” Bagdis said. “They’re very big up front.”

The Crimson offense, which through two games has accumulated 856 total yards, has its own notable standouts.

Harvard ranks first in the Ivy League in total offense, while senior receiver Corey Mazza’s 16 catches for 235 yards and two scores will be the biggest threat to the Mountain Hawk defense. At running back, both sophomore Cheng Ho and freshman Gino Gordon are expected to split time, as neither performed especially well against Brown a week ago.

“Did we execute great in the running game? No,” Murphy said. “It’s still a work in progress. We feel like our offensive line is potentially a very good one. We feel like our backs are solid.”

After playing in front of 18,898 partisan fans in the nighttime win against the Bears, Murphy said that the unfriendly crowd in Bethlehem shouldn’t be too much of an adjustment for Harvard.

“My thing is always just about pride,” Murphy said. “Whether you’re playing in front of 20,000 at home in the first night game or you’re playing on the road...it’s always about pride.”