Rushing Attack Leads Way in Easy Victory

EASTON, Pa.—Football is often a game of inches. For Harvard this season, every game has been won or lost by a mile.

After being embarrassed at Brown last weekend, the Crimson (2-1, 0-1 Ivy) got its season back on track on Saturday, running Lafayette (0-4, 0-1 Patriot) into the ground in a dominating 35-10 win at Fisher Stadium.

“I’m just very proud of our kids,” Crimson coach Tim Murphy said. “We just really appealed to our kids’ pride today, and they responded tremendously from the get-go.”

Without the arm of senior quarterback Andrew Hatch, who missed the game due to a concussion, Harvard turned to the legs of senior Gino Gordon. Gordon responded with a 170-yard rushing performance, accounting for more than half of the Crimson’s 311 yards on the ground. The last time the Leopards gave up 300-plus yards on the ground was in a 34-27 loss to Harvard in 2003.

“We needed to establish the run for a lot of different reasons,” Murphy said. “We’ll go back to being a balanced offense. We weren’t a balanced offense last week, we weren’t a balanced offense today, but we had the right type of non-balance today.”

Senior Marco Iannuzzi got the game off to a good start with a 50-yard kickoff return, putting sophomore Colton Chapple into Lafayette territory for his first drive as a starting quarterback.

Chapple directed a 46-yard rushing drive—including a 30-yard carry from senior wideout Mike Cook—that ended with Gordon darting into the endzone with a two-yard run.

“One of the keys to this game was getting off to a great start,” Murphy said. “Whatever team got off to a great start was going to have an edge. We rode that momentum, and we were fortunate to keep it going.”

The Crimson padded that lead with a pair of touchdowns in the second quarter. The first came on Chapple’s first career touchdown pass—a nine-yard completion to sophomore tight end Kyle Juszczyk—and the second on a five-yard run from sophomore Treavor Scales, a score set up by a 27-yard rush from Gordon.

But just as Harvard’s offense got on a roll in the first half, so did its defense. The Crimson allowed just one score in the first half, coming on a 45-yard field goal from Leopard kicker Davis Rodriguez with 33 seconds left in the half.

“Certainly not our best game by any stretch of the imagination,” Lafayette coach Frank Tavani said. “We took a huge step backwards. Obviously we weren’t prepared, and it starts with me, so I’ll shoulder the blame for that. It was pretty much the first time all year I was kind of embarrassed by our play.”

Chapple ended the half with his longest completion of the game, a 45-yard Hail Mary bomb that was improbably hauled in by Cook at the one-yard line as time expired.

The Crimson then capitalized on its first possession after the break, with Gordon breaking for the longest rush of his career—a 74-yard touchdown run to make the score 28-3.

“You get to think about quite a few things when you’re making a run like that,” Gordon said. “The main one for me was don’t get caught and make sure you celebrate with the offensive line.”

With the game already in hand, Murphy gave some fresh faces a chance to play. Sophomore Rich Zajeski got in on the fun late in the third quarter, first darting through the defense with a 23-yard run and capping the drive with a one-yard score on the next play. Zajeski finished with a career-high 59 yards and his first collegiate touchdown.

Senior Matt Simpson—a backup QB last season who had been converted to a wide receiver—took snaps in the fourth quarter, completing his first career pass to freshman Scott Miller. All told, five rookies saw action.

In garbage time late in the game, Lafayette got into a groove. Leopard rookie Jet Kollie looked to have a 94-yard kickoff return for a touchdown following Zajeski’s score, but the play was called back on an illegal block penalty—one that drew the ire of Tavani, who rushed the field to express his displeasure.

Lafayette backup quarterback Andrew Shoop found Greg Kessel in the endzone for an 18-yard touchdown with five minutes to play in the fourth, making the final score 35-10.

With the win, Harvard moves to 2-0 on the season against Patriot League opponents, a year after going 1-2 against those same nonconference foes. The Crimson has a chance to make a clean Patriot sweep when it hosts Lehigh in two weeks.

“We know [Lafayette’s] struggling, btu we were kind of struggling coming in,” Murphy said. “They’ve got a really outstanding program...You go 3-0 against the Patriot League, you know you’re a very good football team.”

—Staff writer Kate Leist can be reached at kleist@fas.harvard.edu.