Defense Key as Harvard Prepares for Lafayette Tilt

Last week, Lafayette tailback Ross Scheuerman found the end zone three times to lead the Leopards to a 24-21 win over Georgetown, bringing his total to six touchdowns on the year. Against a Harvard defensive front seven that has dominated the line of scrimmage, Scheuerman will have a tougher day Saturday when the Leopards (3-3, 1-3 Patriot) face the Crimson (4-0, 2-0 Ivy) at Harvard Stadium. The Crimson leads the Ancient Eight in run defense, allowing just 75.5 yards rushing per game.

In fact, even after an almost complete turnover of the secondary, Harvard also leads the league in pass defense, a testament to the strong leadership within the remaining veterans in the defense.

“All the linebackers have stepped up,” junior linebacker Eric Medes said. “We had six seniors in the secondary last year, and they’re all gone, so it’s good to have everyone step up, and the D-line’s doing a great job.”

The matchup with Lafayette will be Harvard’s final non-conference matchup, and more importantly, the final tuneup before the squad heads into the bulk of Ivy season. While the defense seems to have answered most of the questions raised at the beginning of the season, the injury-riddled offense appears to have more question marks heading into the fifth game of the year.

Senior quarterback and preseason starter Conner Hempel left the Crimson’s season opener against Holy Cross early in the first quarter due to a back injury. Though he returned later in the game, the signal-caller has yet to see playing time since the first week, and has just returned to practice this week.

Joining Hempel on the sidelines for most of the first few games was junior tailback Paul Stanton, who suffered a high ankle sprain in the preseason and has had limited touches since. Crimson coach Tim Murphy elected to use Stanton in the second half of last week’s matchup against Cornell only when the offense was struggling to score.

Murphy said in an interview Wednesday that while Hempel is day-to-day and questionable for Lafayette, Stanton should be ready to go.

“We feel really good about our backfield right now for the first time in a long time,” Murphy said. “Individually, kids have done a really good job, probably since the first week of preseason, of being healthy."

If Murphy chooses to rest Hempel another week—likely the case, as this Saturday’s game carries no weight in the Ivy League title race—junior quarterback Scott Hosch will take the reins for the fourth straight week.

Hosch has led the team to three consecutive wins, but his inexperience showed early on against the Big Red when he threw a pick on Harvard’s first offensive possession. The offense struggled with ball security early on, turning the ball over four times in the first half.

Buoyed by the return of Stanton, the Crimson put together an offensive surge in the second half, but a late turnover yielded a Cornell touchdown, preventing Harvard from notching its first shutout of the season.

“We don’t have many offensive goals besides ball security, and if you do that, everything else seems to take care of itself,” Murphy said. “We didn’t do that, and in a negative aspect, everything took care of itself, and that’s just the way it works.”

Unlike against Cornell, Harvard will have the added challenge this week of facing a school with athletic scholarships to offer. The Patriot League—which for most of its history adopted an Ivy-esque no athletic scholarship policy—began allowing its schools to offer merit-based athletic scholarships to football players in 2012, and Lafayette signed its first scholarship class that spring.

With two scholarship classes now under their belts, the Leopards may be playing with a higher talent level, but Murphy sees this as further motivation for his squad.

“We really feel like we’re a program in a league that can compete with FCS scholarship schools,” Murphy said. “Does it make it more challenging? Yes. It also makes it in some ways more appealing from our players’ standpoint, who feel that we’re up to that challenge.”

—Staff writer Samantha Lin can be reached at samantha.lin@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @Linsamnity.