Football Picked to Repeat as League Champions

The Harvard football team’s quest for a third-straight Ivy League championship took a step forward this week when Ancient Eight media members picked the Crimson to finish atop the league.

Coming off a 10-0 season, Harvard garnered 11 of 17 first-place votes and 130 points overall. That was enough to push the Crimson in front of Dartmouth, which received four first-place nods and 116 total points. The Big Green finished second in the league last year.

Yale, which came one score away from blemishing Harvard’s perfect record in last year’s rendition of The Game, finished third with 98 points and a lone first-place vote.

The poll results may suggest cloudless dominance for the Crimson, but in a media conference call after the fact, Ivy League coaches stressed a different theme: parity.

“The competition in the league is better than it’s ever been,” Harvard coach Tim Murphy said. “You can probably make a strong case that every team in our league is going to be better than they were a year ago…maybe other than Harvard.”

On paper the Big Green presents the largest threat to Harvard’s hegemony.

According to College Sports Madness, Dartmouth boasts both the projected Offensive Player of the Year in quarterback Dalyn Williams and the projected Defensive Player of the Year in linebacker Will McNamara.

The Big Green’s talent extends beyond these senior standouts, however. Of the 14 players on the Preseason All-Ivy Defensive Team, seven hail from Dartmouth.

More, the Big Green enters the season with the hunger of an underdog—one that hasn’t claimed an Ancient Eight title since going undefeated in 1996.

“We live up in the woods here, so a lot of stuff might not filter up this way,” Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens said. “We don’t make a big deal of it one way or another. We just try to put our best foot forward each weekend.”

A similar psychology motivates Yale, which has surrendered the last eight Harvard-Yale contests and hasn’t won a league title since tying with Princeton in 2006.

Last year the Bulldogs led all of FCS football with 571.5 yards of total offense, and quarterback Morgan Roberts set school records in completion percentage and passing yards. Although Roberts will return, Yale will lose leading rusher Tyler Varga and top receivers Grant Wallace and Deon Randall.

“We feel we’ve got some guys that are in our depth that can do the job,” Bulldogs coach Tony Reno said. “The challenge for us offensively is, can these guys step in to replace the production that we had last year?”

The return of Roberts embodies a league-wide trend toward veteran signal-callers. In terms of yards per game, all of the top five quarterbacks from 2014 will come back for the 2015 season.

This group includes junior Alek Torgersen and senior Marcus Fuller, starters from Penn and Brown, respectively. While the two teams are projected to finish in the lower half of the Ivy League, the presence of such experience potentially establishes the Quakers and the Bears as dark horses.

Princeton lacks a tested play-caller, but the Tigers return Britt Colcolough and Spenser Huston, a pair of All-Ivy offensive lineman, and running back DiAndrew Atwater, a 2013 first-team selection. It’s the same story on the other side of the ball, as Princeton brings back all of its starters on the defensive line.

Even the traditional have-nots of the Ancient Eight enter the 2015 campaign with new intrigue.

Last spring Columbia made ripples by signing Al Bagnoli, the most winning coach in FCS history. Bagnoli had coached at Penn for two decades years, claiming nine outright league titles, but the Lions lured him away with the promise of constructing a winning program from the ground up.

“I still have a few Fruedian slips, to be honest with you,” Bagnoli said. “That Penn thing was engrained for 23 years.... It’s certainly been reinvigorating for me.”

The top job at Columbia presents a unique challenge for Bagnoli, as the Lions haven’t won a game in the last two seasons. Still, with Bagnoli at the helm, Columbia finished ahead of Cornell in the preseason poll.

As for the Big Red, most hopes for success rest on the shoulders of senior running back Luke Hagy, who finished third in the league last year with 734 rushing yards. Hagy and company will seek to improve on a 2014 season in which Cornell won a single game—a three-point squeaker at Columbia.

From top to bottom, the drama of the coming season will take place on the big screen, with a record of 17 Ancient Eight games shown on television networks.

But cameras won’t be rolling next week when teams convene for their first official practices. On private August fields, the Ivy League season, and Harvard’s hunt for its first-ever three-peat, will get underway.

“We’re not destined to go 10-0,” Murphy said. “If for any reason you think you’re entitled to it just because your teammates have won three of the last four Ivy championships, the bottom line is [that] you’re going to get hammered.”

—Staff writer Sam Danello can be reached at sam.danello@thecrimson.com.