THE BOOK OF SAMUELS: Crimson Lets Perfection Slip Away

For the past year and a half or so, no school has tormented Harvard sports quite like the Princeton Tigers.

Doug Davis hitting that are-you-kidding-me shot with 2.8 seconds left in the one-game playoff to end the Harvard men’s basketball team’s 2011 Tournament chances. That 70-62 victory to finish the team’s stretch in the top 25 last season.

And now, this.

Down 20-0 at halftime, the Princeton football team completed a stunning, jaw-dropping, mouth-wide-open-and-hands-on-your-head comeback to pull off a giant 39-34 upset over the Crimson.

In doing so, the longest winning streak in Division I football came to an abrupt and climactic end.

That magical run that began over a year ago on a rainy Friday night at Harvard Stadium with a 24-7 victory over Brown, brought the Crimson to the pinnacle of Ivy League play, saw Harvard break its program modern-era points record, unraveled in a matter of minutes. A streak over a year in the making disintegrated in a single fourth quarter.

The whole ordeal on Saturday seemed strangely out of place. It was the villain finally getting the best of Bond, the Jordan buzzer-beater clanking out. Things that just aren’t supposed to happen.

But of course, all streaks have to end eventually. And with the end of this one, all thoughts of a perfect season, all comparisons to that undefeated 2004 team led by Ryan Fitzpatrick ’05 and Co., went the way of the Hindenburg.

But for Crimson fans, it’s an even tougher fate to swallow for one simple reason: Harvard, unquestionably, should have won this game.

When your quarterback—senior Colton Chapple—throws for 448 yards and five touchdowns, breaking one program record and tying another, you shouldn’t lose.

When one receiver alone—senior Kyle Juszczyk—has three touchdowns and nearly 200 yards on 15 receptions, you shouldn’t lose.

When at halftime, you have a 20-point lead and have held the opposition to 51 total yards while tallying 415 of your own, you shouldn’t lose.

And when you have a 16-point edge with 11 minutes left and the other team’s fans are leaving, abandoning the game as a lost cause, you definitely shouldn’t lose.

Worse yet, the Crimson was the better team, plain and simple. Even Princeton coach Bob Surace acknowledged that.

“They’re the best team in the league by far, and we had a few good breaks go our way....There’s a reason they won 14 in a row,” Surace said.

But in the end, costly mistake after mistake after mistake ultimately cost the team a chance at elusive number 15. If any one of those, it seemed, had been corrected, had gone in the Crimson’s favor, then that winning streak might still be alive and well. One fewer dropped pick, one fewer excessive celebration penalty, one fewer this or that, and who knows.

Yes, this was a game that left Harvard fans with more “what ifs” than a Michael Sandel lecture.

And it all came to a head in that fateful fourth quarter, when the Tigers reeled off those 29 unanswered points—more points than Harvard has ever allowed in program in the final frame in program history—and everything unwound in a stunning and epic collapse.

It wasn’t only those mistakes, though, that allowed for such a remarkable comeback. After allowing only 51 passing yards in the first half, the Crimson secondary struggled mightily in the second two quarters. This wasn’t the unit that shut down Cornell’s mighty attack; it wasn’t the group that gave up 23 points in its previous three contests.

After a strong first half, the secondary gave up a whopping 241 passing yards in the second. By comparison, entering the contest, the Tigers averaged just 163 yards through the air each game.

Even worse: In the fourth quarter, Princeton threw four touchdowns. Coming into Saturday’s game, the Tigers had thrown for just three all season long, and Harvard had allowed just five.

But for some reason, once more, Princeton had Harvard’s number. For the two years prior, the otherwise-anemic Tigers offense had put up more points against the Crimson than any other league competitor. And that trend continued on Saturday—a weak Princeton offense shined against Harvard—but this time, unlike the past two years, it was the Tigers who came away with the ‘W’.

And now, after its first loss since early in the 2011 season, the Crimson must deal with another reality: that Ivy League title that seemed so firmly in its grasp for a second straight year is now, all of a sudden, anything but a done deal.

With the Tigers undefeated, the fate of the Crimson—considered even by Princeton’s coach as the top team in the conference—is no longer in its own hands.

—Staff writer Robert S. Samuels can be reached at robertsamuels@college.harvard.edu.