Harvard Sings All the Way Home from Princeton

­If you passed a bus heading from New Jersey to Cambridge on Saturday night with the soulful tunes of Frank Sinatra booming out, don’t be surprised. According to Harvard football coach Tim Murphy, after road victories, the offensive linemen will sing anything on the bus ride home, from “Sinatra to rap.”

“It’s amazing, it sounds pretty good,” said Murphy about the linemen singing.

The Harvard football team certainly had good reason to sing all the way home from Princeton on Saturday.

“Sometimes it goes your way, sometimes it doesn’t,” Murphy said of the contest in the postgame press conference.

This year, it finally went the way of the Crimson (6-0, 3-0 Ivy). Harvard completely dismantled the Tigers (3-3, 2-1) on both sides of the ball—Saturday’s 49-7 victory at Princeton Stadium looked remarkably little like the triple-overtime loss of last season.

Two years ago, when the Crimson gave up 29 points in the fourth quarter and watched a victory slip away, it was Murphy who was befuddled by his team’s utter meltdown.

This time around, it was Princeton coach Bob Surace’s turn to say, “Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.”

With the Tigers rushing attack taken away by the Harvard’s stout defensive front seven, Surace turned to his two quarterbacks—Connor Michelsen and Quinn Epperly—to move the chains. But the quarterback duo that put up an average of 304 yards passing over the last two years against Harvard couldn’t break 200 yards this time around against a secondary that graduated most all but one starter last year.

In fact, the Tigers offense seemed more style than substance for most of the game, running unusual two-quarterback schemes, which featured reverse plays that seemingly completed more backward passes than forward ones. At one point, Princeton lined up Epperly against senior defensive end Zack Hodges, certainly not the matchup Surace had in mind.

Surace elected to go for a fourth-and-five deep in Harvard’s territory midway through the third quarter, when the Tigers trailed 35-0. Michelsen found wideout Connor Kelley for the first down, but a chop block on the otherwise-promising play brought it back. Princeton was hit with a 15-yard penalty, and it became time to punt—one of the 12 times Princeton was forced to punt on the day.

Michelsen connected again with Kelley for a 27-yard bullet on the next drive—the longest offensive play yet for the Tigers—and Surace’s squad appeared to be potentially making a dent in the 35-0 hole it was in. But on the very next play, Michelsen’s screen pass ended in a forced fumble when junior defensive back Asante Gibson punched the ball out and recovered it.

And so on. Things weren’t going well on defense either for Princeton. Harvard senior quarterback Conner Hempel, finally healthy from a back injury suffered in the Crimson’s first game of the season, appeared to have oiled his jersey in preparation for the Tigers’ pass rushers. Orange and black jerseys swarmed him, and it seemed inevitable that Hempel was going down.

Then suddenly, almost as if by magic, No. 14 would emerge, roll out, and throw a pass. No sack, and touchdown, Harvard.

The Tigers sent two free blitzers on a third down and finally brought down Hempel in the second half, but one of the defenders grabbed Hempel’s face mask on the way down. No sack, 15-yard penalty, and a few plays later, Hempel jumped over his offensive line into the end zone for one of his five scores. Touchdown, Harvard.

Princeton’s defense finally got to Hempel for one sack, but it was too little, too late. For the majority of the game, the offensive line gave Hempel plenty of time to throw, and throw he did—the senior ended the day with a career-high 382 yards and three touchdowns through the air.

Along with helping Hempel to a career day, the offensive line made the nation’s third-best rushing defense look downright average. After the game, Surace, who previously coached offensive linemen in the NFL, noted that at least two members of Harvard’s o-line could play professionally.

Harvard’s offensive linemen certainly appeared to live up to Surace’s praise, as the running back corp tallied over 300 yards rushing thanks to a few explosive runs from junior Paul Stanton and freshman Semar Smith.

Watching the game almost felt like a disappointment—an anticlimactic event after the drama of the past two years. But disappointment was definitely limited to a writer hoping to witness a good game of football.

For after their performance Saturday and sweet revenge on Princeton—two years in the making—finally enacted, the offensive linemen surely sang all the way home.

—Staff writer Samantha Lin can be reached at samantha.lin@thecrimson.com.