Football Looks to Break Streak Against Harvard

By wpengine | October 10, 2003

In any given week, the defense focuses on one or two offensive stars. Harvard’s star, without a doubt, is quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick. How to stop him, however, is another matter entirely.

“I don’t know that you contain him,” said head coach Tim Pendergast.

“He’s really talented. He runs well, very elusive — he’s like a very good tailback who’s also a very good quarterback. Extremely intelligent, he runs a lot of the offense right on the line of scrimmage. He’s sitting out there, and he just knows what you’re doing.”

But Fitzpatrick’s skills aren’t just limited to his running ability and field vision, he’s an all-purpose player. The Harvard junior currently leads the nation in pass efficiency rating, and total offense at 406 yards per game. Last weekend against Northeastern, when he couldn’t find a receiver, he took care of business himself, finishing the day with two rushing touchdowns as well as two in the air.

“This guy can throw the ball and he has receivers that can catch it whenever they want,” said Pendergast. “They don’t have to wait until they are behind to throw the ball. This is a team that likes to throw the ball. They like to spread you out.”

Senior free safety Neil Morrissey echoed Pendergast’s comments.

“Fitzpatrick, he’s up there to make plays. He’s going to throw first and run later, versus the other guys who run first,” he said. “So that’s the question we face, whether or not we’re ready for that, and I think we’re working on it.”

While the top-ranked Harvard offense rolls into Scheollkopf this weekend, it will have to contend with the Ivy League’s leading pass defense. Currently ranked 10th in the nation, Cornell’s secondary has allowed just 141 passing yards per game. The players don’t see why tomorrow will be any different.

“We are extremely excited about the fact that Harvard is coming in here with the top rated passer in the nation,” said Morrissey. “I think that poses a great challenge for our entire defense.

“I think that we’re going to throw a lot of things at Harvard that maybe they haven’t seen.”

But the same thing can be said for Harvard. After losing it’s top receiver, two-time Ivy League player of the year Carl Morris, to graduation, Harvard has found a new top wideout — Brian Edwards. Last week he hauled in seven receptions for 180 yards and two touchdowns. According to Pendergast, Edwards is just one of several weapons the defense will have to limit.

“You have to have talent around talent in order to be good,” Pendergast said. “To be the type of offense that clicks for 530 yards a game, and [Fitzpatrick] leads the nation in offense — he’s a great player.”

Still, the largest factor in limiting Harvard’s offense may not be stopping the run or the pass, it may just be Cornell stopping its own mistakes.

“It’s not that our guys aren’t playing hard, it’s not that they aren’t trying because they are,” said Pendergast of the defense. “Fundamentals — you can go back and watch tape and if a guy goes in the wrong gap, it’s a fundamental breakdown. If the guy steps the wrong way, that’s a fundamental breakdown, and it’s something we need to clean up.”

Cornell’s offense is a different story. Down 24-7 at the half last weekend, the Red mounted a 17-point comeback to knot the game in the fourth quarter. Senior quarterback Mick Razzano spearheaded the effort, throwing for 171 yards and one touchdown. Sophomore Josh Johnston led the way on the ground with 109 yards and one touchdown.

The efforts impressed Pendergast.

“The way I look at it, we scored offensively 17 points in 22 minutes,” he said. “That’s almost a point a minute, not quite, but it’s almost a point a minute. That to me is pretty good production by the offense. In addition, we only took 55 snaps, so that’s almost a point every three snaps.”

Last weekend’s second half also seems to have boosted the confidence of the team.

“We played a good game against Colgate, and we’re looking for big things against Harvard,” said senior receiver John Kellner. “It was a good stepping stone for us to come out and a and play a good second half against Colgate to get us going for this weekend.”

Still, the key to besting Harvard doesn’t lie with one side of the ball. It’ll take a team effort to pull off a win tomorrow.

“A lot of it is just consistency,” said Kellner. “It’s for us to be able to put together four quarters with all three cylinders clicking with our offense, and defense and special teams. We’ve shown signs of greatness in all of them, but we haven’t yet put it all together.”

Archived article by Matt Janiga

Prof. Altschuler Publishes Book on Rock 'n' Roll

By wpengine October 15, 2003

All Shook Up: How Rock’n’Roll Changed America, by Glenn Altschuler Ph.D. ’76, Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies, was published last month by Oxford University Press. The book is the fourth in the publisher’s series called Pivotal Moments in America History. Prof. Altschuler, who teaches a two-semester course on American popular culture, said, “I have given some thought to the relationship between rock’n’roll and controversies over rock’n’roll and the 1950s for some time in my class, so it was a wonderful opportunity when the Pivotal Moments series approached me to take the project on.” All Shook Up places rock’n’roll and its surrounding controversies in a social and historical setting with chapters dedicated to such issues as race, sexuality and generational conflict. On his reasons for writing All Shook Up, Altschuler said, “the aim of the book was to show not only that conflicts over rock’n’roll provide a window to some of the conflicts of the 1950s, but to make the point that there are greater continuities between the 1950s and 1960s than we sometimes think there are.” Eric Alterman, in a book review for The Atlantic Monthly, said [All Shook Up] is “one of the first to do rock-and-roll the significant service of locating it within the cultural and political maelstrom it helped to create.” Alterman’s review continues to say that “Altschuler surpasses the admittedly sparsely populated field in the nuanced way he places the music within the conflicts — racial, sexual, commercial, and political — that it variously helped to encourage, exacerbate, and (occasionally) ameliorate.” Prof. Steven Pond, music, also believed that this book covers aspects of rock and roll never previously addressed. He said that “one of its chief virtues is the way that Altschuler’s analysis dovetails with Reebee Garofalo’s work and with Simon Frith’s work. In both cases, rock’n’roll is treated as social history, but in Frith’s case it’s with a decided Anglo orientation, and Garofalo’s concatenation of social, political, and economic issues leaves room for Altschuler’s discussions of sexuality, public policy and teenage identity struggles.” Some reviewers have criticized Altschuler for not exhibiting sufficient musical expertise to cover the topic of rock and roll. “In the end, however, All Shook Up commits the unpardonable rock’n’roll sin of failing to satisfy. While Altschuler does fine when he digs in, he ultimately covers the decade from the birth of rock in the mid-Fifties to the arrival of the Beatles in the U.S. in 1964 in less than 200 pages. Consequently, the book runs out of steam in about 1960 and races through topics that could easily warrant a book in themselves. And, although he makes few mistakes, Altschuler’s discussions of music never feel fluent,” wrote Anthony DeCurtis in a review for the Oct. 16 issue of Rolling Stone. Altschuler believes that he and DeCurtis have a conflict of interest in the book. “Reviewers always have their own tack on things. When your book is subject to mass circulation publications like this, then sometimes your purposes are lost in the shuffle a bit. This is a book about the 1950s, so when a reviewer says that the events of the 1960s are rushed through, then perhaps there is a gap between my aims and that person’s purposes. And that’s OK — perfectly OK,” he said. On the aims of his book, Altschuler said it was to “use a mass-culture phenomenon like rock’n’roll, and in this case the hysteria that erupted over it, to think about the values of the era in which those controversies occurred. [Also], to look in a serious way at what rock’n’roll reveals about teenage sexuality, about generational conflict, about racism and integration and most importantly, about the emergence of teenagers as a separate identity with consumption patterns that were distinctive and important in the 1950s.” With these aims in mind, the book is an account of the social history of the 1950s, an era in which rock’n’roll played an integral part. Altschuler hopes that some of the issues of the 1950s that arose through rock’n’roll will be enlightened to his readers, which are supposed to include both students and general readers. Altschuler said, “although it’s designed for undergraduates, [it] certainly aims to meet a general reader. Not somebody who’s really looking for insights about the music, per se, but about the era in which the music appeared.”Archived article by Tony Apuzzo
Harvard Blanks Gridders With Stellar Defense

By wpengine October 15, 2003

No. 23 Harvard (4-0. 2-0 Ivy) struck early and often on Saturday, scoring 20 points in the first half en route to a 27-0 win over the football team on Schoellkopf Field. Fast start and offensive prowess aside, however, it was a failed fourth-down conversion by the Red that stands out as the turning point of the game. Trailing 20-0, Cornell (1-3, 0-2) began its third possession of the second quarter on the Harvard 38-yard line. The Red drove 33 yards on 10 plays to place itself at third-and-one on the Crimson five-yard line. Unfortunately for the Red, rush attempts by senior fullback Todd Newell and sophomore tailback Andre Hardaway failed, keeping Cornell off the board as time ran out in the half. “We had just driven the ball 40 yards, and the majority of the damage was on the ground. We were banging out six yards, we were banging out nine yards,” explained head coach Tim Pendergast, “and I felt like we had two chances to get a yard, and I really felt like we could do it. But we came up short.” “If they had scored before halftime, it’s a completely different game in the second half,” Harvard linebacker Dante Balestracci said. “Being able to stop them on fourth down like that and just run off the clock and go into halftime up 20 points was huge.” The sequence of plays was the personification of the stinginess the Crimson defense displayed throughout the game. Drive after drive, Harvard frustrated the Red, limiting the Red to 247 yards of total offense. “The defensive strategy was let’s make them throw the ball to win, because although they did a good job of that, they’re more of a running football team,” said Harvard head coach Tim Murphy. “We don’t want them to dominate the tempo of the game, and we wanted to make them play a little left-handed, so to speak.” The strategy paid off, as the Cornell offense was handcuffed all day. Meanwhile, the Harvard offense, led by junior quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick, continued its assault on the rest of Division I-AA. Fitzpatrick passed for 165 yards and rushed for 83 more to pace the Crimson’s 375 yards of total offense. The Crimson scored touchdowns on three of its first four possessions of the game. On Harvard’s second possession, running back Ryan Tyler culminated a 10 play, 62-yard scoring drive with a five-yard run for a touchdown. Kicker Adam Kingston missed the extra point attempt, giving Harvard a 6-0 lead. On the very next possession, Fitzpatrick called his own number, running 10 yards for a touchdown and a 13-0 Crimson lead. Harvard’s third score came on a five-yard touchdown reception by Brian Edwards early in the second quarter. The trend of offensive efficiency did not continue into the second half, as the Cornell defense finally began to clamp down. “I think we were a little more conservative in the second and third quarters. We wanted to pound the ball a little bit and run some time off the clock. We thought that our guys would be able to dominate the line of scrimmage,” said Fitzpatrick. “A lot of credit to them, they stopped our running game in the second quarter a lot. They were definitely a good defense.” Harvard got on the board again late in the third quarter on a 64-yard touchdown reception by Corey Mazza. “I thought that our defense really fought tooth and nail, and really came up with some big plays ourselves against a really talented outfit who’s averaging 531 yards per game and 41 points,” Pendergast said. Junior punter Mike Baumgartel was again a bright spot for the Red. He averaged 44.7 yards on six punts, including a long of 61 yards. He had two punts land inside the Harvard 20-yard line. “Mike’s a consistently very excellent performer for us,” said Pendergast. “I don’t know what the numbers say, someone might be a yard in front of him in the league average, but Mike’s the best punter in the league.” Another positive point for Cornell was the return of sophomore tailback Hardaway, who rushed for a net of 46 yards on 19 carries. This game marked Hardaway’s return from injuries that limited him for the first three weeks of the season. “Being an athlete, being a ballplayer, being a competitor, there’s no better place I’d rather be than out on the battlefield,” he said.Archived article by Owen Bochner