Murphy believes heavy recruiting efforts are Harvard's only hope of building a team better than others in the Ivy League.

"The visits are necessary. I want to meet him and see what he's like and, quite frankly, without a personal approach he may go to Yale or Princeton," Murphy says, "Ivy recruiting is not that different from other schools or from Cincinnati--we just do it very Spartan and frugally."

Although Restic refuses to speak specifically about the current Harvard programs, he says he has problems with the intensive recruiting being undertaken by Murphy.

"It becomes a self destructive process. You need to build better facilities and as soon as you don't have the edge you spend more to get ahead in recruiting," Restic says "In the end it will destroy college football, it will become so expensive it is no longer an amateur sport."

In Restic's day, such ardent recruiting was virtually unknown.

In 23 years of coaching, Restic says he made only one visit to an athlete's home, and that was to discuss a financial aid consideration.

"During the first half of my tenure, we didn't even recruit schools, we didn't go on the road at all, [Applicants] had to come to the school on their own, and [Harvard] didn't pay their expenses," Restic says.

Officials say Harvard's strategy under Restic was largely to rely on the pull of its name. Indeed, the rest of the league has traditionally complaining they could not compete with Harvard's nation-leading yield.

But as recruiting continued to grow Harvard's name stopped going as far. Sources say Restic's dislike of active recruiting and his late start to the yearly recruiting process led to disagreement with the athletic department during the last few years of his tenure. Sources say there were years in who is the season had ended, and Restic had not yet begun to recruit for the next year.

Although the recruiting patterns of the last two football coaches could not be more different, the careful selection of players of Harvard's sports teams is no new phenomenon.

A Golden Age

Grey-haired fans still dream of the days when Harvard dominated national football.

In the first few decades of the century the University plundered the docks of South Boston to field its teams Athletes academic ability was not negligible. It was overlooked entirely.

I don't know if they ever went to class," Reardon says.

Once Harvard was a serious football threat, winning 317 games and losing only 65 over a course of 40 years between 1890 and 1930.