PROVIDENCE, R.I.--The players on the Brown football team have got to be the biggest suckers alive.

They're pretty good, don't get me wrong. Brown is now 7-1 (4-1 Ivy) thanks to its 17-10 win over Harvard (5-3, 3-2) on Saturday. But suckers, all of them.

Last year, Brown Coach Phil Estes used a quote by Harvard senior running back Chris Menick, who said he was "confident we could run the ball" against the Bears. That innocuous quote became bulletin-board material.

This year, he took analysis that appeared in The Crimson's game preview on Friday: "The hole in the defense is in the secondary, which has allowed quarterbacks to pick their way through it all season, giving up more than 250 yards through the air each game. Overall, Brown's defense is by far the weak link on an otherwise championship team."

"When they said they were going to throw at the secondary and that we were the weakness on the web site, that pumped us up," sophomore Melvin Justice said.

So I asked Estes after the game if this is a standard ploy of his.

"Yes," he beamed. "I love the Internet, I think it's a great invention. I was looking all week, and they kept pumping up how good we are, and I was ready just to make something up, but bam!--there it was on Friday."

Maybe he was just having a good time, but based on his track record of thanking The Crimson after Brown's win in '98 ("Are you with The Crimson? We enjoy reading your stuff online. Thanks."), it appears he probably wasn't.

"Harvard felt our weakness was our secondary, and we fed it to them, and they stepped up," Estes said.

We can break this down analytically, of course.

The fact is that the Harvard football team never said what Estes claims. The person writing the preview did as a result of Brown's poor stats against the pass this season. At the time, the Bears were giving up 27.9 points a game, so saying their defense was the weak link seemed pretty appropriate.

Second, how dumb are these Brown players? Maybe this can work once or twice, but every single week, Estes is surfing the web, looking for a motivational quote. He said it himself--if it's not there, he'll make it up.

Does Brown think that there's some sort of conspiracy against it? Does Estes, now in his second year as head coach but the head recruiter for four years before that, recruit only incredibly paranoid players?

I can only imagine what's going to be board-worthy by Estes' fourth or fifth year. His creativity will be stretched to the max. He'll be spending as much time on the laptop as in the film room.

Suggestions, in case Coach Estes is reading:

"Harvard said that we have an unstructured curriculum and were in a podunk city. Also, they said they were going to steal our girlfriends after the game. That pumped us up."

"Harvard said they didn't respect us as people. They also said our girlfriends are ugly. That pumped us up."

"Harvard said we're ugly and so are our girlfriends, and that they're going to fire us when they're our bosses some day. That pumped us up."

This low-grade name-calling is ridiculous. I propose that next year's Harvard-Brown game be replaced by a WWF Smackdown-style confrontation in which the top five trash-talkers from each team sit at midfield, facing each other Family Feud style. Each can have a microphone, with the captain of each team serving as "dad."

I think we can probably get Merv Griffin to throw something together, maybe some music and a little TV coverage. ESPN's Chris Berman, a Brown alum, can do the color commentary. Maybe there'll be a lightning round that rewards fast thinking, and bonus points for fresh "yo mama" takes, if any still exist.

This year, however, they settled the game the old-fashioned way, and the lasting impression is that Harvard could just as easily have won this game--and maybe the Ivy title--as lost it. Chances are that the Crimson's chances of a title are over, and it's not because it wasn't good enough to win the Ivies.

Harvard is a very good team and a couple of plays (and wins) from being a great team. This defense is terrific and was again Saturday; Murphy said it couldn't have played better.

In Harvard's two league losses, Destiny turned its back on Harvard in crunch time. Cornell scored 14 points in the last three minutes to win 24-23 in a game that Harvard owned for 59 minutes. Saturday, Harvard made too many mistakes to win but came incredibly close.

Despite four turnovers, it went into halftime tied 3-3, thanks to its tenacious defense. In fact, 5:30 into the third quarter, it was up 10-3 thanks to an equally tenacious 11-yard touchdown run by senior Chris Menick.

Brown tied the game two possessions later then went ahead when Justice, a relatively unknown substitute, returned an interception 44 yards to the Harvard 18 to set up the winning touchdown with 12:23 left in the game. It was Wilford's third interception, and it came on third-and-30, when Murphy figured an interception would equal a punt.

Justice's return made a normally safe gamble a loser. Later, senior Mike Giampaolo missed a 37-yarder with the wind at his back. After senior end Mike Sands sacked Brown quarterback James Perry on third-and-8, the officials called senior end Brian Howard for a borderline late-hit personal foul that extended the drive by another minute.

Wilford's fourth interception, a foolish pass he threw late while rolling right and under pressure, killed a drive that had gotten to the Brown 40, and Harvard's Ivy hopes are now gasping for breath, if not dead.

Last year's Crimson team wasn't good enough to repeat the '97 team's success (9-1, 7-0). This year's team was good enough to come close, but unlike in '97, it wasn't a team of destiny. In Harvard's 14-12 '97 win against Princeton, Giampaolo hit a then-career long 43-yarder, and another kick went through despite being tipped as Harvard rallied from a 12-8 deficit. There was no similar sign of otherworldly blessing on this team, however.

Murphy has said repeatedly that the talent level in the Ivy League is close. This year proves him right, since four teams were tied for the league lead at 3-1 entering this past weekend. Little things in individual Ivy games determine the champion, and despite a truly great effort, it looks like this isn't Harvard's year.

I only wish it weren't Brown's, either.