Pause everything for a second—the ball hanging above midfield, the receiver beneath it, the unfortunate safety behind him, the roaring fans in an unusually packed Harvard Stadium on a day when there aren’t any Yalies in site. Freeze it all and the whole thing looks like something out of high school physics.

Remember free-body diagrams? Here’s a problem for you. Object A, the ball, is about to hurtle downward at a 45-degree angle, and your job is to figure out whether or not it will make contact with Projectile A, a receiver shot out like a cannon from a slant-and-go route and accelerating with every step. Ignore Projectile B, the defender a few steps behind, for a moment. He doesn’t matter.

“At times it seems Morris simply can’t be stopped by Ivy defenses.”

—Pete McEntegart, Sports Illustrated

There are a lot of forces to calculate even without having to worry about Projectile B—the weight of the ball, the weight of the pads the receiver wears, the subtle friction of the field—but you don’t have to factor in the effect of the crowd’s breathing, which has for the moment been suspended in a stadium-wide gasp.

“The 6-foot-3-inch, 200-pounder isn’t a one-man team. He’s a one-man athletic program.”

—Bob Duffy, The Boston Globe

Okay, set things in motion. The ball has been overthrown, but this is where free-body diagrams seem to fail. Projectile A shifts into another gear and—with a body control that defies physics—extends fully to catch the ball over his shoulder while leaving the Penn cornerback in the dust.

“Carl Morris, we’ve heard a lot about this guy. He’s supposed to be a mid-round draft pick for the NFL. Is he that good?”

—D’Marco Farr, The Best Damn Sports Show Period

He streaks into the end zone. You may think the problem finished, but physics roars back with a vengeance and dictates that this is where things actually just start to get interesting. Newton says that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, so you might as well draw up a new diagram illustrating these responses as well—the crowd rising to its feet, Harvard clinching the Ivy League title and, a week later, its first perfect season since the Wilson administration. But you don’t want an “incomplete,” so you might as well get every reaction in there—the phone calls from strangers late at night, the defenses tweaked by men whose sole purpose for a week is to figure out how to stop him and reactions to the hype from those around him on the gridiron and elsewhere.

“He’s just a football player. He’s just a guy. Personally, I don’t jump on his bandwagon as much as you guys.”

—Dartmouth tight end Casey Kramer

Factor in a couple of forces that were already there—the rigors of a Harvard education, the heavy practice schedule and the child-like part of Morris that wants nothing more than to play every sport there is all the time, and it’s one of those problems best suited for the last part of the test—the big beast-of-a-problem at the end.

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