Luckily, Carl Morris knows a lot about tests. A 62-year-old balding white man with a goofy grin and a Ph.D. from Stanford, Dr. Carl N. Morris has been a member of Harvard’s Department of Statistics for going on 12 years now. He’s edited two leading statistics journals and—what’s that? You want the sports Carl Morris?

Well, Carl Morris the professor was featured by ESPN.com a few weeks ago for creating a new statistical measure of baseball performance, one that proves that Barry Bonds’ 2002 season was the greatest offensive season of all time.

Still not good enough for you? Fine, we’ll get to the other Carl Morris in a second, but here’s the link for you—the first Carl Morris who set foot in Cambridge knows who the other Carl Morris is. (He says that he hopes the younger Morris enjoys a long professional career.) As do most people who strut back and forth around Harvard Yard all day long, lost in a world of classes, clubs and the occasional protest rally. In a place in which athletics lack the on-campus clout of a Notre Dame, Michigan or even Stanford, Morris’ name carries a level of campus-wide recognition.

It’s not that Morris is the only good football player to come out of Cambridge. Matt Birk ’98 is a Pro-Bowl center for the Minnesota Vikings. Isaiah Kacyvenski ’00 is currently laid up in his home with a high ankle sprain, but the Seattle Seahawks hope he’ll heal quickly and regain the team’s starting middle linebacker spot. Junior Dante Balestracci, a bruising linebacker from New Bedford, Mass., and senior offensive lineman Jamil Soriano may be better NFL bets in the long run.

But Morris is a glamour player—a wide receiver—and his highlight-reel catches make his level of play accessible to more pedestrian observers. Plays like that catch against Penn in last year’s Ivy title game tend to stick in people’s minds.

And the plays keep coming. You want to hear about Carl Morris—the football Morris—and how to measure the greatest offensive season of all time? Watch him obliterate all of the single-season Harvard receiving marks he set the previous season despite injuries to Neil Rose, the team captain and one of the most efficient quarterbacks in Ancient Eight history.

And this is why the fans have been showing up in $38 Morris jerseys available at the Stadium; why, in addition to scouts from across the NFL, ESPN GameDay and Sports Illustrated and hundreds of normally apathetic fans have shown up as well.

At the moment, Morris is very still, sitting in his room with The Simpsons on mute in the background. He sits up in his bed, calmly answering the same questions he’s answered most of the year to yet another member of the media. Yes, ESPN has gotten to this Carl Morris as well, and so have Sports Illustrated and The New York Times. And the result is the other polished, public Morris. The answers have been given a million times now—to publications, to scouts—and the prospect doesn’t hesitate while jumping from subject to subject. Right now, it’s basketball.

Basketball?

“I always wanted to play for the Knicks,” Morris says. “After I got here and was in the program for about a year, football just took over everything, and it was like, life doesn’t get any better than this. I think it’s the ultimate team sport. You can’t have anything without the other guys.”

Morris doesn’t run from his surprising fame. He seems to enjoy it—he keeps one of his uniforms in his common room and once posed for a campus magazine dangling playfully from the goalpost—but is guarded when asked about the NFL, about his role on the team, about agents and scouts. He’ll open up more when talking about the game, whatever the game is at the moment. Here it’s basketball, and Morris’ eyes light up as he talks about hitting the courts for pickup games—even though he doubts he’ll be able to hit the court much after the season because of “all that’s going on.”

The Handler

Tim Murphy remembers Carl Morris and basketball. The first time he saw his star receiver, Morris was playing for Episcopal High in Alexandria, Va. Murphy watched from the stands as Morris dunked from all angles and didn’t quite see the polished football player right then—couldn’t have, since Morris didn’t pick up football until 11th grade—but saw an athlete. Murphy, a master recruiter who has stolen players from the clutches of Nebraska and other big-time programs since taking over in 1994, has an eye for these sorts of things. Maybe he could sense the bloodlines—the grandfather who played for soccer’s Manchester United, the mother who played netball (a basketball derivative) in Britain, the aunt who played college basketball at Old Dominion and the sister who played scholarship ball at Wagner. Maybe he could see the raw ability of the school’s top striker in soccer or the agility of the shortstop who had been paid a visit by the Florida Marlins at age 17—only three years after he’d picked up that sport.

Murphy sits in his office in sweats and a T-shirt now, a portrait of controlled fatigue. He has gone from ESPN interviews early in the week to two Crimson reporters on Thursday—all the while with nationally-ranked Penn looming on the schedule. He has also seen the world’s reaction to Carl Morris—lived it the past few days—and so he’d be as good a person as anyone about the free-body diagram.

“I think it’s obvious from what he’s accomplished that Carl couldn’t have handled it better,” Murphy says. “Carl has the ability—and this is the case with anyone who is successful in anything—to focus. He narrows his scope of vision, and doesn’t let the peripheral things that are going on occupy his mind at critical times.”