Murphy and his staff worry about those peripheral things—like putting together video packages that best showcase Morris’ skills, getting the word around that he exists in the first place and facilitating visits and tape screenings by scouts at Dillon Field House early in the morning before practices. The coach sees the staff’s job handling Morris as an extension of their responsibilities to every kid under their watch.

“The thing we do is try to help these guys reach their full potential and then help them get to the next step,” Murphy says. “Whether that’s helping them get a job in the corporate world, writing a recommendation for graduate school or, in Carl’s case, helping him get into the industry he wants to.”

The “industry” has heard a lot from Harvard lately—Birk and Kacyvenski head a list of recent Crimson NFL signees that approaches double digits. In the decade before Murphy’s arrival in 1994, not one Harvard player had signed.

Like Morris, Ivy League football is being pushed by several forces at once. On one hand, its own increasingly intense recruiting has made it more legitimate in the football world. Dartmouth’s Jay Fiedler, Columbia’s Marcellus Wiley and Yale’s Eric Johnson all start in the pros. On the other, the Ancient Eight has clamped down on athletics—and football in particular—over concerns about maintaining the league’s ideal of the student-athlete. Recruiting limits were sliced last spring by the presidents of the Ivy League schools. Coaching staffs were slashed, and measures were put into place to limit time spent in practice.

Murphy is asked about ideals. “The ideal is in the mind of the beholder,” Murphy says. “Everyone seems to have a different idea of what that is.” He looks at the two reporters and notes how much time they’ve spent around Harvard football themselves. What makes them any different from his kids? “I think the reality of the 21st century at a place like Harvard is that if you can be a good student and a good something else, whether it’s writing for The Crimson or playing women’s basketball or football, well, that’s a lot. Everybody doesn’t have to be a renaissance man. It’s more about excellence than being a jack of all trades.”

Morris, Murphy’s excellence personified, is poster boy for the Ivy athlete at a critical juncture in the league’s history. Stereotype-filled debates over jocks and books litter the op-ed pages of school newspapers while his teammates feel frustrated that the Ivy League, out of concerns for those ideals, won’t let them participate in Division I-AA playoffs.

“Anytime somebody says you don’t belong somewhere, it bothers me regardless of what the context is,” Morris says. “I don’t feel their opinion matters. A lot of people don’t understand the level of commitment that any sport takes, and in the case of our sport it’s a little higher than most. But anytime you work so hard and so long just to be out there and people take away from that, it’s going to hurt.”

He remembers his sister’s days playing ball at Wagner. “My sister went to a scholarship school, and there were times when she said, ‘I don’t want to do this,’ but she had to,” Morris says. “Here, if that’s how you feel, there’s no obligation to stay. That’s overlooked in this.”

The Crimson Bloodlines

Morris pauses the interview to answer the phone. It’s Chris Nowinski ’00—and this, fellow physicists, is where our study of Carl Morris becomes as much a study in time as space, for Morris is supported by the growing network of Harvard alums who were once in his shoes. Nowinski has successfully broken into professional wrestling and is a regular in the WWE. He played defensive tackle in front of Kacyvenski, the Seattle Seahawk. Those two represent the lucky few Harvard alums that have somehow escaped the gravitational pull of I-banking and consulting. They get to play children’s games for a living, and Morris desperately wants to join them. Morris’ predecessors offer constant advice, if only because the games surrounding their dream careers are anything but kid stuff.

Morris knows.

“I kind of got contacted sporadically up until March, when whoever does the rankings put me on one of them,” Morris remembers. “That’s when they started calling.”

“They” are sports agents, and they called with increasing frequency well into this season. Now, Morris won’t answer the phone unless he knows who’s calling.

“I started cutting things off,” Morris says. “I mean, I got a call at the hotel before the Lehigh game at around 11 o’clock at night. It’s kind of a cutthroat business and it all comes out, and I just wanted to get away from all that.”

Given the specter of agents and uncertainty about their motives, Morris has turned to Kacyvenski and Nowinski for advice. And it’s not just the successful pros who advise Morris about how to run the gauntlet. Terrence Patterson ’00 was Harvard’s primary pre-Morris receiver, and has seen his protegé take an axe to his receiving records. Patterson, who worked out briefly for the NFL before winding up with a corporate job in the Walt Disney Company, never garnered the hype that surrounds Morris now, but he says that what chatter there was got to him.