But as the starting quarterback and captain, Harvard football still needed him. From thousands of miles away, Rose kept in touch. He called the coaches and other players and received tapes of spring ball practices in the mail.

“We talked quite a few times during the summer,” Morris says. “We stayed in pretty close contact, and we were always kind of on the same page.”

According to Rose, though, there was still a lingering distaste about being captain in absentia. Spring ball was the first real action for many current sophomores who are now key contributors.

“I was watching all these players develop on tape,” Rose says.

Nobody faulted him for taking the time off, though, and in the end almost everybody agreed it was for the better. He kept in shape, was able to work without distractions and, most of all, he was able to relax.

“It was a unique experience to have your captain not in school leading the team,” Harvard coach Tim Murphy says. “But also, it gave Neil some much-needed and much-deserved time away to reflect on how important football was to him.”

Rose returned to campus in August, ready to lead the team to another Ivy title. Almost immediately, things went drastically wrong.

Fired and Iced

Early in preseason camp, Rose attempted to use Harvard’s new lifting apparatus, the “EZ-Squat.” Having squatted all summer, he felt fine on the new machine until the last rep—when he fell after racking the weight.

As a result of the fall, Rose slipped some of his vertebral discs. He took a few days off to rest the injury, but then realized he could throw a bit and so got back into the swing of things.

However, the first day he ran sprints, the discs ruptured, leaving Rose questionable only a few days before Harvard’s opener against Holy Cross.

Rose recovered somewhat and started against Holy Cross. Miraculously, Rose was tearing up the Crusaders’ defense like never before, completing 86 percent of his passes and throwing three touchdowns. But then it happened—Rose took a blow to the head, and had to sit out the rest of the game.

The following week was the Ivy opener against Brown and Rose—having shaken off the shot to the head—accepted the fact that he could learn to play with ruptured discs.

But while sleeping on the bus ride down to Providence, something happened. And when Rose got off the bus and walked around, he found that he could only limp.

“I like to walk the field before the game, jogging, and all of a sudden my right leg is on fire,” Rose reveals. “I’m really scared—I think it’s over.”