Despite the drama on the field, Rose has admirably kept his wits about him. It’s no small task when you consider that his best friends have graduated and moved away, that he spends much of his free time trying to develop the offense and that he spent nearly eight months removed from his current teammates.

Before this fall, for example, Rose’s roommates in Currier were the members of his offensive line, and the group was close. And even though he is friends with many students not in his class, Rose left with the knowledge that, when he returned, there would be serious adjustments to his social life.

“It’s really different this year. If you followed me around on a daily basis, you’d probably think I was the loneliest guy on campus,” Rose jokes.

He wakes up in the morning and heads to Dillon Field House to watch some film on his own, then goes to class, then practice, then dinner.

And after dinner, where would you find a 22-year old senior who already has a job lined up when he leaves?

“I’m in Lamont library three, four hours a night,” Rose admits. “That’s the funny thing—you go out in the real world and all of a sudden you want to learn stuff.”

The financial world excites Rose more than anything else, and when he leaves Cambridge for good on Christmas Eve (lucky exam scheduling on his part), football will be far from his mind. And even though his favorite receiver, Morris, will head for the NFL, the guy who threw him all those balls has no dreams of following.

“I never had NFL expectations myself—the coaches never really talked to me about it,” Rose says. “This may sound funny, but I never saw professional football fulfilling enough as a choice. I feel I’m at the point [where] I understand football, and after a while I think it may not be that engaging. I might get bored with it.”

No Harvard fan has been bored with Rose’s performance. If he leads the Crimson to another victory over Yale, Rose would be well-advised—from a business perspective, of course—to publish that dissertation on football.

It would be a good way to say “Aloha” to Harvard.

—Staff writer Rahul Rohatgi can be reached at rohatgi@fas.harvard.edu