Not familiar with Murphy’s affinity for conservative play, one reporter asked Fitzpatrick what the Big Red defense had done differently to shut down the Crimson after the first quarter.

The reporter thought that Cornell had figured out Harvard’s offense, found a flaw and taken advantage of it. Come on. It takes incoming freshmen two years to figure out how to play in Murphy’s complicated offense, so it would probably take lowly Cornell more than a quarter to figure out how to stop it.

Still, Fitzpatrick politely answered the question. “Um, well, I think we were a little more conservative in the second and third quarters,” he said.

Yeah I think so. Murphy was trying to so hard to run out the clock, you were tempted to ask him if he were a Red Sox fan trying to get the game over in time for the 4 p.m. first pitch.

And not only was it boring, it wasn’t working.

Playing without a multitude of offensive lineman and with an injured Ryan Tyler, Harvard struggled to run the ball successfully when it was running on every down.

Even though Fitzpatrick attempted a grand total of just seven passes once the Crimson led by three TDs, Harvard didn’t have a single drive longer than three minutes. If you take out Corey Mazza’s 64-yard TD reception—the only second-half reminder of the Crimson’s big-play character—there was no drive longer than 18 yards. In the final three quarters, there were only five first downs, compared with six three-and-outs.

But it didn’t matter to Murphy. As long as the defense preserved the win, his offense didn’t need to build on it. In the end, the Crimson was 4-0, and I guess that’s all that really matters—not national rankings or Fitzpatrick maintaining his position as the top statistical QB in Divison I-AA.

But it would still be nice for Harvard to win some of these games 55-0 just because it can.

—Staff writer Lande A. Spottswood can be reached at spottsw@fas.harvard.edu.