But to his teammates, at least, Fitzpatrick was clearly a leader already.

The first months of football are brutal for freshmen, the former stars now struggling with bigger players and bigger playbooks. Most freshmen finish practice just in time for dinner and then drag themselves to Annenberg, happily pushing all things football aside for the rest of the evening.

But Fitzpatrick was different. He never wanted to forget about football.

Minutes after he settled in at one of the dining hall’s long tables, it would start.

“Hey Bri,” he would call out with a grin to Brian Edwards, sitting a few seats away. “What do you trips right, code 10?”

Edwards—now the Crimson’s leading receiver and an All-Ivy candidate—would look up at Fitzpatrick like he was personally responsible for the so-called beef brisket on his plate. But then he would soften. More than a year removed from seeing playing time, the last thing Edwards wanted to talk about was football, but he’d always try to answer anyway. He couldn’t ignore his quarterback.

“He’s a really patient person,” Edwards says, “and he was really patient with me, helping me learn the offense. He still quizzes me to this day, but luckily I get all the answers right now—unlike freshman year.”

You see, the thing about Fitzpatrick is, well, he’s a football geek. There is no other way to say it. He loves football like a little kid, except that he is 6’3” and 210 lbs and one of the smartest players on probably the smartest football team in the world.

And he doesn’t just love the games and the euphoric high that accompanies them. He loves practice. He loves breaking down film. He loves doing squats at 6:30 a.m. six months before the season opener, which he admits is kind of weird. But he can’t help it.

“I love it,” he says. “Squats and hang cleans. I love them. You can just feel yourself getting bigger and better.”

When you love something that much, it would be hard not to be good at it.

Consider why Fitzpatrick knew the offense well enough to quiz Edwards in the first place.

The coaching staff sends out playbooks to the incoming offensive players over the summer to study before they arrive, but most give them only a cursory read through. Fitzpatrick studied his like a Talmudic scholar.

“Ooh! I was so excited [when I got the playbook],” Fitzpatrick says, lighting up like he tends to do when talking about football. “I kept having to bug the coaches about it. They sent the playbooks out halfway through the summer, and I probably called them every week until then and asked, ‘Where’s the playbook?’”

When it finally arrived—along with instructional videos of the coaches explaining the various protections and packages—Fitzpatrick contentedly submerged himself in the complications and intricacies of Harvard’s no-huddle.