Years from now, whenever the Harvard faithful look back on a season once filled with such promise, they will not curse Dartmouth’s Andrew Hall or Columbia’s Prosper Nwokocha as the players who ruined the Crimson’s perfect season.

To them, the culprit will forever be the unknown Cornell defender whose helmet fractured the fifth metacarpal of Ryan Fitzpatrick’s throwing hand—and with it, the dream of an Ivy title.

It’s still hard to believe that something so small could stop something so big; that a broken hand would be strong enough to break the hearts and hopes of so many.

But it was.

You see, Fitzpatrick is as important to the Crimson as a player can be in a sport where 22 men take the field at once.

“What you don’t know until you see him compete is how tough he is, how confident he is, how that attitude that he has really rubs off on everybody else,” Harvard coach Tim Murphy says. “What you don’t understand or don’t know is that there’s an intangible there that along with his speed, his versatility, his strong arm, makes him a tremendous catalyst for our offensive success.”

If you really want to know why Ryan Fitzpatrick is so important to this football team, forget, for a moment, the statistics.

The pass efficiency rating.

The rushing yards per carry.

The massive amounts of total offense he accumulates in every way imaginable.

If you really want to know why he is so important to this football team, you don’t need to know any of that. You just need to know Ryan.

* * *

You need to know Fitzpatrick the way his teammates do, especially his classmates. The guys that have been there since the first day of summer football years ago, when the unheralded blond kid from Arizona was buried four-deep on the depth chart.

Back then, the self-described “straight-edged” Fitzpatrick was—like all rookies—pretty nondescript in practice, leaving the coaching staff undecided as to his potential.

“We knew he could throw the ball and we knew that he was a good athlete,” Murphy says.“But he was such a quiet kid that sometimes we really weren’t sure if he had the personality and the charisma to be a great leader.”

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.

“I had a great time that summer, just learning this offense,” Fitzpatrick says. “It was such a new way of thinking about football for me.”

Over three years later, his enthusiasm has not waned.

Earlier this year, Fitzpatrick ran into Carl Morris ’03, the former Crimson wide receiver who was recently a member of the Indianapolis Colts’ practice squad. Morris gave Fitzpatrick a knowing smile, saying, “Hey, I’ve got something you’ll want to see.”

Morris fished around in his SUV, pulled out a binder and handed it over. It was the Colts’ playbook, but Fitzpatrick was so giddy he looked like a 12-year old reading his first Playboy.

He just can’t get enough, and his teammates adore him for it.

“I’m not going to lie and say that I enjoy football all the time like he does, but it is kind of inspiring,” Edwards says. “It reminds you that the reason you play this game is because you like it and enjoy it and have fun playing it. [He] reminds us of our roots and why we are out here doing this everyday.”

* * *

Fitzpatrick’s own roots help explain why he’s out there playing football every day, too.

Ryan is the third of four Fitzpatrick boys, who are, by all accounts, the most competitive siblings in America. The twins—Brandon and Jason—are 22, Ryan is 20 and Shaun 17.

They all made good grades (the twins are now enrolled in law school and medical school), excelled at sports (three of the four will end up being Division I athletes) and never got into trouble, instead transforming all of their extra energy into competitive drive.

They competed in everything from wrestling to board games—but most importantly for Ryan, they competed to live up to the standards they set for each other.

“Growing up and going through the same schools that [Jason and Brandon] went through, elementary and junior high, there was just a certain reputation that the Fitzpatrick family had,” he says, “and I was expected to live up to their reputation. Before I even got in my classes, everyone knew who I was because of the twins and how excellent they were.”

But it isn’t just his brothers who are so intense. It’s the entire family.

Fitzpatrick says some of his favorite memories of childhood are of afternoons spent playing scrabble with Shaun and his grandmother. The games would often progress into rowdy debates over point totals, because his grandmother wanted to win as badly as the boys did.

When Edwards visited the Fitzpatrick home in Gilbert last spring break, he got to see the intensity firsthand.

“When I got there, him and his brother and his dad took all my measurements—my wing span, my height, my weight—so that they could compare them to everyone else’s,” Edwards says. “They had to see who was the tallest, who had the highest bench max, who had the highest vert and all of that.”

He grins and shakes his head. “So yeah, Ryan’s probably the most competitive person I’ve ever met, but his whole family is kind of like that.”

Unlike most über-competitive athletes, though, Fitzpatrick insists he doesn’t have a temper, something others confirm.

He is always confident and in control, often cracking up teammates with a single word or gesture, injecting levity into even the most serious situations. But never, ever does he lose his temper.

It sounds too good to be true. Fitzpatrick always wants to win so badly, that he must erupt sometimes when he loses. Right?

“Well, he hasn’t lost very much,” Edwards says matter-of-factly. “So I really haven’t been around him that often when he loses, but he’s never gotten mad that I’ve ever seen.”

* * *

If there was ever a time to get mad, it was this year’s Dartmouth game.

Harvard was 6-0 and ranked 16th in the country, and with Fitzpatrick set to return against Columbia the following week the theme of the game was simply survival. Though Fitzpatrick had practiced well that Thursday—the only time he had thrown the ball in weeks—he was only supposed to see a couple of series at most.

But as the offense lurched its way through the first quarter, Fitzpatrick’s body language on the sidelines began to change. With every incomplete pass, he would fidget and lick his fingers. With every failed third-down conversion, he would move a step closer to Murphy, chin strap fastened.

Finally, with the score knotted at 6-6 and the Crimson deep in Dartmouth territory, Murphy gave in. He pulled backup junior quarterback Garrett Schires mid-drive with Harvard in the red zone and inserted Fitzpatrick for the first play of the second quarter.

Fitzpatrick threw only one pass that series—a wobbly duck that was probably the worst of his career—and the Crimson had to settle for a field goal. On the next drive, Schires was back at quarterback and Fitzpatrick was back on the sidelines.

But as Dartmouth pulled out to a two-touchdown lead in the third quarter, Murphy couldn’t help himself, and reinserted his star.

If he hadn’t, Fitzpatrick probably would have never forgiven him.

“It would have been more frustrating if I didn’t get to play at all,” Fitzpatrick says several days after his three second-half turnovers helped give Harvard its first loss of the season. “The most frustrated I’ve ever been—well, probably the second most frustrated I’ve been since I’ve been here—was when I didn’t start in the second half, when he put Garrett back in.”

The most frustrating moment, for the record, came in last year’s 44-9 loss to Penn when Fitzpatrick was relegated to the sidelines in favor of Neil Rose ’03 and didn’t see any playing time while the game’s outcome was still in question.

Against Dartmouth, though, he got his chance.

The cast encasing Fitzpatrick’s broken right hand hadn’t even been off a week, he had only practiced one day and in his first series he had looked rusty at best. But with perfection in peril and the best quarterback in the Ivy League fidgeting a foot away from him, Murphy finally relented to the overwhelming truth that, for better or worse, his team needs its quarterback.

When Rose—the most prolific quarterback in Harvard history—was hurt last season, Murphy didn’t rush his return. Even when it was a minor injury, a close game and Rose was begging to play, Murphy didn’t budge.

But against Dartmouth he sent in his star, and said with his action what he wouldn’t dare say out loud—that even rusty, hurt and turnover prone, Fitzpatrick was more than just one of 11 guys on the field. He was irreplaceable.

Even the defeat was more of an affirmation than a condemnation of his importance to this team.

“I would have liked to not play him in the Dartmouth game,” Murphy says a week later when Fitzpatrick’s hand was back in a cast after reaggravating the injury during the comeback attempt. “But he said, ‘Coach, believe me. I’m perfect. There’s nothing wrong. I’m ready to go.’ And we needed him.”

* * *

Four years ago when Murphy was recruiting Fitzpatrick—a 17-year old taking snaps for Highland High—he couldn’t have known that he was looking at the future foundation of his team.

Sure, Fitzpatrick had performed well in “a decent spread offense,” throwing the ball 20-25 times a game on his way to setting virtually every school passing record in the book, but for some reason that no one knows, he still wasn’t a big time prospect.

“I was surprised when I watched him on high school video, that he wasn’t [recruited by more high-profile Division I schools],” Murphy says. “I mean it’s not like he’s six feet, one half inches, you know? He’s 6’3”. I was very surprised that teams like Arizona, Arizona State didn’t take a more legitimate shot at him.”

But their loss was Harvard’s gain, even if Harvard didn’t know exactly what it was getting.

“One of the things we’ve always prided ourselves on is our evaluations in general, and our evaluations of quarterbacks in particular,” Murphy says. “We were fortunate to not only be right about Ryan but we [were also lucky]. We just didn’t know how strong a leader he was.”

They also didn’t know the type of competitor he was. Or how eager he was to improve himself. Or how much he loved football.

All of those things combined have created a quarterback that those closest to him insist does not belong in the Ivy League.

Edwards played high school ball with Trent Edwards—the No. 1 ranked passer in the high school class of 2002 who is now the starting quarterback at Stanford—so he knows what a top QB looks like. And he thinks his new quarterback is just as good.

“I am shocked that Ryan is not a scholarship player at a D-I university,” Edwards says. “The differences between Trent and Ryan as far as throwing are not that big, and then Ryan is such a great runner. It is just unbelievable that he’s not at a D-I school, and I think we are really lucky to have gotten him.”

Earlier this season, Brown coach Phil Estes went even a step further than Edwards, and said that Fitzpatrick wasn’t just good enough for big-time college football, but maybe for the NFL.

After watching Fitzpatrick—the same kid who led Harvard to a comeback win over the Bears a year before—post 410 total yards this season, Estes wouldn’t have believed that Fitzpatrick hadn’t been heavily recruited.

But he wasn’t, and in some ways it makes sense.

Because to know how important Fitzpatrick is to a football team, you have to know about a lot more than just his athletic ability.

“I wasn’t born this super, superior athlete,” Fitzpatrick says. “[Loving the game] is what has brought me to this point right now. I’ve had to work hard my whole life to gain what I have, and that’s why I have such a fun time doing those things that nobody likes. Like squatting or hang cleans or getting up in the morning, because I think that I realize in the end what it’s going to do for me and what is has done for me in the past.”

Forget, for a moment, the statistics.

The pass efficiency rating.

The rushing yards per carry.

The massive amounts of total offense he accumulates in every way imaginable.

If you really want to know why Ryan Fitzpatrick is so important to this football team, you don’t need to know any of that.

You just need to know Ryan.

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