WORCESTER, Mass.—It didn’t take long for junior quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick to make his mark in the Harvard record book.

Tallying 471 yards of total offense in Saturday’s game against Holy Cross, Fitzpatrick supplanted former record holder and teammate Neil Rose ’02-’03, whose 449 yards against Dartmouth in 2002 now rank as the second most proficient single game offensive performance in Crimson history.

“He’s one of those guys who knows the offense so well that he’s very difficult to defend,” Harvard coach Tim Murphy said. “Even when they covered the receivers well, he’d scramble for yards.”

And that is something that Rose was never really able to do.

While Fitzpatrick threw for 359 yards and scrambled for 112, Rose gained his yards almost exclusively through the air, recording just six yards on the ground.

Playing catch with his favorite receiver, Rose found Carl Morris ’03 21 times for 257 yards on his way to setting additional records in completions—36—and passing yards—443.

In his performance, Fitzpatrick attempted just 27 passes, connecting on 20, while distributing his passes among six separate receivers.

Un-Special Teams

While the Crimson offense seemed unstoppable, the special teams proved to be anything but.

Sophomore kicker Jim Morocco started the afternoon on the wrong foot, missing a 29-yard field goal early in the first quarter to leave the score knotted at zero.

And it all went downhill from there. Morocco was pulled after having his second extra point effort of the afternoon stuffed by the Crusaders’ defensive line, barely floating the ball into the end zone and never threatening the goal posts.

His replacement, senior Adam Kingston, fared little better.

While kicking with the wind, Kingston forced several Holy Cross touchbacks, sending the ball out of the end zone on two occasions.

Kicking against the wind, however, Harvard decided to squib its kickoffs short of primary Holy Cross deep return threat Ari Confesor to avoid surrendering territory.

The attempts to hold the Crusaders to poor field position backfired miserably, as each return advanced the ball to at least the Holy Cross 40-yard line, with one return brought all the way to the Crimson 35. Had Kingston kicked the ball out of bounds for a penalty on each kickoff, the Crusaders would have been relegated to their own 35.