After last season, the departure of Dante Balestracci—All-Ivy linebacker, team captain and one of the top football talents to have ever played for Harvard—left teammates and coaches alike with the inevitable question: Who would replace him?

Would anyone on the Crimson emerge to instill in his opponents the fear of the Inferno?

Surprisingly, the answer was almost too obvious—without question, linebacker Bobby Everett was the man to carry out this seemingly impossible task.

Even with Balestracci gone, the man who had played in Dante’s shadow last year is poised to carry the team to its first unblemished season with 10 or more victories in over a century.

Everett would never entertain any statistical comparisons to Balestracci. But as a leader, not even Dante could have done any better this year.

“I never looked at it as me being better than anyone,” Everett says. “[The role of leader] was just something bestowed upon me by the coach.”

Any teammate can tell you that he has since embraced the role. At the very least, he has struck the right chord with the talented defense that he now leads.

“He’s an individual that never takes a play off, a minute off,” says fellow linebacker Matt Thomas. “He’s someone that leads by example. You can see the improvement on the defensive line from Week One to Week Nine. I can’t see us being here without him.”

Harvard’s impressive defense has held down its opponents to only 17 touchdowns and 131 total points this year.

“I was very excited about the prospects of this defense coming into the season,” Everett says, “even though we were somewhat inexperienced. It took some time for us to play together.”

After early successes on the field, Everett cautioned the team against overconfidence, reminding them that they “haven’t arrived yet.” He made sure that the defense never became complacent, made sure that it kept on improving and ultimately helping the team garner victories.

And the victories just kept on rolling in.

Everett might never rank up there with Dante in terms of physical abilities, but his pure intensity and tireless work ethic have been a motivation to his teammates on and off the field.

Sean Tracy, senior defensive back and Everett’s roommate, says of the linebacker, “He’s not a yeller or screamer. He plays hard every practice and that inspires us to follow his lead.”

Balestracci will never be forgotten, but Everett has done his best this season to make sure that the team doesn’t suffer from the absence of the Inferno on the field.

From Dante, Everett learned how effective it was to instill fear in his opponents, and to always hit them with everything he’s got.

His message to his teammates is the same message of his mentor: When you hit someone, you try to lay him out.

There was a time, however, when neither Everett nor any person on the team knew what the linebacker had in him.

“From being practically a non-contributor to being All-Ivy [is very satisfying],” Everett says. “[After my sophomore year,] I decided to make my next two years count.”

His hard work in the off-season paid off in his junior year. When the Crimson struggled last season, Everett remained one of the few bright spots, amassing 94 total tackles, second only to Balestracci.

His statistics this year might not be as good as last season’s, but statistics don’t always tell the whole story.

Take, for instance, the game Everett had against Princeton a year ago, in which he made 15 tackles. It is thought to be his breakout game, but Everett admitted that the box score didn’t show everything.

“I don’t feel it was my best performance. I made a number of mistakes [that might have cost us the game],” he says.

“Bobby’s a little bit like [senior quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick] in that overall his statistics probably aren’t as gaudy as a year ago,” Harvard coach Tim Murphy says, “and yet their lack of concern about statistics has helped us to win. Bobby is always in the right place at the right time, he’s the emotional glue to our defense, and he’s the one guy we cannot replace, both in terms of production and in terms of leadership.”

The most important thing is that Everett has made the big plays when it mattered. Just look at the touchdown reception he had last week against Penn, along with his seven tackles, and that’ll tell you the kind of player Everett is. He will do anything—even if it’s playing on the opposite side of the ball—to help the team win.

Everett’s goal has always been to improve every day and to be an inspiration to his teammates the way Dante had been an inspiration to him. He looked up to Balestracci when he played alongside him; now, his teammates are looking up to him.

“During a game, I would go up to him and ask, ‘Do you see anything?’” Thomas says. “He’s always available to give advice. I have a huge amount of confidence in him.”

And why not? Everett has a self-confidence that has enabled him to become one of the most clutch players on the team. Preparation for the big plays in practice can only do so much.

“We go out there and say, ‘It’s fourth and goal to win the game’,” Everett says, “but when you play the game, you can’t think about it too much. You have to have confidence in yourself to make the play.”

“If you want to take a mold of the type of kid we have to recruit at Harvard, I’d say it’s Bobby Everett,” Murphy says. “He was not blessed in high school with an inordinate amount of talent that you would say he would be a great Ivy League football player, or a kid that would be able to handle engineering and college athletics at a high level, but through sheer willpower and intangibles, he has risen to the top.”

Everett doesn’t like to look too far ahead. For him, the biggest game is always the next game.

As luck would have it, that couldn’t be any truer than now. The Yale Bulldogs—and that historic 10th win—are waiting.