Harvard football started the season in unfamiliar territory.

Forced to find a replacement for all-time Ivy League leading rusher Clifton Dawson ’07, Harvard’s 2007 campaign looked bleak after two early last-minute losses to Holy Cross and Lehigh dropped the team to 1-2 for the first time in recent memory.

But with just one game remaining last November, the Crimson found itself back in the hunt with an undefeated 6-0 mark in the Ancient Eight, on the heels of a six-game win streak, and on the brink of its first Ivy title in three years. The foe standing in its way? Who else but 9-0 Yale—the then-No. 11 squad in the nation, which featured All-American and eventual Ivy League Player of the Year Mike McLeod and New England Coach of the Year Jack Siedlecki in addition to one of the most potent defenses in the league. The 124th edition of The Game, pegged as perhaps the best Game since the epic 29-29 tie in 1968, quickly turned sour for the outcoached Bulldogs, as the Crimson scored early and at will to break out to a 27-0 halftime lead and an eventual 37-6 win.

“We were the better team,” head coach Tim Murphy said. “You could see that at halftime.”

It was the completion of a 180 degree turnaround from the start of the season that had brought nothing but heartbreak for Harvard.

Quarterback Dominic Randolph and the Crusaders shocked the Crimson in the season opener, 31-28, with a 40-yard strike with 19 ticks remaining, just seconds after Harvard linebacker Glenn Dorris dropped what would have been a game-sealing interception.

Game three stung even worse. To add insult to injury, after the Crimson lost starting quarterback Liam O’Hagan to a season-ending injury, backup hurler Chris Pizzotti fumbled the ball in Mountain Hawk territory with the game tied at 13 and 30 seconds left on the clock. Lehigh defensive tackle Paul Bode scooped up the ball and ran it back 27 yards for the score, giving his team the 20-13 win despite scoring zero offensive touchdowns.

The lone early victory came in the first night game in Harvard Stadium history, a 24-17 win over Brown in which the defense proved it was a force to be reckoned with, as it allowed just one third down conversion on 12 attempts and posted three interceptions—statistics that would become the hallmark of a veteran-stacked defense that allowed only 22 percent of third down conversions and notched 21 interceptions in just 10 games. Senior cornerback Steven Williams had two of his eight picks on the year against the Bears as part of a season that would vault him into the Harvard record books and make him one of Harvard’s 11 All-Ivy selections as well as one of two Ivy players selected as an All-American.

Whether it was inevitable or something just clicked, the Crimson started to roll after the tough start. Big wins against Cornell at an ever-unpredictable Schoellkopf Field—where the team suffered a surprising 27-13 setback in its last visit in 2005—and at home against Lafayette were flanked by three more victories against Princeton, Dartmouth, and Columbia.

“It was definitely a determined mentality [before Cornell],” junior cornerback Andrew Berry said. “We knew that sort of stumbling out of the gates that there was no room for error...[The coaching staff] stressed that we needed to have a sense of urgency because of the parity in the Ivy League.”

Yet it wasn’t until the penultimate game against Penn that things really came together. The mediocre team that relied heavily on defense and sunk to its opponents’ level—a single score separated Harvard and perennial bottom dweller Columbia at halftime of the Crimson’s 27-12 win—finally reached its Ivy League champion potential. In the 23-7 victory over Penn, the defense continued to shine against a strong Quaker run game, allowing just 198 total offensive yards and limiting the second best tailback in the league to just 73 on the ground. But the offense, too, showed the best was yet to come, with Pizzotti throwing for 232 yards and two touchdowns against one of the top defenses in the Ivies.

“We got better every game,” Murphy said.

Yale was the culmination of that improvement. The defense limited one of the top offensive attacks in the country to just 109 total yards—senior hurler Matt Polhemus was 2-of-18 for 29 yards, and McLeod had a net 50 yards on 20 carries. The offense had its most impressive performance of the 2007 campaign: Pizzotti posted a blistering 316 yards on 27-of-41 passing for four touchdowns, and the Harvard receivers manhandled Yale’s secondary with freshman Matt Luft posting eight catches for 160 yards and two touchdowns. The 1-2 team had suddenly become undefeated Ivy League Champions.

—Staff writer Madeleine I. Shapiro can be reached at mshapiro@fas.harvard.edu.