Sophomore running back Treavor Scales and the rest of the Crimson football team, shown here in earlier action, overpowered Dartmouth on Saturday, cruising to a 30-14 win.

HANOVER, N.H.—For the last 13 years, a date with Dartmouth has meant an almost-guaranteed easy win for the Harvard football team. The Crimson didn’t think it would come so easily this year, but for the first half of play at Memorial Field, it seemed that nothing had changed.

Harvard (5-2, 3-1 Ivy) overpowered the resurgent Big Green (4-3, 1-3) early, jumping out to a 24-0 lead and cruising to a 30-14 victory—its seventh straight against Dartmouth—on Saturday afternoon.

“They’re a good football team,” said Big Green coach Buddy Teevens. “They played well, better than we did today. We spotted them a bunch of points early on and played better in the second half, but just didn’t convert enough to close the gap.”

In his first start of the season, junior Collier Winters guided the Crimson to 480 yards of total offense in its most balanced performance of the season. Harvard gained 233 yards on the ground and 247 in the air.

“We felt like we wanted to diversify and balance our offense,” Harvard coach Tim Murphy said. “We’ve been a pass-first team for a long time, and after the Brown game this year and the injuries to all of our quarterbacks, we became a run-first team. And we’re getting back now to being the type of team we want to be—as balanced and as unpredictable as possible.”

The Crimson received the opening kickoff and used a 14-play drive—seven run plays and seven pass plays—to get into the endzone. After a reception by senior Mike Cook brought Harvard to the one-yard line, Winters punched the ball in himself for his first of two rushing touchdowns on the afternoon.

Harvard followed up with a run-dominated, 87-yard drive that culminated in another Winters dash into the endzone. In the first quarter of play, Harvard held the ball for 11:17, limiting Dartmouth to just 39 yards of offense and silencing the homecoming crowd.

“We knew going into the game that this was probably going to be the biggest game they’ve had in a while—at homecoming, they’re playing really well,” Winters said. “That was our focus, to just come out and really take that momentum and take the spirit out of them, and just really get on top of them in the first half. I think we accomplished that.”

On the first drive of the second quarter, freshman David Mothander booted a 43-yard field goal—the longest of his young collegiate career—to extend the lead to 17-0.

The bulk of the Crimson’s yardage on that drive came from a trick play that put the ball in Cook’s hands.

The wide receiver found junior Adam Chrissis, who led the team with seven catches for 86 yards, 35 yards downfield.

As the offense was rolling, the defense got into a groove as well. When the Big Green’s offense—led by star tailback Nick Schwieger—began to settle in early in the second quarter, sophomore linebacker Josh Boyd made a big stop by intercepting a Connor Kempe pass at the Harvard 29-yard line. Boyd ran the ball back 45 yards to set up the Crimson’s third touchdown of the day.

“You still have to stop the run, and you’re not going to completely do it against a team like this,” Murphy said. “But we never really gave them a chance to be in a rhythm. There were a lot of second and longs. We did a great job, at least in the first half, of converting our defensive stops on third down, and those things were huge.”

Rushes by senior Gino Gordon and sophomore Treavor Scales set up a 10-yard touchdown pass from Winters to Chrissis for the 24-0 lead.

Dartmouth got on the scoreboard for the first time with 2:24 left in the first half when cornerback Shawn Abuhoff returned a punt 82 yards for a touchdown.