But Murphy wasn’t quite finished with a season that will certainly go down as a candidate for his magnum opus. After the Crimson topped Penn to secure the Ivy championship, the coach wasn’t satisfied: If they didn’t beat Yale, he told his players, then no one would get a ring.

“That was the deal,” Boden says with a laugh. “It was definitely a persuasive argument.”

The Crimson dominated Yale in The Game, routing the Bulldogs, 45-7. The victory marked Harvard’s fifth straight win over Yale.

According to his players, part of the secret of Murphy’s long-run success, in addition to consistently recruiting talented athletes, is his combination of a deep knowledge of the game and a highly disciplined approach.

“I don’t think anybody works harder than Coach Murphy week in and week out,” Chapple says. “He almost runs the program like a business, and as soon as we get down to practice, it’s two hours of nothing but straight business, and you better be focused for that time.”

“I’ve never met a man who knows more about the game of football,” Boden adds. “It’s unreal. He knows every nuance, everything.”

And in a sense, Murphy’s years of work culminated near the year’s end, before the Ivy title, when Murphy passed long-time coach Joe Restic to become the winningest coach in Harvard history.

Then, following the season’s conclusion, Murphy—who took a 40 percent pay cut when he left Cincinnati in 1994 to come to Cambridge—received a job offer from a Football Bowl Subdivision school and was rumored to be an early favorite for the Penn State opening.

But in the end, Murphy elected to stay at the place where he had made history.

“At the time, I thought I felt good about the decision [to stay] in my gut,” Murphy says. “You look back, and it was a great decision…. The kids we work with here are among the toughest, hardest working, classiest kids I’ve ever been around. And, we really feel like if we work our butts off, and we work smart, that we have a chance to succeed on a regular basis.”

And in his 18 years at the helm of the Crimson, including a memorable 2011 campaign, Murphy has done just that.

—Staff writer Robet S. Samuels can be reached at robertsamuels@college.harvard.edu.