Harvard's offense lines up against Princeton, Head Coach Andrew Aurich's alma mater, during the 2024 regular season. This year, the team will have a chance to play in the postseason.
{shortcode-8c0dd475ea3269f67b1a4d37d27db5cc232a1fc2}hen Head Coach Andrew Aurich and his top players filed into the post-game press conference at the end of last season, their disappointment was palpable — with the loss to Yale, the chance at the first outright Ivy Title in a decade had slipped through their fingers.
“We shouldn’t have shared this thing with anybody,” Aurich said during the postgame press conference.
The heartbreaking end capped off an impressive season — one where Harvard went 8-2 during Aurich’s debut head coaching year. Still, the final loss left the team hungry for more.
‘Another Level of Excitement’
This year, for the first time in Ivy League history, Harvard has the opportunity to make the FCS playoff, giving the Crimson not just a chance at redemption, but an opportunity to go further than before and for Aurich to define his legacy. First, though, they need to win the Ivy League.
“We were already preparing to put ourselves in a position to win an Ivy League Championship,” Aurich said. “So it didn’t really change the work. Obviously, I think that brings another level of excitement.”
The team is coming into the season in search of its identity, having lost much of its talent with star wide receiver Cooper Barkate transferring to Duke and key players graduating.
Despite having many younger players eager to slot in and key returners in senior quarterback Jaden Craig and captain safety Ty Bartrum, Aurich acknowledged at the end of spring training that his team was going into the season with less of an advantage than last year.
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“We are not the same team we were,” he said. “I feel like the distance between us and a lot of teams we played, as far as talent level was significantly further last year. And that’s not to say we won’t be as talented or more talented than a lot of teams who play, but the margin for error is much smaller.”
With the first game of the season only three days away, Aurich said he wants his players to be “obsessed with the ball” and focused on the challenge directly ahead of them.
“We go about our business and focus on one game at a time and get the results we want at the end of season,” Aurich said.
‘We’re Not a Cookie Cutter Offense’
Last season began with questions about Aurich filling legendary head coach Tim Murphy’s shoes. Now, as Murphy’s name is etched into the new turf at Harvard Stadium, the program has turned to a new chapter, firmly under Aurich’s helm.
The team, reaching a nine-year high of No. 17 in the Stats Perform FCS Top 25 poll last season, flashed its potential, but this year the team will have to rebuild its offense as it hopes to fill the shoes of past players.
The offense will certainly not resemble its unpredictable 2024 self that constantly created chaos for opposing defenses. The unit lost a significant amount of talent with four of its top five receivers, running back Shane McLaughlin, and utilityman Charles DePrima — who could line up from anywhere — all departed from the program.
Craig, a 2nd team All-Ivy selection, is looking to build on success from his junior campaign, in which he threw for 2430 yards and 23 touchdowns against just three interceptions.
“Every year is a little bit different. Now, obviously we’ll miss Scotty Woods and Cooper Barkate quite a bit at receiver,” Aurich said.
With a 60.5 completion percentage, Craig’s pocket awareness and gunslinging abilities will result in the pigskin finding new receivers across the gridiron.
“We're not a cookie cutter offense where we're the same every single year,” he added.
Craig also expressed optimism about the potential for this year’s offense
“We’ve got a lot of young guys that are very talented,” Craig said at the Ivy League Media Day.
Aurich noted that every team deals with player turnover, and each year it’s the coaching staff’s responsibility to determine the schemes and personnel that fit an offense’s skillset.
While it remains to be seen who will step up as the Crimson’s key skill players on the outside, Aurich and offensive coordinator Mickey Fein will certainly lean on Craig’s mobility, arm strength, and veteran presence as the team develops an attacking cadence.
“You develop your players to make sure they’re a different version of themselves when you get to the actual games,” he said, “And I think we did a really good job of that.”
Junior running back Xaviah Bascon, the team’s leading rusher last season, is another offensive highlight for the team — poised to carry his late-season momentum into the fall as the team’s feature back.
“I feel good about where we’re headed and what we have,” Aurich added.
‘Disrupting the Football’
On the defensive side of the line of scrimmage, the team returns two of its top tacklers in Bartrum and junior defensive back Austin-Jake Guillory. However, the front seven took some major blows, including losing defensive end Jacob Psyk and linebacker Mitchell Gonser, both first-team all-Ivy selections, in addition to several other starters.
In order to replicate the success of previous years, the fundamentals of the defense under longtime coordinator Scott Larkee won’t change.
“It’s all about execution. We need to get 11 guys executing every single play. We don’t need guys who are thinking, ‘I need to make a play’, because the plays will come to you if we can get 11 guys that are executing,” Aurich said.
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One player ready to step up to the task is junior defensive end Josh Fedd, who sat under Psyk for much of his first two seasons before being a preseason All-Ivy League second team selection.
“The guys who have risen up on the depth chart are the guys who are consistently on defense, disrupting the football, executing their job,” Aurich said.
“I’m approaching it from the standpoint of ‘Let’s just be as great as I can, putting in work throughout the summer,’ and then making sure I have this connection with my teammates and getting into the playbook in a way I’d never done before,” said Fedd. “Even though we do hurt to see those guys leave, I feel as though in the locker room it’s still the same mentality: we have to go make those plays.”
Bartrum — the team’s 151st captain — is ready to lead a new group of guys to the same level they were at in years past. “I think that’s the name of the game, is next man up mentality,” said Bartrum.
“We got a lot of guys that are hungry, a lot of guys as I’ve just said, like, have not played meaningful snaps. So I’m super excited for them to show what they can do,” he added.
‘They Want to do Something Special this Year’
As one of the last teams to kick off its 2025 campaign, the Crimson is ready to strike. In the preseason Ivy League poll, the team was ranked 1st — with Dartmouth and Yale tailing closely behind.
The Ivy League’s season starts nearly a month after the first weekend of college football, and Aurich said watching other teams see gametime action has only made his players more eager to get on the field themselves.
“These guys are just so excited to play against somebody else, different than anywhere else in the country, because we literally walked off the field practice one, and I turned on my TV and Kansas State was playing,” Aurich said.
On Saturday, the team will finally have a chance to get started with a game on the road against Stetson (1-2). The matchup marks the first time in Harvard history that the team will make the journey to Florida for a game.
Last season, the Hatters didn’t pose a significant threat to the Crimson, but this year’s matchup nonetheless will be a test for the cohesion of Harvard’s squad — and a chance for the Crimson to continue its streak of never having given up a point to a team from Florida while shaking off the rust before the Ivy League season.
With so much young talent hoping to redefine the offense and returning players hoping to retain their reps in this season, Aurich said the team has the motivation to succeed.
“They want to do something special this year,” he said.
– Staff writer Connor Castañeda can be reached at connor.castaneda@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @castanedasports.
