By almost any metric, the 2011 Harvard football program had a historic campaign. Coach Tim Murphy became the winningest football coach in Crimson history. And nearly every week it seemed, the squad matched or broke some ancient offensive record.
Once it was all set and done, Harvard had scored 374 total points—breaking a modern-era record set by the juggernaut 2004 team—en route to a 9-1 overall record and a league title. After a shaky early-season loss to Holy Cross, no other team came close to topping the Crimson.
But Harvard really shined in conference play, going an unscathed 7-0. The Crimson’s smallest margin of victory was a healthy 10 points, which came in a 41-31 win over Cornell.
But even then, the contest wasn’t as close as the score made it seem. Down by 17 with two minutes to go, Cornell quarterback Jeff Mathews and Co. found the end zone with 1:32 left on the clock to narrow the gap to 10. But the game was already well out of reach by that point.
The team’s historic performance leads to the question: had any Harvard squad dominated the Ancient Eight quite so effectively as the 2011 version?
We’ll start our search in 1956, the first year of official Ivy League play. If we didn’t, we’d have to include years like 1890, when the Crimson outscored its opposition, 555-12. But at that time, Harvard was playing teams like Exeter, Williams, and Amherst (which lost, 74-6). So we’ll ignore those seasons.
Starting at 1956, just four Harvard teams have won all seven of their conference contests: 1997, 2001, 2004, and 2011 (all coached by Murphy). The 1968 squad got close, going 6-0-1 in conference play. And funny enough, its 29-29 “win” over Yale might be the most famous in school history. But because the team didn’t win ‘em all, we took it out of the running.
To decide which of those four squads had the best conference season, we calculated each one’s Pythagorean win expectation, which equals (points scored)2/((points scored)2+(points allowed)2). It’s a decent proxy for just how dominant a team was.
The results (Year, Pythagorean win expectation):
1997, 0.949
2011, 0.810
2004, 0.773
2001, 0.717
By a wide margin, the 1997 team—which featured now-NFL center Matt Birk ’98—comes out as the most dominant. And looking at the results from that year, it makes good sense. None of its seven league opponents scored more than 12 points against Harvard. In total, the Crimson averaged 27.7 points per Ancient Eight game while yielding just 6.4 to the other side.
The 2011 squad came in second, riding its historically-prolific 279 points in league play.
Interestingly, the two undefeated teams throughout the whole season—the 2001 and 2004 squads—rounded out the rankings (the 1997 team fell to Lehigh in a non-league contest).
The 2004 team’s third-place finish may come as the biggest surprise, though. Often considered the best team in Harvard football history, the squad featured Ryan Fitzpatrick ’05 at quarterback and Clifton Dawson ’07 at running back, arguably the two best at their position in the program’s storied history. Both made forays into the NFL, and of course, Fitzpatrick currently has a none-too-shabby starting gig in the league.
Yet fans often forget that the 2004 undefeated campaign nearly fell apart—twice. Harvard had two one-point victories, over Brown and Dartmouth. Only at the end of the year did the Crimson take on an air of invincibility. In the season’s last three games, Harvard outscored the opposition, 104-13.
