Following Harvard football this season has been a little bit like watching my beloved Red Sox in 2010. Things started off well enough, although there were some early bumps in the road (the Crimson lost Collier Winters and was embarrassed at Brown, the Sox lost Jacoby Ellsbury and got swept by the Rays at home). And then the sporting gods decided that the team had experienced enough recent success and decided to dole out a plague of injuries.

Harvard has started its third-string quarterback in the last two games, is playing without two of its starting wideouts, and has seen its linebackers and secondary decimated by injury. Looking at the starting lineup from the Cornell game brought me back to the dark ages of July when a typical Sox lineup included Kevin Cash, Darnell McDonald, and Bill Hall.

The injury plague hasn’t just been limited to the Crimson, though. The Bears lost their starting quarterback for the rest of the season two weeks ago against Rhode Island when Kyle Newhall-Caballero went down with a broken wrist, and Princeton’s defense took a huge hit in Week 1 when co-captain and linebacker Steven Cody broke his leg.

Now the big question is how each team will respond. Who will step up and play like Victor Martinez in a contract year? Which young gun will be Ivy football’s version of Ryan Kalish? And who will pull a Josh Beckett and doom his team’s fans to a season of agony and thoughts of what could have been?

We won’t learn too much this week, as all eyes will rightly be on a matchup of Ivy unbeatens—Columbia and Penn—in Philadelphia. Which team will fall victim to the wrath of the sporting gods next? Maybe that’s the better question.

Let’s take a spin around the Ivies.

FORDHAM (2-4) at YALE (3-1, 2-0 Ivy)

Yale’s on a roll. Fordham...not so much. The Rams have lost three straight, including a pair to Patriot League foes Holy Cross and Lehigh. But Fordham does have a big positive on its resume: it’s the only team to beat Columbia this season with a 16-9 win way back on Sept. 18.

Meanwhile, the Bulldogs picked up a big road win at Dartmouth last week with a last-minute field goal. The jury’s still out about whether beating the Big Green is something to brag about or if Yale should be embarrassed that it almost lost to once-lowly Dartmouth. But regardless, quarterback Patrick Witt is averaging 277 yards per game, the Bulldogs have two established running backs, and the Rams are reeling. Seems like that decision to start awarding athletic scholarships hasn’t paid off for Fordham yet. Advantage Yale.

Prediction: Yale 31, Fordham 17.

COLGATE (3-2, 1-0 Patriot) at CORNELL (1-3, 0-2 Ivy)

Please. This is Cornell, the team that recovered a fumble on Harvard’s five-yard line last week and only got a field goal out of it. Is there even a question? The Raiders should roll to a second-straight Ivy win.

Prediction: Colgate 35, Cornell 10.

HOLY CROSS (3-3, 0-1 Patriot) at DARTMOUTH (2-2, 0-2 Ivy)

Ah, Dartmouth. How you toy with my emotions. After I raised a hullabaloo last week about how the Big Green was the dark horse of the Ivy League, the team went and lost to Yale. So much for that.