Penn leads the league in both rush and pass defense, but it will be going head to head with the Ancient Eight’s best rush (Harvard) and pass (Brown) offenses.

With a stalemate on one side of the field, what these games will come down to is how well the Crimson and Bears can stifle the Quaker offense. Penn’s got the worst passing attack in the Ivies, averaging under 130 yards a game. But it’s second behind Harvard in rushing offense, and the team that can figure out how to stop the Quaker ground assault—led by Lyle Marsh—is the team that has a shot to take Penn down.

I think it’s the Crimson that has the best chance. The Quakers have the ability to get in Newhall’s head, while Harvard’s capable of playing a balanced game on offense, even if it’s struggled to do so thus far.

And when the Crimson’s defense is on, it’s on. The team faced off against the third-best rushing offense on Saturday and held Princeton to just 38 yards on the ground. But to take down Penn—or Dartmouth, Columbia or Yale, for that matter—Harvard has to execute.

The Crimson seems to have the clearest path to the Ivy crown at this point. All it has to do is keep winning—unlike Brown, which needs both of the unbeatens to lose—and its toughest remaining game comes at home. If it can solve the Quakers, Harvard just has to beat the stumbling Bulldogs to take the title outright.

But this is the Ivy League in 2009, and anything can happen. Just ask Columbia.

—Staff writer Kate Leist can be reached at kleist@fas.harvard.edu.