Statement Game

You can’t stop Brown running back Nick Hartigan. You can only hope to contain him.

So it must have appeared to most Ivy League defenses—Harvard’s included—which, with a bit of help from the Bears’ out-of-conference opponents, surrendered 1,263 yards and 17 touchdowns to the 6’2, 220-lb. rusher in 2004. Those totals were good enough for second in the Ancient Eight, behind only the Crimson’s Clifton Dawson.

Against Harvard, Hartigan’s numbers were no less gaudy: 34 carries, 175 yards, two touchdowns, and one first-half heart attack for the would-be league champions. Not exactly what Crimson coach Tim Murphy had in mind before heading across state lines to Providence for Harvard’s 2004 Ivy opener.

Murphy, whose desire to force opponents to “play left-handed” (read: pass) is well known, had made no secret of his desire to focus on minimizing Hartigan’s effectiveness in the days leading up to the second-week showdown. And why should he have? Only days earlier, the Crimson’s unexpectedly solid defense blanked Holy Cross while surrendering just 61 yards on the ground. Surely it could do the same against the Bears, which entered play that Saturday with no passing game to speak of.

“Our job at all costs is to stop the run,” Murphy said days before kickoff. “That may open us up to passing, but if you’re going to stop their offense, you’ve got to stop their run.”

The strategy was, by all accounts, sound.

The execution? Not so much.

Brown capitalized on Harvard’s Hartigan fixation with a mix of misdirection and play action, which regularly rendered the bulk of the Crimson’s defensive corps out of position to land a tackle on the actual ball carrier or defend a downfield pass. Bears quarterback Joe DiGiacomo passed for 141 yards in the first quarter alone, 83 of them coming on one long touchdown pass over the top of the secondary.

And when he wasn’t beating Harvard with his arm, DiGiacomo’s legs were more than sufficient. Faking a handoff to Hartigan before tucking the ball and taking off untouched, DiGiacomo opened the scoring with a 53-yard dash to the goal line that stunned the Crimson defenders left in his wake.

Even when Harvard “guessed” correctly and Brown called Hartigan’s number, the Crimson was no more up to the challenge. Both of the bruiser’s trips to paydirt came in the first half, as did 129 of his yards on the day.

“We didn’t tackle worth a damn in the first half,” Murphy said afterwards. “Hartigan just kept falling forward and forward.”

“We really hung our hat on running the football,” Brown coach Phil Estes said earlier this week. “And sometimes there were eight or nine guys in the box and he was still gaining yards.”

And there will undoubtedly be some recurrences of that tomorrow at Harvard Stadium. No rusher of Hartigan’s talent can be pinned at the line of scrimmage by even the best of defenses. But lest Estes or Hartigan have any doubt, Murphy guaranteed that for each Brown blocker, there would be one more Crimson defender packed into the box in the hopes of clogging and holes and overwhelming the Bears at the point of initial contact.

“If they have seven men up front, we’re going to apply an eighth guy to the box,” he said. “If they’ve got eight men up front, we’re going to apply nine.”

That’s precisely what the Crimson attempted to do last year, with mixed results. It almost goes without saying that if Harvard’s defense turns in a performance that ranks alongside its season-saving showing in the second half last season, Hartigan will have one of his worst days of the season.

But otherwise?

“Well, I’ll go on record saying that if he has the sort of first half this year like he did last year, we’re in big trouble,” Murphy said. “If we’re going to beat Brown, we have to shut down the run. You’re not going to hold him to 20 yards, but if he has 150 yards it’s going to be a long day for Harvard.”

—Lisa J. Kennelly contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Timothy J. McGinn can be reached at mcginn@fas.harvard.edu.