There have not been many fall seasons where Tim Murphy has been away from the football field. By his own count, the head coach of the Harvard Crimson hadn’t missed a season as either a player or coach since 1968, when he was in junior high school.
COVID-19 changed all of that. With no football games allowed last season, Murphy didn’t have a field to command. But he had film.
“You know, I watched more football on television by 1000% than I ever would have, and took copious notes," he said. "I kept working, so to speak, I [stayed] involved, I kept in constant contact with Zoom meetings with our coaches and players.”
On Saturday, for the first time since the fall of 2019, the Crimson will take the gridiron again when they travel to Washington, D.C., to take on Georgetown. For one of the oldest football programs in the country, it will be the rare experience of having to shake the dust off the cleats after the unthinkable: a year without Harvard football, the biggest disturbance since World War II when the team had "informal" seasons against non-league teams in 1943 and 1944.
Back when COVID-19 was still referred to as a “novel coronavirus,” the Ivy League turned heads when it became the first Division I conference to shut down its men’s and women’s basketball tournaments. That was on March 10, 2020.
The move proved to be prophetic. By the end of that week , the upcoming NCAA tournaments were cancelled, and major pro leagues postponed their season to uncertain future dates.
While other schools eventually got back to play, the Ivies stayed essentially shut down until this fall.
By about mid-summer of last year, linebacker and team captain Jordan Hill began to understand that there wasn’t going to be a 2020 season.
“I didn’t really want to accept it, you know, going into my senior year, obviously," he said. "So I’m pushing, I’m doing what I can in terms of talking to the AD [athletic director], talking to the head coach, just to see if there was a possibility. But I think the first week of July they came out with an official statement and at that point, you know, it was what it was.”
With no football last fall, Hill worked out, went to school and took a job at a department store to keep busy. He received a waiver to maintain eligibility to come back for a proper season this year, taking the spring semester off.
The pandemic uprooted just about everything for the program. With prospects not allowed to come on campus, recruiting was done virtually, a new process that Murphy said gave a suprisingly intimate perception of a recruit but one that he still described as a leap of faith on both ends.
"We made the transition to recruiting via Zoom because you couldn't have kids on campus and did hundreds upon hundreds, maybe six or sevend hundred Zooms, within a year," he said. "And the reality is we just found a way to muddle through."
Rosters have ballooned to about 130 players around the Ivy League with the addition of seniors who have been granted an extra year of eligibility. Hill points out that there are essentially two freshman classes on the field who have never been in a game for Harvard: the freshmen from last year and the freshmen coming in this year.
But even with those challenges, when the team got together as a whole again in August for the first time in roughly 18 months, Murphy said it was one of the most exciting days for the Crimson in a long time.
“The kids were like a bunch of little kids. It’s like, ‘Wow! Football!'" he said. "It was hectic because the environment on campus was still transitional ... so there was a lot of moving parts, but the flip side of it is, it was, you know, everyone was just clearly excited to be here."
Offensive lineman Spencer Rolland, a senior, said being back felt like playing football for the first time again.
"Being back on the field and being off for so long, you really start wanting to be on the field and kind of having that itchy feeling, so it was unbelievable," he said.
Although it's going to feel more normal than it has been in a long time at Harvard, the specter of COVID-19 still looms large: All Ivy League schools are mandating their football teams be vaccinated .
Still, when Harvard kicks off this season, its goal will be an Ivy League title. For Hill, that would be made even sweeter knowing what it cost to get here.
“A lot of the seniors had to make a decision similar to myself to take time off of school and that's not always an easy decision," he said. "So to know that those guys sacrificed. To know that people really put the time in and to eventually, hopefully reach that pinnacle of what we do in this league, nothing would be better.”
