A Harvard Football Scandal? That Smarts

The team captain, an all-league linebacker, is kicked off the team and charged with domestic assault after allegedly breaking into his girlfriend’s dorm room.

The quarterback is suspended five games for violating team rules, but details of his transgression are kept secret by the school.

A senior running back is dismissed because of actions the coach calls “disgusting” during an annual preseason “Skit Night.”

These are only a few of the story lines generated by a single football team during the last year, incidents that seem to go hand-in-hand nowadays with big-time college sports.

Except never before has the team been Harvard, one of the world’s most prestigious universities.

And if it can happen here....

Harvard does not award athletic scholarships. Its conference, the venerable Ivy League, doesn’t even allow its league champion to participate in the NCAA Division I-AA playoffs.

Here along the banks of the Charles River, the sports teams receive little emphasis and cause nary a ripple on campus. Asked about the football controversy last week as they studied on the steps of the library, two graduate students answered with blank stares. They had no idea.

But football Coach Tim Murphy is well aware that his team is being watched by many on campus who are worried that the university’s image is being sullied at the expense of a few extra victories.

Murphy is in his 13th season as one of Harvard’s most successful coaches. Under his leadership, the Crimson has won three Ivy League titles, and the 10-0 squad of 2004 is considered by some the best Harvard team in 100 years. Every one of his four-year players has played on a league championship team and has graduated.

Recent events, however, suggest that his program might be falling prey to the type of scandal that rocks programs with lesser ideals.

On a table in front of the coach’s desk on a recent morning was a book titled “Never, Never,Quit,” and Murphy does not intend to. He wants to defend his program and reputation but has received orders not to comment further on off-field matters.

“We’re just focused on football,” Murphy said.

Thomas Dingman, the dean of freshmen who instructed Murphy not to talk, referred all interview requests to Robert Mitchell, Harvard’s director of communications. Mitchell did not respond to an interview request.

Bob Scalise, Harvard’s athletic director, also declined to comment, and no Harvard football players were allowed to be interviewed for this article.

Chuck Sullivan, the school’s director of athletic communications, said he understood the man-bites-dog intrigue involving a university with such a vaunted reputation.

“Harvard can be an easy target,” Sullivan said, adding that it was wrong to draw conclusions from isolated incidents and naive to think Harvard was immune to societal problems.

“You can’t fairly take a small sample and extrapolate that to mean there’s an epidemic.”

Murphy prompted raised eyebrows, however, when he recently suggested that Harvard was merely a microcosm of society. A random sample of his players’ media guide biographies suggests otherwise:

“Career plans include research toward cure for ALS,” reads one.

“It’s a microcosm of winning,” former Harvard star receiver Pat McInally said of his alma mater’s woes. “It’s the price of having not just a winning program, but a program that is yielding pros.”

No longer able to state his case, Murphy referred a reporter to his postgame comments from a 38-21 win against Brown on Sept. 23.

“I’ve been a head coach for 20 years and I’ve never been through anything remotely like this,” the coach said that day. “I know this: 99% of the kids that we’ve had at Harvard have been world-class human beings, the kind that you would literally be proud for your daughter to marry.”

Other Harvard athletes downplay the events. Kelsi Chan, a freshman member of the Harvard soccer team, dismissed the football controversy as tabloid talk.

“It’s not a good story if it’s not a bad story,” Chan said. “That’s human nature.”

Jim Goffredo, senior captain of the Harvard basketball team, said it was sad that athletes “get lumped together” but added that he didn’t think the football team’s problems were a reflection of the 40 other athletic teams fielded at the school.

“It’s an easy story to make something out of Harvard,” said Goffredo, who attended Crescenta Valley High School and is on schedule to graduate from Harvard next spring with a degree in economics.

David Stearns, a reporter for the Harvard Crimson newspaper, opined in an Oct. 3 article that the football team was taking a national beating “because it’s Harvard, and when people have a chance to knock the Crimson down a notch or two, they jump on it.”

The football story took a more disturbing turn when the Boston Globe reported that the “Skit Night” featuring a performance that led to running back Keegan Toci’s dismissal also involved a skit by other players that included provocative sexual innuendo about the coach. Those players, however, were allowed to remain on the team.

When Murphy addressed the team and asked whether he was wrong to dismiss Toci, several Crimson players stood in support of the player.

Helene Irvin, mother of junior quarterback Richard Irvin, who played at Harvard-Westlake School in North Hollywood and Muir High School in Pasadena and is among 14 Harvard players from California, said she was appalled by the “Skit Night” routines.

“I expect the grown-ups and the administration and the coaches to put a stop to this behavior immediately and get things back to working order,” Irvin said. “That’s what every parent would want. This cannot and will not happen again.”

Michael Hull, whose son Thomas is a freshman punter who played at Santa Margarita High, said he had no regrets about sending his son to Harvard.

“It may be unprecedented or unheard of,” Hull said of the off-field problems, “but it doesn’t mean the institution is falling apart or that there is a pattern. There is no cancer afoot.”

The elder Hull played football at USC and in the NFL. He said given that Harvard had been playing football for more than 100 years, the problems of late were “infinitesimal.”

Some wonder, though, whether football success has affected Harvard. Is the school taking more chances on more players?

The 2006 media guide notes a “tremendous resurgence” of Harvard graduates who have been drafted or signed by the NFL -- 11 players in the last nine years.

McInally, who may be the most accomplished player ever at Harvard, made All-America in 1974 and still holds the school’s single-game reception record with 13. He spent a decade with the NFL’s Cincinnati Bengals and is the only player ever to register a perfect score on the league’s “Wonderlic” intelligence test.

McInally says Harvard football was different in the 1970s.

“If you won too many titles, it was a negative,” he said. “Then you were becoming Dartmouth.”

Although he was a straight-A student, McInally said, Harvard would not promote him for the Academic All-American team.

“They wouldn’t give them my grades,” he said. “They said that’s for people who go to Ohio State and major in basket weaving.”

McInally would later get a laugh when he and Pete Johnson ended up Cincinnati Bengal teammates. Johnson was an Academic All-American at Ohio State.

Once, Harvard took its football very seriously, winning the last of its seven national titles in 1920.

Harvard Stadium, with its Roman columns and gray concrete casing, oozes history. Jim Thorpe, the star of visiting Carlisle, played there in 1908.

The formation of the Ivy League in 1954, however, began a slow movement toward de-emphasizing football, and since 1982 the league has played at the second-tier NCAA I-AA level.

McInally remembers a heated debate over whether Harvard should retire his uniform number. The matter went before the faculty board, he said, where esteemed economist and Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith stood up to address the issue.

“He said, ‘We have never retired the blue books of our greatest scholars, why would we retire the jersey of a gridder?’ ”

McInally wonders whether Harvard football is making football too important again.

“This guy is a big-time coach,” he said of Murphy. “He’s going to attract those people. I’m not blaming him.

“It’s discouraging that all these winning programs have to have problems. Some of it has to be the players. But that’s how you win.”

Meanwhile, off-field problems continue to beset other traditional football icons.

Recently, the starting quarterback and tailback at the East Coast university where football was modernized, by Walter Camp, were arrested after a fight outside a downtown market.

The school involved this time?

Yale.

chris.dufresne@latimes.com