Harvard, Murphy were great fit
For the past decade and more, the question had a simple answer. How long would Tim Murphy stay on as Harvard’s football coach? For as long as he wanted to.
Unlike the professors on the other side of the Charles, he didn’t have tenure, but he might as well have. After 30 years, 200 victories, and 10 Ivy League titles, Murphy had earned the privilege of determining the time of his departure.
That time came Wednesday morning when he announced that he would be retiring at 67 from a profession that “has been my passion and my life” in the wake of another championship season.
Many of Harvard’s coaches have measured their careers not so much in years as in decades. That’s particularly so in football, which has had only three men in charge — John Yovicsin and Joe Restic were the others — since 1957.
By any standard, Murphy achieved unparalleled success, remarkable for both its excellence and its consistency. The 141 Ivy triumphs, most in league history. The three perfect seasons. The 16 consecutive winning campaigns. The 14 victories in 15 years over archrival Yale.
That would have seemed implausible when Murphy arrived in 1994 after reviving Cincinnati’s flagging program. Harvard hadn’t had a winning season in seven years and wouldn’t for another four.
His assistants told him that it was “professional suicide” to take the job, which came with a 40 percent pay cut. But the lure to return to Massachusetts was strong.
Murphy had grown up in Kingston and played football for Silver Lake High and Springfield College. He’d been an
assistant at Boston University. His friends and family were here, and his mother was ailing.
And coaching at the place that was responsible for inventing the game and dealing with intelligent, self-motivated players who welcome challenges was uncommonly attractive.
That was Murphy’s immutable message to his charges. Nothing worthwhile in football or in life comes easy. The expectations at Harvard are high, and we’re going to demand a lot from you.
That message especially resonated with the kind of players Murphy sought, blue-collar guys who were accustomed to working hard for everything and weren’t looking for guarantees.
His first several seasons were rough ones. But Murphy turned things around in one recruiting cycle, winning the Ivy crown outright in 1997.
That foreshadowed an extraordinary run that began with the new millennium and eventually encompassed six Ivy titles in nine years.
The elevated quality of the players was undeniable — the Matt Birks, Isaiah Kacyvenskis, Kyle Juszczyks, Ryan Fitzpatricks, and Cam Brates all went on to play in the NFL, along with a couple of dozen others.
But the culture of commitment that Murphy and his staff created and reinforced from year to year was essential to the program’s perennial success.
You did the offseason work. You turned up for the strength and conditioning sessions. You were on time, if not early, for meetings. You did not skip practice for a class. You arranged your class schedule around practice. You’d been told that playing for Harvard would be demanding, and it was all of that.
What Murphy wanted — and produced — were smart, hard-nosed, classy varsities that played an imaginative and entertaining brand of football. Losing seasons were so rare that they came as a shock.
Supporters often wondered how the Crimson, especially the unbeaten squads, would have fared in the FCS playoffs. The Ivies don’t participate, and Murphy wasn’t interested in that changing.
“Why do you want a game after The Game?” he’d ask his players.
There was a broader, longer life after the Yale game, and the lessons about dedication and resilience learned wearing the crimson helmet were meant to prepare you for it. Coming to Harvard isn’t a four-year decision, basketball coach Tommy Amaker tells recruits. It’s a 40-year decision.
Murphy coached nearly that long at three schools but hadn’t intended to. He was set to enroll at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management when Maine offered him the head job in 1987.
He could have stayed at Cincinnati or decamped to a big-time school with bowl aspirations. But Harvard seemed the right fit for him so he stayed longer than any coach had in 150 years.
Along the way, especially more recently, there were warnings of life’s impermanence. Murphy had triple-bypass heart surgery in 2014. Ben Abercrombie, a promising defensive back, was paralyzed from the neck down in his first game in 2017.
And last year Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens, Murphy’s high school teammate and lifelong friend, died months after a horrific bicycle accident left him paralyzed, too.
Teevens’s death shook Murphy deeply and reminded him that there was a life to be lived beyond the gridiron. How many times did you have to hoist the Ivy trophy, after all?
One final time was enough, as the Crimson shared the crown with Yale and Dartmouth last year and Murphy concluded that it was an appropriate time to move on after coaching 1,000 players and working with more than 80 assistants.
“Sometimes at the end of your career, someone will ask, ‘Do you have any regrets?’ ” Murphy said in his retirement statement. “And my simple answer is no, because in any endeavor, any relationship, if you give it absolutely everything you have, there can be no regrets.”