Undefeated Showdown

Jeff Terrell and Clifton Dawson should know better.

As seniors with three-and-a-half years of Ivy football under their belts, they should know that when it comes to Princeton-Harvard, the individual stars of the moment always get trumped by the history of one of college football's greatest rivalries.

Especially this year, when for the first time since 1922, the Crimson and the Tigers are both undefeated five games into the season — ranked as the No. 15 and 21 teams in Division I-AA football, respectively.

But as the football team (5-0 overall, 2-0 Ivy League) prepares for tomorrow afternoon's battle with Harvard (5-0, 2-0) at Princeton Stadium, the Tigers' star senior quarterback and the Crimson's superlative running back has honed in on the attention, threatening to turn the game into a showcase of the league's two best offensive players.

Dawson's role in this hostile coup could have been predicted prior to the season. With 4,314 career rushing yards under his belt, Dawson sits 401 yards shy of Ed Marinaro's all-time Ivy League record, which has stood for 35 years. For a player who has averaged a stunning 126.8 rushing yards per game over the course of his career, the season's five remaining games should prove more than enough to climb to the top of the list.

"He's a complete back," Princeton head coach Roger Hughes said. "He can catch, he can obviously run, he breaks tackles, he blocks well. You don't want to get him on a screen pass because he'll turn that [into] 50, 60 yards at a time."

Indeed, the potential for the big play has made Dawson not only a chain-mover but also a scoring machine. He already holds the Ivy League record with 57 career touchdowns, but this year Dawson is going overboard. In each of Harvard's first four games this season, Dawson scored exactly three touchdowns. With 78 points on the year, there are six teams in Division I-AA whom Dawson can say he has outscored singlehandedly.

A native of Ontario, Canada, Dawson has already been drafted by the Toronto Argonauts in the sixth round of the 2006 Canadian Football League draft. An NFL roster spot remains a real possibility for next season.

When asked how his team will look to limit such an offensive force tomorrow, Hughes initially joked about resorting to drastic measures.

"I've hired a couple sniper rifles in the stands," Hughes quipped.

But, ultimately, Hughes knows that his team's ability to stop Dawson will have a serious say in the outcome of the game. And he knows that his Tigers have had serious trouble stopping Dawson in the past. In three career games against Princeton, Dawson has averaged over 195 yards on the ground while totaling eight touchdowns.

"One of the things we haven't done is tackle well," Hughes said of his team's Dawson-related difficulties, "and we can't miss tackles against him. If you look at the previous games that we've played against him, it wasn't the fact that we weren't in place, it was the fact that he turned a four-yard gain into 12, that he turned a two-yard gain into 6."

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Tackling, unfortunately, is one of the few problems that Terrell cannot solve for Princeton as his team's stellar co-captain and signal caller. While less of a sure thing than Dawson heading into the year — on the heels of a solid debut season as a starter — Terrell has emerged as Dawson's equal in terms of Ivy supremacy at his position.

"He's by far the best quarterback we'll see," Harvard head coach Tim Murphy said of Terrell. "He's probably the best quarterback in the Ivy League."

Murphy's hunch is supported by a glance at the league's statistical leaders. Terrell leads all players with eight touchdown passes and is the only quarterback who has thrown at least two more touchdowns than interceptions. He is second to Brown's Joe DiGiacomo in total passing yards, but his completion percentage is significantly higher than DiGiacomo's, and he thoroughly outplayed his rival in Princeton's 17-3 win over the Bears last week.

Add to that the fact that Terrell is second on the Tigers with 231 rushing yards, and Murphy starts to see a resemblance between Terrell and another all-around quarterback who tore up the Ivy League.

"He's Ryan Fitzpatrick-like at times in his ability to improvise, his ability to get plays off under pressure and to make plays with his feet," Murphy said, comparing Terrell to the former All-Ivy signal caller for the Crimson, now in his second year with the NFL's St. Louis Rams.

Proof once again that — even as Terrell and Dawson look more like future pros — there's just no shaking that Princeton-Harvard legacy.