Football | 10.11.2023

The Sesquicentennial All-Crimson Team

The greatest players in the program’s history

by Dick Friedman

From The November-December 2023 Issue

Head shots of football players divided between offense and defense

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Harvard is celebrating the 150th anniversary of Crimson football. To commemorate the occasion, we have undertaken the daunting task of choosing the greatest players in the program’s history. (A tough job, but someone had to do it.) Our panel includes four who are steeped in Harvard football. They are: yours truly; Joseph Bertagna ’73, author of Crimson in Triumph: A Pictorial History of Harvard Athletics, 1852-1986; John T. Bethell ’54, former editor of Harvard Magazine, who served as “Cleat,” the publication’s football writer, from 1971 to 2014; and John Powers ’70, longtime sportswriter for the Boston Globe and contributor to The Third Harvard H Book of Athletics 1963-2022. After much spirited, sometimes agonizing, but always collegial debate, we arrived at these choices.

Offense	First Team	Second Team
TIGHT END	Kyle Juszczyk ’13	Cam Brate ’14
OFFENSIVE LINE	Ham Fish 1910 Robert Fisher 1912 Dan Jiggetts ’76 Endicott Peabody ’42	Matt Birk ’98 Roger Caron ’84-’85 Mike Clare ’01 Stan Pennock 1915
CENTER	William H. Lewis LL.B 1893	Ben Ticknor ’31
QUARTERBACK	Ryan Fitzpatrick ’05	Neil Rose ’03
RUNNING BACK	Clifton Dawson ’07 Eddie Mahan 1916	Eddie Casey 1919 Chris Menick ’00
WIDE RECEIVER	Pat McInally ’75 Carl Morris ’03	Corey Mazza ’07-’08 Matt Luft ’10
KICKER	Charlie Brickley 1915	Jake McIntyre ’20
KICKER RETURNER	Colby Skelton ’98	Justice Shelton-Mosley ’19

Defense	First Team	Second Team
DEFENSIVE LINE	Bob Baggott ’78 Desmond Bryant ’08 Tack Hardwick 1915 Zack Hodges ’15	Dave Campbell 1902 Truman Jones ’23 Ma Newell 1894 Bob Shaunessy ’59
LINEBACKERS	Joe Azelby ’84 Dante Balestracci ’04 Isaiah Kacyvenski ’00	Don Chiofaro ’68 Don Peterson ’89 Jordan Hill ’20
DEFENSIVE BACKS	Andrew Berry ’09 Cecil Cox ’86 Bill Emper ’77 Barry Wood ’32	Charley Brewer 1896 Ken O’Donnell ’49 George Owen 1923 Steve Williams ’08
PUNTER	Jacob Dombrowski ’13	Samuel Felton 1913