Harvard Takes a 6-0 Record and the Country's Second-Best Completion Rate to Hanover for a Friday Night Ivy Showdown

Halloween weekend, Friday night lights, first place on the line in the Ivy. Harvard (6-0, 3-0 Ivy) visits Dartmouth (3-3, 2-1) tonight at 7 at Buddy Teevens Stadium in Hanover, N.H., on ESPNU, The Harvard Crimson reports. The Crimson are ranked No. 13 and No. 16 in the two FCS polls.

For the second week in a row, the winner of Harvard's game takes the lead in the league standings. If Dartmouth wins and Princeton also wins this week, the Big Green would hold the three-way tiebreaker over Harvard and the Tigers, according to the Crimson. If Harvard wins, it can afford one loss in its last three league games and still take the Ivy's automatic bid to the FCS Playoffs.

Coach Andrew Aurich is acting like this is just a normal Friday. "We've had a stretch of games where the person that we were playing was tied in first place with us, so to me it's the status quo," he told the Crimson. "The fact is, you're only guaranteed 10 [games], so you want to make every game count. These guys don't want to have any blemish on their record."

The guy to watch is sophomore quarterback Charlie Smith. After a slow first start, he's averaged 276.4 passing yards a game with 11 touchdowns and three picks over the last five, and he's completing 72.3 percent of his passes on the season, second-best of any quarterback in the country, according to the Crimson. That's almost 10 points better than anybody else in the Ivy.

The rest of the offense is a committee. Six Harvard skill players have double-digit carries, the team runs for 128.5 yards a game, and junior DJ Gordon, last year's No. 2 rusher, made his season debut against Princeton last week. Nine players have scored a touchdown, and the roster has eight Phil Steele FCS Midseason All-Americans, including linemen Spencer Doan and Thomas O'Brien. The line has allowed one and a half sacks a game despite injuries forcing rotations. "No one has these flashy, super outstanding stats, but it's everyone," captain running back Xaviah Bascon said.

"We came into the season knowing in every position that we had great depth, and the o-line obviously was one of those," Bascon said of the line. "They've been incredible communication-wise, new guys in different roles and stuff, and they've just worked super hard." Fedd credited Larkee's scheme for "putting the scheme in that allows there to be an extra man every time."

Dartmouth is better than 3-3 looks, at least according to the schedule. The Big Green lost their first two after leading through three quarters, 24-20 to then-No. 7 Lehigh and 31-28 to Monmouth, then beat Penn, lost 28-7 at Yale, beat Merrimack 27-21, and smashed Columbia 38-18 last week, when its secondary had three interceptions and allowed just 5.2 yards per pass attempt. The Crimson describes Dartmouth's offensive line as one of the most physically dominant in the league, though no Big Green player made the Phil Steele midseason All-America list. All three losses came to teams receiving FCS poll votes at the time, the Crimson notes.

Their engine is sophomore back Myles Craddock, a Phillips Exeter product who ran for 128 yards against Columbia and is one of four Ivy backs past 500 rushing yards. Harvard's defense, run by coordinator Scott Larkee, has forced at least one takeaway in every game and scored its first defensive touchdown last week on a scoop-and-score after a strip sack by junior Xaden Benson. "Regardless of the opponent, we still come in with the same mentality," senior defensive end Josh Fedd said.

The series: this is game No. 129, Harvard leads 75-48-5, and the Crimson have won four straight and 24 of the last 28. Last year Dartmouth showed up in Cambridge at 5-1 to challenge an unbeaten Harvard and got beat 31-10.

Dez's take: same movie, different theater. Dartmouth's whole identity is that physical line and Craddock, and Harvard's whole identity is that nobody needs to be a hero because Smith completes everything. If Harvard's defense keeps Craddock from turning 4-yard runs into 12-yard runs and gets its weekly takeaway, I like the Crimson. If Dartmouth controls the clock and keeps Smith on the sideline, it's a coin flip on the road on a Friday night. This is Harvard's second of three nationally televised games, so if you've never watched Ivy football, tonight's a good one to start.

Kickoff is 7 p.m. on ESPNU. Not yet known: the result.