Knowles' Running Game Turns Cornell Around

Cornell may still be located in the middle of nowhere, but at least its football program is now on the map.

A 27-13 victory over Harvard, the defending Ivy champion and national No. 20, last Saturday in Ithaca garnered national attention for the Big Red and may have helped separate it from the other five Ancient Eight teams that have in recent years watched Penn and Harvard duke it out for the conference crown.

"You've got a couple teams in the Ivy League that have been doing very well [in recent seasons]," Cornell head coach Jim Knowles said last week, prior to his team's victory. "Now for the rest of us, it's our job to try and catch up to them."

While a victory over the Crimson does not vault the Big Red to the status of an Ivy power on the level of Harvard or Penn, it shows how quickly Knowles has helped his alma mater "catch up." Just midway through his second season as head coach, Knowles has already taken a team stuck in the doldrums of Ancient Eight football, with a 1-9 record in 2003, to a third place Ivy finish in 2004 and the first victory over a nationally-ranked opponent in school history in 2005. The win also marked the end of Harvard's nine-game conference win streak dating back to 2003, and was Cornell's first victory over the Crimson in the last five years.

Despite the Big Red's emergence with a third place campaign a year ago and the conference's top rushing attack so far this season, a potential upset seemed far-flung. After suffering just three conference losses last season, including a tight 34-24 defeat to the Crimson at Cambridge, the Big Red seemed poised to take a step back after falling to 1-3 early in 2005, including a 37-17 loss to an inexperienced Yale team in its only conference matchup. A weakened run defense plagued Cornell in its first four games, while the offense relied almost solely on the run and sophomore tailback Luke Siluwa.

But against the Crimson, the Big Red rush defense, the team's strength a year ago, seemed to recover its form and held junior Clifton Dawson, an All-American and candidate for the Walter Payton Award, to a career-low 39 yards rushing on the day. The defense also shut down the conference's top passing attack (282.3 yards per game entering last week), holding Crimson signal caller Liam O' Hagan to just 95 yards through the air on 13 of 24 passing.

The biggest factor in the game was turnovers. Harvard coughed up the ball on five occasions, with four in the first half, as O'Hagan threw three picks and Cornell recovered two fumbles in the contest. The first turnover came on the opening drive of the game, when senior safety Kevin Rex returned an interception to the Harvard 21-yard line. It then took the Big Red offense just one snap to take a lead they would never relinquish when senior Ryan Kuhn threw a strike to classmate Brian Romney for a touchdown.

It was the conference's top rush offense, however, that helped the Big Red move the chains, control the clock, and put points on the board for the rest of the day. Siluwa tallied one touchdown and ran for 89 yards, just missing out on his fourth consecutive game above the century mark, while Kuhn scrambled for 47 yards and scored on the ground late in the fourth quarter to give the Big Red a 27-7 lead.

The run-heavy offense that wore down both the Crimson and the clock was something that the Cornell coaching staff switched to in the off-season from a more pass-oriented game plan last year. The switch was seemingly intended to limit mistakes and shorten the game against top foes such as Harvard.

"I know there have been a couple of teams that have been on top the last couple of years," Knowles said last week, "but every game has still been very tightly contested usually. When you have a league like that, the running game helps you to control the game and time of possession and keeps turnovers down-all those things that help you win close games. It all stems from the running game."

How far that running game can take Cornell and what stems from the upset win remains to be seen. But, without question, the victory over the defending champions shook up the Ivy title race and, at least for a day, turned eyes toward Ithaca.