Everyone in the stadium was stunned Saturday night except the man who’d called the play. Down three to Colgate with four seconds left, Andrew Aurich sent in a 44-yard Hail Mary with a designed lateral built in, and Harvard ran it for a 20-17 win as if it had done it a hundred times. It had done it on Friday. Robert O’Connell’s piece in Wednesday’s Journal is about a 43-year-old coach who treats the last minute of a football game as a science, and it’s the best planning story in the paper this week — it just happens to be on the sports page.
Here’s the drill, run at least once a week: 60 seconds on the clock, no timeouts, the ball at the wrong end of the field, and the offense has to come away with the winning score. The details change weekly; what never changes is that Harvard is behind and the clock is nearly gone. The results: in Aurich’s three seasons, five Crimson wins have come on scores in the final minute, and three of those came with no time left at all. Aurich picked up the habit under Greg Schiano, who picked it up from Bill Belichick — the lesson being that the whole 60 minutes can turn on a few seconds at the hinge points.
Saturday’s call was Big Ben. The 6-foot-6 tight end, Teigan Pelletier, is the target, and his job is to win the ball in a crowd; four teammates set up around him in a diamond and rotate as it comes down, so that wherever a tip or a lateral goes, someone’s there to take it. Quarterback Charlie Smith’s throw landed short of the goal line. Pelletier made the catch and was buried in tacklers; freshman wideout Nate Bailey looped around for the lateral — his Friday assignment, now for real — and dove into the end zone. “We just did this on Friday,” Aurich told the huddle before the snap. “Let’s go do it again.”
No timeouts, and you’re losing
What struck us isn’t the trick play. It’s that Aurich designs practice around the conditions nobody wants: behind, out of time, no way to stop the clock. His explanation for why — “so there’s no panic” — is the whole argument. Panic isn’t a character flaw. It’s what happens when a situation shows up that you’ve never seen before.
Our read
This is Behavioral planning, with Cash Flow (M5) doing the blocking. Most financial plans are built for the first three quarters: steady income, markets that mostly rise, time to adjust. Almost none are rehearsed for the fourth-quarter version — a layoff and a market drop in the same month, say, with no timeouts. So run the drill. If the paycheck stopped Friday, which account would you draw from first, and for how long? If the portfolio fell by a fifth, what’s the written rule you’d follow, and does your spouse know where it is? Our own books have dates written down for when they’d add in a drawdown, decided on a quiet day, for exactly this reason: a plan you made in calm is the only one you’ll trust when the clock is running.
Harvard doesn’t run Big Ben because it expects to need it every week. It runs it so that the one week it does, nobody is improvising. Walk through your own version with us before the fourth quarter — the Hail Mary works a lot better when Friday’s practice already happened.