Edwards played high school ball with Trent Edwards—the No. 1 ranked passer in the high school class of 2002 who is now the starting quarterback at Stanford—so he knows what a top QB looks like. And he thinks his new quarterback is just as good.

“I am shocked that Ryan is not a scholarship player at a D-I university,” Edwards says. “The differences between Trent and Ryan as far as throwing are not that big, and then Ryan is such a great runner. It is just unbelievable that he’s not at a D-I school, and I think we are really lucky to have gotten him.”

Earlier this season, Brown coach Phil Estes went even a step further than Edwards, and said that Fitzpatrick wasn’t just good enough for big-time college football, but maybe for the NFL.

After watching Fitzpatrick—the same kid who led Harvard to a comeback win over the Bears a year before—post 410 total yards this season, Estes wouldn’t have believed that Fitzpatrick hadn’t been heavily recruited.

But he wasn’t, and in some ways it makes sense.

Because to know how important Fitzpatrick is to a football team, you have to know about a lot more than just his athletic ability.

“I wasn’t born this super, superior athlete,” Fitzpatrick says. “[Loving the game] is what has brought me to this point right now. I’ve had to work hard my whole life to gain what I have, and that’s why I have such a fun time doing those things that nobody likes. Like squatting or hang cleans or getting up in the morning, because I think that I realize in the end what it’s going to do for me and what is has done for me in the past.”

Forget, for a moment, the statistics.

The pass efficiency rating.

The rushing yards per carry.

The massive amounts of total offense he accumulates in every way imaginable.

If you really want to know why Ryan Fitzpatrick is so important to this football team, you don’t need to know any of that.

You just need to know Ryan.

—Staff writer Lande A. Spottswood can be reached at spottsw@fas.harvard.edu.