On almost any football team, one position stands out above the others.
It's the one you look to first, the one you talk about the most, and the one who usually shoulders the biggest burden from the fans and media who watch him every week.
The running backs might pound the ball and the wide receivers might catch the big passes, but the quarterback touches the ball on all those plays and then some.
It should come as no surprise, then, that in recent years the team with the best quarterback in the Ivy League has almost always been the one hoisting the championship trophy at the end of the season.
The names still resonate at football stadiums across the Ancient Eight -- Neil Rose, Gavin Hoffman, Mike Mitchell, Ryan Fitzpatrick and perhaps the best-known of them all at the moment, Jay Fiedler.
Penn coach Al Bagnoli has seen them all, and said "it's not just coincidence" that the men under center have led the way to glory.
"In most people's offenses in our league, the quarterback is the triggerman," he said, in large part because the Ivy League's coaches "all believe in being able to throw the ball."
For proof, consider some statistics from last season.
Of the eight teams in the Ivy League, only Harvard and Princeton attempted fewer than 30 passes per game. The Tigers were the only team to average fewer than 200 passing yards per game.
Three quarterbacks -- Yale's Alvin Cowan, Penn's Pat McDermott and Harvard's Ryan Fitzpatrick -- threw for more than 1,900 yards. Cowan threw for 2,140 yards, while McDermott totaled 1,995 and Fitzpatrick 1,986.
McDermott, Cowan and Dartmouth's Charlie Rittgers each averaged more than 200 passing yards per game, and none of the eight Ivy starters averaged fewer than 150.
For Bagnoli, McDermott's big numbers last season also added up to a lot of experience with the football in his hands, and the ability to run a more complicated offense this year.
"If you don't have an experienced quarterback, you're forced to pare down your offense a little bit, you're forced to fast track him," Bagnoli said. "It's hard to simulate in practice what actually happens in a game."
Harvard coach Tim Murphy concurs -- not least because last season, Fitzpatrick delivered a championship to Boston in his senior season.
"The quarterback position is an important one for us, because we really look for someone who can run our offense and who the team can rally around," Murphy said in an e-mail.
Good communication skills can often be as important for a quarterback as a good throwing arm. Whether it is calling a play or speaking to teammates in a huddle, quarterbacks often have as much to do mentally as physically while on the field.
"It's definitely a position where you need someone in there that's going to be confident, that guys trust in," McDermott said. "There's a lot on the quarterback to know the offense and get the ball to the right place, get the ball where it needs to be."
For Bagnoli, communication skills are even more important in the complex offensive system the Quakers run.
"A lot of the times we come out, it's a run/pass option, it's a run one way or run the other way option, it's a throw one way or throw the other way option," he said. "So obviously, [the quarterback] controls a little bit of what you ideally want to be able to do in his hands."
In addition to the work a quarterback does in a game, he also often has to shoulder the burden of attention from fans and media. While McDermott willingly accepts this responsibility, he argued that he can't do everything himself.
"A lot of responsibility falls on the quarterback's shoulders, so I'd say with a lot of responsibility comes a lot of criticism," he said. "At times it's fair but there's also 10 other guys on the field who have to be doing their thing."
Murphy said that he doesn't think quarterbacks are "under any more pressure than anyone else on the field," while Bagnoli said that the attention paid to quarterbacks is "just the nature of the beast."
"Fifty percent of the time he's throwing the ball, and he has to throw it to the right guy, on time, on target, and get us out of bad plays into good plays," Bagnoli said. "You try not to put him on a pedestal, but somebody has to be controlling things on both sides and [the quarterback is] the guy on offense."
Like so many things, it seems easier said than done.
