Quarterback Conner Hempel remembers what he was wearing the day in the spring of 2010 when an assistant football coach from Harvard showed up at his Kentucky High School offering to change his life.

“Jeans and a long-sleeve white T-shirt,” Hempel says. “If I’d known someone from Harvard was coming, I might have dressed up a little.”

It was the spring of 2010 and Hempel, a 6-foot-3, 210- pound prospect, was considering a collection of regional football programs: Miami (Ohio), Toledo, Bowling Green, Western Kentucky. He’d never thought about playing Ivy League football, or that one of the world’s most prestigious universities might have any interest in him. Like everyone he knew in Kentucky and the college-football-mad South, Hempel assumed Harvard was all about academics.

With Harvard’s 2014 football team one win away from an undefeated season and its third Ivy League championship in four years, and a roster that includes several NFL prospects and hopefuls, Hempel now knows better. “We’re all about athletics as well,” he says.

Harvard football has never had a season like this one, as the college uses aggressive new financial-aid packages, generous donors and its hallowed reputation to tap into reservoirs of talent from all over. The roster includes 13 players from Texas, 13 from Georgia and even a freshman from the football powerhouse De La Salle High School of Concord, Calif. The Crimson are 9-0 overall, and 6-0 in the Ivy League. They dominated nonconference opponents Holy Cross, Georgetown and Lafayette. Harvard has outscored opponents 197-64 in the Ivy League and 296-99 overall. The team features the top-ranked defense, measured by points-allowed a game, in NCAA’s Football Championship Subdivision, the second tier of major Divison I football, and the second-best rushing defense in the FCS. This is not the team Ted Kennedy played for.