More On Schedules

Following up on yesterday's listing of who Ivy League teams are playing out-of-conference this fall, today we take a look at FBS games on tap for the Big Green's three non-conference opponents in 2025:

• New Hampshire will play at Ball State in its third game of the season on Sept 13, one week before visiting Dartmouth. The Big Green's season-opener will be UNH's fourth game.

• Central Connecticut kicks off its season Aug. 30 with a short trip to UConn. Dartmouth's Week Two game in New Britain on Sept. 27 will be the Blue Devils' fifth of the season.

• Fordham opens its season Aug. 30 at Boston College. The Rams will have a bye week before Dartmouth comes to The Bronx on Oct. 18.

#

The video below comes with this explanation, which may – or may not – ring true:

When The Ivy League initially signed a television deal with ESPN in 1988, the relationship between the two sides was on rocky ground. However, in 1989, ESPN attempted to fix this with a proposal designed to give The Ivy League more television exposure. The end result was a disaster, with The Ivy League bashing ESPN, and with the relationship between the two sides being beyond repair. This is the story behind the drama between ESPN and the Ivy League at the end of the 1980s

The video goes on for a bit but there's interesting background as well as some clips from "back in the day." Hit the "skip" link to get into the video a little quicker.

#

Yes, this shot from the Calgary Stampeders website shows Flo Orimolade '17, the former Ivy League defensive player of the year wearing not just No. 7, but a cowboy hat at a press conference where he spoke this week about being traded back to the Stamps. Click HERE to hear what he had to say.

#

Dartmouth's Ivy League championship football team was recognized at last night's Big Green hockey game. This shot of head coach Sammy McCorkle addressing the crowd is from Dartmouth's social media. Find several more pictures HERE.

#

EXTRA POINT

We're having full sun for the third consecutive day and that's a good thing when you own Chevy and Hyundai EVs, and an electric lawn tractor that has to remain plugged in all winter. Although the large solar tracker we installed in our field a few years ago is incredibly efficient at turning and tilting to squeeze the most juice it can out of the sun, it's not a miracle worker. It can do only so much when the days are as short as they are in the winter and the sky is as overcast as it has been the past month or so.

Elsewhere

With Dartmouth's 2025 football schedule filled out with the addition of Central Connecticut, here's a look at who the rest of the Ivy League teams will be playing out-of-conference. Harvard and Penn still have opponents yet-to-be named.

Brown

Georgetown 

Rhode Island

at Bryant

Columbia

at Lafayette

Georgetown

Lehigh

Cornell

at Albany

Colgate

Bucknell 

Harvard

at Holy Cross

TBA

TBA

Penn

at Lehigh

Marist

TBA

Princeton

San Diego

at Lafayette 

Mercer

Yale

Holy Cross 

at Lehigh

Stonehill

By way of contrast, here are a few of the nonconference games being played by Patriot League teams (including new member Richmond):

Lafayette – Oregon State and Bowling Green

Richmond – North Carolina

Fordham – Boston College

Colgate – Syracuse

Bucknell – Air Force

Holy Cross – Northern Illinois

Just sayin'. 

#

Don Dobes, Dartmouth's defensive coordinator, was recently named the American Football Coaches Association Assistant Coach of the Year. Click through the interview below to hear how, as a student at Illinois Wesleyan, he and a teammate designed their own college course that saw them road trip to the 1979 coaches convention in San Francisco. That led to him becoming a graduate assistant for Jerry Berndt at DePauw, where his roommate would be another grad assistant. Fellow by the name of Buddy Teevens.

He talks about being linebacker coach for Berndt at Penn under defensive coordinator John Lyons, who would go on to be Dartmouth head coach. He shares stories from his coaching stops at Penn, Rice, Temple and Princeton, interrupted by a short stint at DIII Rowan, where he coached in a national championship game.

Along the way, Dobes learned an important lesson: "You're not really a coach in this profession until you get fired." 

He talks about being let go at Princeton and ending up at Dartmouth the next season, seven weeks after interviewing with Teevens and being pretty sure he wasn't going to get the job.

It's well worth a listen:

Green Alert Take: I'm not sure I will do it, but if I ever choose my Mount Rushmore of Dartmouth football coaches since I first started covering the team in the Joe Yukica era, Don Dobes will be on it.

#

EXTRA POINT

It makes me a little suspicious when you bring your car to the dealer for a recall at the manufacturer's expense and after doing an unsolicited "free" overall health check they tell you the car also needs new brakes. But when you bring it to a local shop to get the brakes done, the mechanic – who could have made money replacing the brakes – instead tells you they are just fine.

Changes Keep Coming

The Dartmouth coaching staff continues to evolve, with tight ends coach Wendy Laurent departing Hanover in favor of an analyst role at Ohio State. Laurent had been named the Big Green's associate head coach only last year.

Green Alert Take: Upon hiring Wendy Laurent, Buddy Teevens said he had a bright future, comparing him favorably to former Big Green assistant Cortez Hankton, now on staff at LSU. While recent changes in FBS coaching rules allow analysts more involvement in practice, it's interesting that the move for an associate head coach at a successful FCS program would be to an analyst's role, rather than a regular position coach.

Green Alert Take II: As a fellow Penn Stater, it's easy to wish Laurent good luck in his new role. But not too much good luck for tOSU. ;-)

Here are changes in the Dartmouth staff under Sammy McCorkle:

•  new offensive coordinator 2025  – Shane Montgomery

•  new secondary coach 2025 – TBA

•  new nickels/special teams coach 2025 – TBA

• new head of strength and conditioning 2025 – TBA

Also:

• new wide receivers coach 2024 – Dan Herbert

• new running backs coach 2024 – Braxton Chapman

#

The new hires will be on the field with the Big Green when it begins spring practice in 48 days. Here's the schedule for the 12 days of spring ball allowed Ivy League teams:

SPRING PRACTICE

Tuesday, April 8

Thursday April 10

Saturday, April 12

Tuesday, April 15

Thursday, April 17

Saturday, Aprl 19

Tuesday, April 29

Thursday, May 1

Saturday, May 3

Tueday, May 6

Thursday, May 8

Saturday, May 10

Once again, practice will be interrupted for a week midway through, allowing coaches to hit the road recruiting and players to recover and gear up for the final two weeks of spring.

#

The NFL Women's Forum will coincide with at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis. A release from the league about the forum included this:

For the second year in a row, the NFL will also honor the life and legacy of Buddy Teevens, former Dartmouth College head football coach and advocate for the inclusion of women in football, with the presentation of the Buddy Teevens Forward Progress Award.

Former NFL head coach Ron Rivera, who had onetime Dartmouth assistant Jennifer King among the women on his staff, won the inaugural Buddy Teevens Forward Progress Award last year. (LINK)

# 

EXTRA POINT

The network news last night mentioned that the term Artificial Intelligence was coined by a mathematics professor at Dartmouth. A web search this morning confirmed that the term was first used to promote a workshop regarding what previously been called, among other things, cybernetics or automata theory. From a Science and Technology web page (LINK):

In 1956, two years after the death of (Alan) Turing, John McCarthy, a professor at Dartmouth College, organized a summer workshop to clarify and develop ideas about thinking machines — choosing the name “artificial intelligence” for the project. The Dartmouth conference, widely considered to be the founding moment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a field of research, aimed to find “how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans and improve themselves.” 

A Look Into The Future

With the long-awaited news yesterday that Central Connecticut would fill out next fall's dance card for the Dartmouth football team, here's what we know (or think we know) about schedules that the incoming freshmen will play in their careers. The trip to Central Connecticut next fall might suggest the 2027 game with the Blue Devils will be flipped, but only time will tell.

And in case you are looking ahead to 2029, all we know beyond the usual order of Ivy League games beginning with Penn on Sept. 29 is that the lone non-conference game that has gone public is a Sept. 25 contest at Towson down in Maryland. That's a makeup for the 2020 game schedule to be played at Towson that did not take place because of COVID. That contest was the back end of a home-and-home with the Tigers that began with a 20-16 in 2016.

Green Alert Take: Dartmouth used to publish "future schedules" on its website, but that has unfortunately gone the way of media guides.

#

Back to Central Connecticut, former Dartmouth wide receiver Isaac Boston '24, who caught a 12-yard touchdown pass against his former team in the Blue Devils' 20-16 loss in Hanover last fall, is getting social media help from his agent as he prepares for his Pro Day. Boston caught 21 passes for 243 yards and five touchdowns for Central last fall and 35 passes for 354 yards and one touchdown in a Dartmouth uniform.

My client, @_iboston WR from @DartmouthFTBL squatting 275. Last week, he ran a 4.44 in his 40 yard dash pretest. We believe that he will be in the 4.3s come his Pro Day on March 25 at @UConnFootball. This man is literally the FLASH! #NFLProspect #NFL #NFLDraftProspect #SportsLaw pic.twitter.com/LFDxKPSQm3

— Matt Tympanick (@TympanickLaw) February 18, 2025

#

EXTRA POINT

We still haven't had a big storm this winter but the never-ending little ones are adding up. I had to strap these puppies on my uh, puppies (?) yesterday to do my daily hike, and I'm here to tell  you it was a ton of work getting to the top of the mountain. At one point my left snowshoe slid off and my leg sunk into snow up to my hip. Pulling it back out getting it onto the snowshoe again was a comedy of errors.

And The Answer Is . . .

This morning BGA posted a note about the missing game on Dartmouth's 2025 football schedule. While head coach Sammy McCorkle said yesterday nothing had been finalized that has now changed.

The Big Green's Sept. 27 opponent will be Central Connecticut per a link shared by a loyal BGA reader. The game is already listed on the Central Connecticut website HERE and the FBS Schedules page HERE.

The game will be played at Central Connecticut's Arute Field, in New Britain, Conn.

Dartmouth and Central Connecticut  have met three times previously, with the Big Green winning each time including last Sept. 20 when Dartmouth won, 20-16.

The Big Green won the first meeting between the teams in 2014 in Hanover, 35-25. The met again the next fall in New Britain and Dartmouth won, 34-7.

Central Connecticut finished 7-6 last year but with a 5-1 Northeast Conference record advanced to the FCS playoffs where the Blue Devils lost, 21-17.

News Of A Sort

When I started at the local daily we were in competition with another daily from just down the road, sometimes with a Vermont daily, always with the network TV affiliate in White River Junction, and even with a local a.m. radio station that did a lot of local sports at the time. And beating The Dartmouth with a story from its own campus was always a goal.

If/when we learned of breaking news in my early days at the paper, and later when I took over the Dartmouth beat, we would confirm it and rush a story to print to try to beat the competition (which we usually did).

These days the local daily is quite often the "day after" paper, the other remaining papers pay no attention to Dartmouth, the TV station was absorbed by another in Burlington and seldom looks this way, local radio has pretty much gone the way of local newspaper and The Dartmouth is a shell of what it was at one time. The Sports Weekly, an independent Dartmouth publication that was by far the toughest competition I had in trying to break news in the mid-'90s, morphed into something much less aggressive and finally disappeared.

All that is by way of telling you there's no pressing need to "break" news on BGA. That being the case, I can share a couple of tidbits today, but still hold a little back out of respect for the individuals involved. Keep reading and you'll know what I mean.

First, I received an email last week informing me that someone of local football interest has landed a new college position. I've chosen not to share more about that quite yet because he hasn't put that information on his own social media, which I check each morning. There's been nothing reported by the school where he's been on staff, or by the school that is bringing him on. I have no doubt the validity of the news I received, but on this platform I can do what I feel most comfortable doing, and that is allowing the individual in question to let the news come out on his timetable.

And that leads me to the next news. Dartmouth has hired a new strength coach to step in for Spencer Brown, who has accepted a position at Rutgers. (Spence hasn't updated his social media to announce his new role, but when I saw Sammy McCorkle I asked if I could post it and he gave me the go ahead.) Dartmouth's new strength coach is still listed on his old school's website and his social media has not been updated, so I'm going to sit on the specifics, apart from sharing that he is coming from a Power 4 football school. I continue to check his social media and the web, and will post the details once the news goes public.

#

A few updates from Sammy McCorkle gleaned by yesterday's Zoom call.

• Dartmouth has not yet  finalized its 2025 football schedule. The Big Green still has a Sept. 27 open date for a non-conference opponent. The other two non-league opponents are New Hampshire (Sept. 20 in Hanover) and Fordham (Oct. 18 in The Bronx). On a Zoom call shortly after the season concluded Athletic Director Mike Harrity suggested the Big Green was close to filling out the schedule, but that hasn't happened yet.

• With new offensive coordinator Shan Montgomery onboard, Dartmouth is currently in the process of interviewing replacements for nickels coach Joe Castellitto, who moved on to UMass, and secondary coach Aashon Larkins, who left for Appalachian State.

• McCorkle reported the Big Green closed out a successful recruiting season with players from 15 states. "We hit every spot that we needed to positionally," he said, noting that "about half the class was completed prior to the start of the (2024) season."

• Dartmouth has 62 players on campus for the winter term, which is about as many as McCorkle could recall since he joined the program in 2005. Per McCorkle, another 20 or so are off in the winter and will be back for the spring term.

• In Brown's absence, Schuyler Harting and Olivia Indorf, both assistant strength and conditioning coaches, "have done a phenomenal job" filling in, said McCorkle.

• Dartmouth will once again hold spring practices Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays starting April 8 and finishing May 10. The 12 sessions allowed by the Ivy League will be spread over five weeks with a break after the second week that will give the coaches the opportunity to do "junior" recruiting and the players a week for recovery.

#

EXTRA POINT

The wind has been howling for two days, creating an interesting pattern on the surface of the snow. What looks a little like an aerial view of the ice flows in the Arctic Circle is actually our field.

Happy Presidents Day

Nice!

Who says the two ball-sport athlete is a dinosaur? Not Dartmouth's Harrison Keith.

The 6-foot, 200-pound sophomore – who started the final two football games of the season last fall at strong safety – made his collegiate debut with the Big Green lacrosse team yesterday, scoring the go-ahead goal with 8:02 remaining as Dartmouth opened its season with a 13-11 win over Bucknell. Watch his goal here:

First collegiate (lacrosse) game ➡️ first collegiate goal for Harrison Keith, which was the game-winner in today’s 13-11 win!

Two-time @IvyLeague champion for @DartmouthFTBL makes his mark in game 1 💪#GoBigGreen | #TheWoods🌲 pic.twitter.com/ud0CPw1WGx

— Dartmouth Men’s Lacrosse (@DartmouthMLax) February 15, 2025

Keith, a Choate product who comes from Fairfield, Conn., had 10 tackles and a pass breakup for the Big Green last year. Find his football bio HERE and his abbreviated lax bio HERE.

#

As an aside, the hero for Dartmouth in its opening game was a transfer. Thomas Power, who scored 66 goals in two seasons at DIII Colorado College, had five goals and two assists in his first DI game.

Green Alert Take: You don't have to take many, but sometimes a transfer can make a big difference. Yale, Princeton and Harvard football have shown that over the years. For the record, Power played his high school lacrosse at Cherry Creek in the Denver suburbs, the same school where running back Pete Oberle '95 played before transferring to Dartmouth from Colorado State and helping the '96 Big Green to an undefeated record. (A little trivia for you. Both of the Big Green's 1995 captains were from Cherry Creek. Oberle was joined in that role by high school teammate Taran Lent, a linebacker.)

#

It's been quite a year for former Dartmouth wide receivers coach Jarrail "JJ" Jackson. Last fall he was named the NAIA Region 5 coach of the year after leading a Texas College team that hadn't had a winning record since 2005 to a 7-3 record, including a 5-3 mark in conference.

Also serving as head baseball coach this spring, Jackson saw the Steers end a 99-game losing streak (you read that right) with a 6-5 win down in Tyler, Texas last Sunday over the Eutectics of the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis. Here's what relief looks like when you avoid a 100-game losing streak:

Big time. Gotta pay big respect to my guy. Associate Head Coach @CoachOvalle for the big win and all the great work and time and effort you put in.. This all you. It was fun you be back out there with you.. https://t.co/U7wJtksFM2

— Coach Jarrail Jackson (@Coach_JJackson2) February 10, 2025

For the record, Texas College's most recent win before last week was 16-3 vs. Tougaloo on March 10, 2020. 

(Thanks to a friend for passing along the information.)

#

From baseball to the hardwood.

Look who is in the photograph SI's NIL Daily website used to illustrate the story: Dartmouth. That was no accident.

From the story (LINK):

On Friday, the Trump administration’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) officially rescinded a 2021 memorandum that classified college athletes as employees under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

And . . .

This comes just weeks after Trump fired Jennifer Abruzzo, the NLRB’s former general counsel, who issued the memorandum and was one of the strongest advocates for college athletes to be granted employee status.

And . . .

Recognizing that the new administration would not be sympathetic to their cause, the Dartmouth players withdrew their petition in December, and the NLRB’s Los Angeles office dropped its case against USC, effectively ending two of the most significant labor challenges in college sports.

#

But that's not the big story for Dartmouth men's basketball this winter. That's coming on the floor where the Big Green stands alone in second place in the Ivy League standings (you read that right) and is in strong position to make the Ivy League tournament for the first time with a 6-3 conference record. (The top four teams play in the tournament.)

Last evening Dartmouth put an 88-49 hurt on Cornell for its fourth-consecutive Ivy League victory and third straight in a rout. After opening the late-season run with a 95-89 win over Columbia, the Big Green had crushed Harvard  (76-56) and Columbia (78-56) before last night's 39-point romp.

The Ivy League standings:

Yale 9-0

Dartmouth  6-3

Princeton 5-4

Cornell 5-4

Brown 4-5

Harvard 4-5

Penn 2-7

Columbia 1-8

Dartmouth's remaining games are at Penn and at Princeton, home against Yale and Brown, and on the road at Harvard. The Big Green is 12-10 overall.

#

EXTRA POINT

Although we haven't had a big storm yet this winter, the snow just keeps coming, day after day. The forecast called for another 5-10 inches today, and it kind of looks like the weather folks got right the way it's coming down.

Here's something you may not realize if you don't live somewhere like this. It isn't the big, beautiful and  fluffy flakes that add up. What I call "department store" snow (because it's the kind of stuff art directors put in store windows at Christmas) doesn't build up. In fact, what might also be called "Hallmark movie" snow is a pretty good sign that either Mother Nature is just putting on a show or the storm is winding down.

The stuff that adds up are the tiny flakes that come straight down for hours and hours, and that's what we are seeing right now.