Closing in on Memorial Field

The new Memorial Field goalposts are finally in place. All systems are go. ...

Coach Buddy Teevens said at practice yesterday that there's an outside chance the team will be on the new Memorial Field surface for today's session. It would be a surprise, but don't rule it out.

For a couple of pictures of the FieldTurf installation at Harvard Stadium, click here. (Caution: these pictures take a l-o-n-g time to load.) There's no getting around it; the crimson lettering is set off very nicely against the green turf. I'd hoped Dartmouth would use a darker turf color in the Memorial Field end zone to help set off the lettering there (and it was in the original plans) but that isn't the case.

Harvard and Columbia are scrimmaging against each other. Interesting. And it will be closed to the public, unlike Dartmouth's scrimmages against Brown and Columbia in years past.

Sounds as if Jay Fiedler won't be ready for the opener in Tampa Bay. Coach Jon Gruden told the Bradenton paper: "The No. 1 thing is to make sure we have rehabbed him properly. We don't want him to have a setback in fairness to Jay and his career. He is making progress. We'll have to make some kind of decision here soon."

A subscriber (and former Dartmouth football manager) who helped out in the Tampa Bay Bucs one summer sent along this link to a hilarious and entertaining story about the demise of the team's peculiar old training facility, One Buc Place. There's some incredible stuff in there including a few anecdotes from John Idzik '82, a former Dartmouth player who used to be in the Bucs' front office and is now senior director of football operations for the Arizona Cardinals. Idzik is one of at least three Dartmouth alums who worked (or still work) for Tampa Bay, which got me to thinking I ought to link to what they are doing now.

To learn more about Idzik, click here. In the first year of his second stint at Tampa Bay is Kevin Demoff. He is a senior assistant who works in contract negotiations, salary cap management, scouting, strategic planning and salary cap forecasting. Former Dartmouth safety Lloyd Lee used to scout for the Bucs but now is a defensive assistant for the Chicago Bears.

At practice I met subscriber-parents from Austin, Texas, and told them about former linebacker Gordy Quist, who has become popular on the local music scene in that musically interested city. Here's a link to Gordy's home page. ... If you'd rather just skip ahead and hear a little of his music, here's a sampler from The Ballad of Gordy Quist. Don't worry, it plays quickly on your computer. I'm no expert, but the guy is g-o-o-d. (I did a story on Gordy and his former band several years ago for the newspaper.)

Gordy Quist publicity photo