No Scrimmage; JV Schedule Released

As was the case last year, Dartmouth will not be holding an outside scrimmage before the start of the 2006 season. Under coach John Lyons, Dartmouth scrimmaged Columbia at prep schools in Connecticut for a handful of years and later worked out against Brown at Exeter, N.H.. There was even a home scrimmage against Plymouth State one year. When Buddy Teevens took over as coach last year, he called off a previously scheduled scrimmage against Brown, explaining that he preferred not to show his hand to a future opponent. That feeling apparently hasn't changed. Green Alert Take: It was always kind of fun to go to the scrimmage and see the young kids play, but the lack of an outside scrimmage last year apparently didn't hurt preparation for the opener. Dartmouth ended up beating Colgate anyway.

The 2006 Dartmouth junior varsity schedule has been released. (I'll be at all the games as the unofficial official statistician again this fall and will be posting stats and capsule stories on the games the same evening on the regular web site.)

The 2006 Dartmouth JV schedule:
(All games are in Hanover)
9/17 Middlebury 1 p.m.
10/8 Milford Academy 2 p.m.
10/27 Harvard 2 p.m.
11/12 Bridgton Noon

The Carolina Panthers' first preseason game was a good news/bad news scenario for former Dartmouth tight end Casey Cramer in his bid to return to the NFL team for a third season. The converted fullback caught two passes for 28 yards. That was the good news. The bad news: He was ruled to have fumbled away one of the receptions after an official review.

Allen Lessels of the Manchester Union Leader has a nice story about Ricky Santos and David Ball, the dynamic UNH duo. Allen calls it, "The Legend of Ricky-David," a takeoff on the name (and theme) of the popular movie. The story begins this way:

Well, this is the story -- no, The Legend -- of Ricky-David. The tall tale of a couple of small-town football players who come out of nowhere and get their chance and, seemingly overnight, turn their team into the most prodigiously productive, and one of the highest-ranked, in all the land.
Ricky Santos and David Ball. David Ball and Ricky Santos.

The Sports Network handicaps the A-10 race and also throws a little love UNH's way. Matt Dougherty makes the valid point that the Wildcats got lucky with Santos and Ball, hardly top recruits. It reminds me of Casey Cramer, who was almost an afterthought in his recruiting class at Dartmouth. Whatever happened to him?

In a column on CBS SportsLine.com Dennis Dodd writes that the change from I-A and I-AA football to Football Bowl Division and Football Championship Division came about because, "Sniveling I-AA officials thought their division had become stigmatized." He's right, but he's also wrong. There was indeed a stigma attached to the I-AA label, but not with regard to football. Schools with I-AA football but that played Division I basketball were being portrayed as I-AA schools. In fact, while the football programs were I-AA, their basketball programs were Division I, period.

Gonna change sports here for a second. You may have heard (or will hear, I'd venture to say) about the Vermont-New Hampshire Little League baseball championship game Friday. Vermont was winning the contest in the final inning but neglected to play one player as required by Little League rules. When they realized their mistake in the last half inning, the Vermont coaches instructed their pitcher to throw intentional balls and their fielders to make mistakes so that the Green Mountain team could tie the score and force extra innings, thereby giving the player who hadn't yet appeared in the game a chance to get on the field. The New Hampshire coach, once he figured out what was happening, instructed his team to swing and miss on purpose to end the game.

My first reaction was that it was pretty dumb that the Vermont coaches hadn't been paying more attention to their substitution pattern, and to hold them to blame both for that mistake and for the instructions to their players upon realizing their mistake. But this column opened my eyes to the idea that maybe the New Hampshire coach was even more at fault. What do you think?

And finally this: Tubestock, Chicago style. The outlawed Connecticut River party, replaced this year by Fieldstock, has a successor on Lake Michigan.