Harvard QB Back For Dartmouth

To the surprise of no one, Liam O'Hagan will make his first start at quarterback when Harvard visits Dartmouth Saturday. O'Hagan, suspended for the first five games this fall, entered the Princeton game last week in the second quarter. Talking about what O'Hagan brings to the table, Harvard coach Tim Murphy told the Crimson: “All things being equal, you ask any defensive coordinator, you get two guys of basically somewhat equal ability, and one guy can make plays with his feet … it’s tougher to defend. It’s a dimension that’s more intangible.” ... O'Hagan, by the way, outgained Clifton Dawson on the ground in three quarters last week at Princeton.

The Dartmouth Sports Information advance story on the game can be found here.

Harvard's game notes have been posted. Click here for the PDF file. From the notes: "... Harvard head coach Tim Murphy will try to defeat one of his closest friends in Dartmouth head coach Buddy Teevens. The two head coaches were classmates and teammates at Silver Lake High School in Kingston, Mass., and were assistants together at Boston University from 1982-84. Teevens hired Murphy has his offensive coordinator when the former was named head coach at Maine in 1985, and Murphy succeeded Teevens as Black Bear head coach in 1987.

There's an interesting story in the Columbia Spectator about athletes who quit playing at the New York school as well as at other Ivies. The well-written piece was pulled together by a former walk-on kicker who quickly realized he'd made a mistake giving the college game a shot, but agonized about the decision to walk away. The next time you criticize someone who gives up a sport, think about this sentence from the story: "... (S)ports teams can easily absorb the defection of one player, but one young man cannot readily retrieve four years of an unhappy life." ... The story is particularly timely given the decision by Columbia's backup quarterback to leave the team after being passed on the depth chart. Find that story here.

The Gridiron Power Index (GPI) coordinated by I-AA.org collects rankings from various polls and combines them into what it bills as the "top indicator of at-large playoff selection." Although Ivy teams aren't going on to the playoffs, the GPI still ranks them and the results can offer an indication of how the teams are viewed nationally. The latest rankings can be found here. Here's how the Ivies and Dartmouth's opponents rank among the 122 I-AA programs in the latest GPI index:

11. Princeton
18. Harvard
24. Yale
35. Penn
64. Brown
75. Cornell
83. Columbia
84. Dartmouth

9. New Hampshire
36. Holy Cross
57. Colgate

Whether you like the NFL, the Giants or the Bucs, you'll enjoy this New York Times story about twins Tiki and Ronde Barber.

And finally, a change of pace. I sometimes laugh about what friends from metropolitan areas must think when they take a look at our local paper and see big splash stories about things like cow tipping. (This slide show about cow tipping is actually pretty interesting; be sure to turn on the captions.) Well, I'd bet a few Dartmouth students will grimace when their Ivy friends tease them about this story in the Daily D. Here's the "nug graf" as they say in the journalism business:

"As anecdotal evidence suggests that the skunk population in Hanover has increased, the skunks have reportedly been hitting all the campus hot-spots, including the entrance of Thayer dining hall, the steps of Baker-Berry library, the bushes behind La Casa, the dumpster by the Gap, the McLaughin Residence Cluster and even the occasional School Street apartment."