Bring On PSU. No, Not THAT PSU

There's a nicely done column in the Daily Dartmouth about the college's lack of a natural rival and the writer pretty much nailed it. As much as Dartmouth folks like to portray Harvard as their natural rival, and for as much as Harvard really does seem to enjoy trying to eat the Big Green's lunch, the Crimson's big rival is, has always been, and will always be Yale.

Realizing the obvious -- that a logical candidate for a genuine rivalry doesn't exist -- the Daily Dartmouth writer puts tongue firmly in cheek and creates one: New Hampshire's Keene State.

My only quibble is that he picked the wrong Division III school. He should have gone with Plymouth State because unlike Keene State, Plymouth State actually has a football team.
And because:

• Plymouth State pushed Dartmouth off the front page of the sports section in 1985 when it had a running back by the name of Joe Dudek who finished ninth in the Heisman Trophy balloting. (True story.)
  
• Plymouth State had the audacity to missappropriate the color green for its school color.
• While Plymouth State was going 75-11 between 1981-88 it had the audacity to nickname its defense the Green Wall!
• The Plymouth State Panthers actually have better nickname than the Big Green. (I'm not crazy about the Keene State's Owl.)
  

So Plymouth State gets my vote. And it has nothing to do with the fact that when the school changed from Plymouth State College to Plymouth State University a few years ago they started calling it PSU. Sorry Plymouth State, but there's only one PSU. Ditto to you, Portland State.

An aside: Since leaving eastern football behind to join the Big Ten, Penn State has the same problem as Dartmouth. The season-ending, rivalry game is against Michigan State. Boy, that one really gets my juices going. To quote Wayne, or perhaps it was Garth: "Not." For a Penn Stater there will never be anything like that regular-season ending game against Pitt at Thanksgiving. I've still got a button with a slogan from that game that said it all, written in gold on blue in Pitt's familiar script. (Sorry, I can't report what the button said in a family blog other than to tell you the first word rhymed with Pitt but had an extra t on it and the second word was "on.")

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The Ivy League site reports the death of the oldest surviving NFL player, Sam Dana, who was a Columbia teammate of Lou Gehrig before going on to play one year of pro football. He was 104. ...

The College Sporting News has the latest Gridiron Power Index up. There are 122 schools in the hybrid ranking. Dartmouth is 68th. The ranking for the Big Green and its opponents:

8 New Hampshire
12 Yale
T-20 Holy Cross
28 Harvard
38 Colgate
54 Cornell
64 Brown
68 Dartmouth
80 Princeton
82 Penn
110 Columbia

Continuing with the ratings game, here's how the venerable Jeff Sagarin sees Dartmouth and the Ivies among all Division I teams:

87 Yale
89 New Hampshire
112 Holy Cross
139 Harvard
154 Colgate
171 Cornell
184 Brown
192 Dartmouth
197 Princeton
201 Pennsylvania
228 Columbia

Water polo? The Green Alert blog is going to link to a water polo story? Yup, because it isn't often when a Dartmouth player has a twin brother playing a varsity sport at another school. That Dartmouth player is freshman Spencer Hood. His twin, Gordon, scored two goals for the No. 19 Brown water polo team in a 10-7 victory over Mercyhurst. He gets a mention in a story in the Brown Daily Herald.

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Another reminder that Saturday's game against Cornell will be available on the YES Network, channel 622 on DirecTV. YES is part of the DirecTV Sports Pack.

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