Honoring The Champions

Four more Dartmouth football teams that won Ivy League titles will be celebrated this fall:

• The 1978 team quarterbacked by one Eugene F. "Buddy" Teevens will be honored on Sept. 27, the afternoon of the UNH game.
• The 1958 team, whose leading rusher was one John "Jake" Crouthamel, will be feted on Oct. 11, when the Big Green takes on Yale.
• The 1966 team that finished in a rare three-way tie for the crown will be honored on Nov. 1, when Dartmouth plays Harvard.
• The 1990 team that won the first of two Ivy championships under coach Buddy Teevens will be recognized on Nov. 15 when the Big Green plays Brown.

Additionally, all former Dartmouth teams will be celebrated on Oct. 18 when the Green hosts Holy Cross for Homecoming.

Oh, and please don't ask why Homecoming is against Holy Cross instead of Yale or Harvard. While many of you – most of you? – would probably prefer Homecoming be against Harvard, that is not a football decision and is not made by the athletic department.

One plus about having Homecoming against Holy Cross: It should help what has the potential to be a pretty good year for home attendance. That's because ...

... The Memorial Field season opens with New Hampshire. While UNH doesn't exactly get blood racing among the locals, it has an appeal to some people around the state and usually sees a slightly better-than-usual crowd in the visiting stands. Sandwiched around Homecoming, Yale and Harvard should both be pretty good this fall and both have natural drawing power in Hanover. That leaves only the Memorial Field finale against Brown lacking any special appeal – unless, of course, the Big Green happens to be in the running for the title.

The Sporting News is carrying a story on Dartmouth alum/SEC commissioner Mike Slive '62 and his push for a "plus-one" championship model in major college football. The story is built around the playoff idea, but it is a throw-away note late in the story about something else that caught my eye:

Slive's vow to have the SEC probation-free within five years hasn't quite panned out. But Mississippi State and South Carolina's 5-year probation periods end in June, and only Arkansas' men's track team is currently under sanctions.

The old joke about SEC standing for "Surely Everybody's Cheating" isn't heard so much anymore.

If you know Mike Slive and his reputation, you might be tempted to say, "I told you so."

Reading that story, by the way, sent me scurrying back to the web where I found a thoroughly entertaining ESPN story about Slive from last fall that you absolutely should not miss. The day-in-the-life of the commish (a game day, of course) includes an anecdote that Slive has probably told many times, but for some reason I'd not seen before. From the story:

You might not guess it, but the small, trim man was a college athlete. He arrived at Dartmouth as a quarterback but switched to lacrosse and lettered three years after an unmistakable hint from the football coach.

"We had 20 quarterbacks and 19 centers," he says. "When we lined up and I was the one without a center, I knew I was in trouble."

Hilarious. The ESPN story, by the way, introduced Slive this way:

When the SEC hired Slive away from Conference USA in 2002, many people wondered how a Jewish lawyer with an Ivy League diploma and a New York birth certificate was going to mesh with a brass-knuckles league in the Bible Belt.

They're not wondering anymore.

Former Dartmouth assistant coach Don Brown has had a lot of success as head coach at Massachusetts, where he once served as an assistant to former Brown QB and coach Mark Whipple. Now it appears the Don Brown-Whipple relationship will go to another level as Whipple's son, Spencer is apparently transferring from Pitt to UMass. So says this story. ... Donny Brown, incidentally, has a glittering 88-40 record as a college head coach.

And finally this ... Did you catch the Celtics-Lakers game last night? Pretty good one, was it? I wouldn't know. My kids woke up this morning and asked me who won. I had to fire up the Mac to find out.

Apart from the game being on too late for those of us with sleepy eyes on the East Coast, the problem here on Moose Mountain was once again with our satellite dish. See, our TV picture breaks up or freezes when we have rain – even the hint of rain will do it – or wind. No kidding, I tried watching last night but Paul Pierce would put up a shot and with the ball in midair the picture would f-f-f-freeze. Sometimes it would come back with the teams running up the court, at which point I would try to read the score before the screen froze again to see if the shot went in.

Worse yet, the picture might freeze (or disappear completely) for 3-4-5 minutes. I'm not a big fan of the NBA or either team, but it got so frustrating that I found myself wishing I could end-over-end the clicker right into the screen.

We'd ditch the satellite for much-more dependable cable (with Internet capability) in a New York minute, but as they say down in Mike Slive's country, that dawg don't hunt. I spent part of Wednesday morning down in the town office with a handful of others from rural Hanover meeting with people from a cable giant for the third time to talk about getting cable/broadband Internet service out our way. To the credit of the cable people, they listened patiently to our pleading and didn't laugh. Nor, of course, did they give us any hope that it would happen. Not on their dime, anyway.