Friday, October 03, 2008

Penn-Dartmouth Heating Up

Penn coach Al Bagnoli had a revealing comment in today's Daily Pennsylvanian. Said the dean of Ivy League coaches:
"This is one of the younger Dartmouth teams that I've seen. They're pretty athletic … (but) we hope to exploit some of those young, inexperienced characteristics."
Dartmouth tri-captain and offensive lineman Alex Rapp told it like it is in the Dartmouth Dartmouth preview:
“I think we’ll move the ball down the field well, but the key this week, when we get to the red zone, is to finish drives with six points, and not three.”
The Manchester Union Leader has a brief note about the Dartmouth-Penn game here.

Not much in the way of predictions around the Ivies this week (probably a good thing given how last week's games went). The Harvard Crimson's pick: Penn 30, Dartmouth 10.

Speaking of Penn, former Dartmouth sports information director Jack DeGange, now the unofficial historian of Big Green sports, passes along a humorous addendum to yesterday's blog item (Oct. 6, 1956: Penn snaps a 19-game home losing streak at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, beating Dartmouth 14-7 in Quakers first official Ivy League game. Big Green quarterback Mike Brown [future Cincinnati Bengals owner] accounts for Dartmouth's only score.) Jack writes:
Before Leverone Field House was built (1962), football team practiced on that footprint...there was no fence between football practice and fall baseball practice (on current baseball field)...It was Tony Lupien's first year at Dartmouth and he was building his 1957 team. This exchange unfolded:

A baseball player (unconfirmed but Ralph Manuel, later the Dean of College, says he was the batter) hit a ball that rolled into the middle of football practice.

Bob Blackman, in his second year at Dartmouth, picked up the ball, threw it back toward the baseball field and yelled, "Hey, Tony, the baseball season is over."

Lupe's reply: "Hey, Bob, so's the Penn losing streak."
In the words of Sammy Davis Jr., "Ouch, babe."

A couple of alums of the Dartmouth and Penn football programs are in the news. ESPN.com's Ivan Maisel writes:
"U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the man struggling to shepherd a Wall Street bailout through Congress, is showing the same tenacity in Washington that he demonstrated as an All-Ivy League offensive lineman at Dartmouth 40 years ago. So says Jake Crouthamel, the retired Syracuse athletic director who served as the top defensive assistant on Paulson's teams."
Excerpts from a New York Times story about Chicago Cubs utility man Mark DeRosa:
DeRosa, 33, is the major leagues’ only former all-Ivy League quarterback and the only player with a degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

When DeRosa stood out enough as a student, quarterback and shortstop in high school that Wharton accepted him, the DeRosas decided to forgo full athletic scholarships elsewhere and cut corners for a top education.

“I never saw myself as an Ivy League guy,” said DeRosa, who later led Penn to a 9-0 record and league football championship in 1994. “I wanted to play both sports in college, so when Penn started recruiting me for football, it opens your parents’ eyes.” ...

DeRosa’s eyes remained on the major leagues throughout college, though. One day, he sat with a half-dozen housemates as each described their plans for after graduation — work on Wall Street, go to law school, run a start-up business. DeRosa and one other said they were going to be professional athletes, for which their gumption was roundly hazed.

The other was Jim Finn, the Giants’ starting fullback from 2003 through 2006.
The Philadelphia Inquirer writes about the former Quaker:
At Penn, DeRosa received much more notice in these parts as a quarterback, going 16-3 as a starter and leading the Quakers to the 1994 Ivy League title.
A certain blogger's wife almost has to be restrained from throwing the remote control at the TV when a former athlete-turned-broadcaster says, "He should have ran left," or "If he would have went right ..." That blogger has his own pet peeves, one of which he committed yesterday when he headlined a story with an "It's" instead of an "Its." Fortunately a reader gently pointed out the mistake that said blogger fixed before banging his head against the wall a few times.

But I digress. Today's pet peeve comes out of the Patriot League where the headline is: Colgate-Georgetown Football Game Has Been Cancelled.

Turns out there was an outbreak of something called norovirus on the Georgetown campus.

The problem is that under the headline saying that the game was "cancelled," comes this line: "A make up date has not been reached at this time."

OK folks, listen up. If a game is cancelled it will not be played. Period. If it is postponed, it will be played unless it is later cancelled.

And while I've got your attention, you can't have a "first annual" anything. And while you can "break a record in the mile," you can't set a "new record for the mile" unless there isn't an old record. ... Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Actually, one final note about the Georgetown-Colgate game that "has been postponed and sounds as if it may well be cancelled," again courtesy of Jack DeGange. He writes:
G-town reminds of 1969 Holy Cross-Dartmouth.

It was second game of season for both, also played on October 4. Dartmouth won, 38-6. After game it was determined that many HC players were victims of hepatitis. HC cancelled all remaining games on 1969 schedule. The illness was traced to a water faucet at the HC practice field.
If you are wondering how the three players Dartmouth faces this year who are in the hunt for the Payton Award are doing, you can find their current game-by-game stats and head shots by clicking on their names:
McLeod and ScottRandolph meet up tomorrow in New Haven and if McLeod doesn't do something spectacular this week and next in Hanover, look for him to disappear when the revised Payton list is posted soon.

Remember Sean Jellison, the UNH back who had TD runs of 4 and 16 yards in the first quarter against Dartmouth last week? He has a younger brother named Steve, a 245-pound junior fullback at New Hampshire's Souhegan High School. From Seacoastonline:
"Souhegan coach Mike Beliveau said Harvard, Dartmouth and Princeton have shown interest in Jellison, who has also received letters from Stanford, Notre Dame and Princeton."
Later today on Green Alert Premium: Fearful Forecast and the Dartmouth-Penn preview.

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