Feeling Right At Home

The forecast in Princeton today:

Partly cloudy with a 30 percent chance of snow showers. Brisk with highs in the upper 30s. Northwest winds 15 to 20 mph.

If may feel a little chilly in the stands, but after this week on the practice field in Hanover it will be almost balmy for the players.

Thanks to an Alert reader for pointing out something on the future Dartmouth football schedules that I had missed. Starting in 2011 the home-road rotation will see the venue of the Penn and Yale games switched. After the change, Penn will be a road game when Brown and Harvard are on the road. Yale when Columbia, Cornell and Princeton are road games.

To achieve the switch, Dartmouth will play host to Penn in 2011 and 2012 and travel to Yale both years.

That switch brings about two improvements:

• First, it softens the "even years" travel burden a bit. Instead of traveling to Columbia, Cornell, Princeton and Penn in the same year, it will be Columbia, Cornell, Princeton and Yale.
  

• Second, it's a plus from a marketing perspective to have the Yale and Harvard games at home in alternating years. While having two of the bigger draws in Hanover in even years can help attendance, having neither at Memorial Field has made the odd-numbered years less appealing on the schedule.

Speaking of which, the non-league opponents starting in 2012: TBA, TBA and TBA. But don't be surprised if there isn't a change before then he whispered quietly. ...

Jake Novak over at Roar Lions Roar in his weekly predictions about the Dartmouth-Princeton finale:

...(Y)ou have to lean towards the Tigers because they are at home and they have a great runner in Jordan Culbreath. But with 0-10 staring them in the face, the Big Green will give Princeton a fight.

Even ESPN's Chris Fowler has noticed the Ivy League could, that's could, finish in a four-way tie this year. He writes:

You probably have not spent much time pondering the convoluted scenarios in Chris Berman's beloved Ivy League. But it is possible that four teams could share the crown at 5-2.

The value of the UNH game to Dartmouth is dubious. If you believe The Sports Network, it's not so valuable for UNH either. Not this year, at least:

Many feel that even with a New Hampshire loss to the Black Bears, the Wildcats are already comfortably in the 16-team field. However, with a weak non- conference slate that includes wins over the likes of Dartmouth and fledgling FBS Army, the prospects of a playoff bid aren't written in stone with a New Hampshire.

My how times have changed. In a Boston Globe story about Harvard's 29-29 "win" over Yale in 1968, Crimson captain Vic Gatto is quoted saying:

"Dartmouth was the team we loved to hate back then. The Yale guys seemed so much like us."

The Globe also has a story about the Kennedys and Harvard football on this 45th anniversary of the JFK assassination.