Tough Just Officially Got Tougher

It was something of a throw-away line in a story about Holy Cross football coach Tom Gilmore, but it was bad news for Dartmouth and Patriot League football teams. From the Worcester Telegram:

Gilmore will be back with the Crusaders in 2009 and so will star quarterback Dominic Randolph. The Patriot League approved the player’s application for a medical redshirt and the Holy Cross record-setter will return for a fifth season.

Gilmore, of course, is the former Dartmouth defensive coordinator who was believed to be one of the finalists for the vacant head coaching position at Yale. Word broke yesterday that he has withdrawn his name from consideration for the job, which remains unfilled.

Randolph is Gilmore's senior quarterback, who injured an ankle in the first half of his first junior varsity game and didn't play again that season.

With the Patriot League approving his petition for a final year, Dartmouth's traditionally tough first half of the season just got that much tougher.

How has Randolph fared against Dartmouth the past three years?

• 2006 20-32, 259 yards, 1 TD, 0 int in a 24-21 win
  
• 2007 24-35, 298 yards, 2 TD, 0 int. in a 41-15 win
• 2008 33-45, 391 yards, 2 TD, 2 int. in a 44-26 win
  

Add it up and he's completed 77-of-112 passes (68.8 percent) for 948 yards, five touchdowns and two interceptions against the Big Green. Randolph, by the way, just won the George “Bulger” Lowe Award as the Division I Player of the Year in New England. He finished ninth in the balloting for the Walter Payton Award as the nation's top offensive player in the FCS.

With Colgate having taken the wraps off of Patriot League Rookie of the Year Nate Eachus (872 rushing yards and 10 TDs after moving over from linebacker), New Hampshire being New Hampshire and Penn having the most All-Ivy players in the league returning those first three games next fall will certainly be a challenge. What Yale will look like in Game 4 is anybody's guess (but the game is at New Haven, which won't help the Dartmouth cause) and then it's off to Holy Cross for another look at Randolph.

There are Dartmouth bashers who think Big Green sympathizers talk too much about the difficulty of the early season schedule but no matter how you slice it, that's clearly not an easy first five games.

Returning star players is no guarantee of success, of course, something Dartmouth fans should know. The Big Green won a share of the title in 1992 with Jay Fiedler completing 64.1 percent of his passes. He came back as a senior and saw his completion percentage plummet to 49.8 as the Big Green finished a strong second in the Ivy but did not repeat.

Still, it's better to have star players returning than not have them returning and clearly, Colgate, UNH (quarterback RJ Toman, tight end Scott Sicko) and Penn have plenty of firepower back in the fold.

Sicko, by the way, was named to the Associated Press All-America first team. Other players Dartmouth faced this year who were honored by the AP included second-teamers Bobby Abare (Yale linebacker) and Nick Hennessey (Colgate offensive line) and third-teamers James Williams (Harvard offensive line) and Andrew Samson (Penn kicker).

This is kind of silly. Someone on eBay is offering a "vintage 70's" Dartmouth football jersey starting at $29.99. Before you bid on it (which no one has as of this morning) take a good look. Unless I'm mistaken, that's not a game jersey at all, but one of the "class numeral" shirts that freshmen wear to the first football game. And if that's the case, this "70's" jersey is from 1987 because that's the numeral.

And finally, I'm working on a freelance story about Dartmouth basketball forward Alex Barnett, a truly remarkable player who last night went over 1,000 points in his career. The silky 6-6 senior is averaging 21.4 points and 5.1 rebounds per game for the 2-6 Big Green. (Those numbers would have been even higher if he'd played more than 23 minutes in Sunday's win over Division III Plymouth State.) But the reason I mention this isn't Barnett. It's because there were 317 people at the men's basketball game against Quinnipiac at Leede Arena and 807 for the women's ice hockey game against Harvard. Granted, the women's hockey team is No. 3 in the nation and Harvard, is Harvard. That's great for the women's hockey team. But are you kidding me?