Playing The Recruiting Lottery

Say this for Dartmouth: It's getting mail into some interesting hands. There's a story in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about Michael Dyer, a 5-9, 190-pound running back timed at 4.37 for the 40. How good is the high school junior? From the story:

CBS College Sports national recruiting analyst Tom Lemming, who hosts the weekly Max Preps Lemming Report and helps pick players for the annual U.S. All-American game in San Antonio, rates Dyer as one of the top three junior running backs in the nation.

The story goes on to say:

He already has scholarship offers from Arkansas, Alabama, Ole Miss, Tulsa and Stanford and has drawn interest from Oregon, Florida, LSU, Georgia Tech, UCLA, Oklahoma and others.

Kansas State sent him nine letters. In one day!

Why is he mentioned here? Because Dyer lives with an uncle who told the newspaper:

... what makes him the most proud in the recruiting process, though, isn't the letters Dyer has received from big-time football programs, but those he's gotten from Ivy League schools Harvard, Dartmouth and Princeton.

Will a kid like that come to Harvard, Dartmouth or Princeton in this day and age? Probably not. But for the cost of a stamp the three schools got noticed, and then you never know. Think of the lottery. You probably aren't going to win but you definitely won't win if you don't play the game. (Which I don't, but you get the idea ... ;-)

Gordon Morton, the former assistant sports information director at Dartmouth and a Brown alum, has a profile of Bear football coach Phil Estes in the Brown Alumni Magazine. The story begins this way:

One of these seasons the pundits are going to figure it out. Last fall, they chose the Brown football team to finish third in the league. Instead, the Bears won their second Ivy championship in four years and their third since 1999. What did all these teams have in common? Head Coach Phil Estes, who has been gradually putting up numbers that make him arguably the best football coach in the school's history.

Morton writes about Estes ...

... winning fifty games more quickly than any coach in Brown history, even the legendary John Anderson, who led the Bears from 1973 to 1983 and coached them to their first Ivy title in 1976.

In addition, thanks to Estes's versatile offensive approach, his teams scored 1,000 points faster than those of any coach in Ivy League football history. In Estes's first thirty-two games as head coach, his teams scored 1,022 points, for an average of 31.9 points per game. Overall, Estes has posted a 66–43 record (a .605 winning percentage) and an Ivy League mark of 47–29 (.618). No one in modern Brown football history has been able to approach this level of success.

A case can be made that five of the 10 schools Dartmouth plays have the best coach they've had in the modern age. I'm not saying they are the best, but you can at least make the argument for the following coaches:

• Tim Murphy, Harvard (15 years, 97-52, .650, 5 Ivy titles)
  
• Phil Estes, Brown (11 years, 66-43, .606, 3 Ivy titles)
  
• Al Bagnoli, Penn (17 years, 114-54, .679, 6 Ivy titles)
  
• Dick Biddle, Colgate (13 years, 104-49, .679, most wins in school history)
  
• Sean McDonnell, UNH (10 years, 70-50, .583, five consecutive NCAA appearances)
  

McDonnell's career record isn't on a par with the others, or even with predecessor Bill Bowes (175-106, .621), but he's certainly brought the Wildcats to previously unattained heights.

Speaking of UNH, if you haven't seen Cowell Stadium where the Wildcats play, you haven't missed much. While UNH has grown into a national powerhouse, its 8,000-seat home hasn't kept pace. The addition of FieldTurf helps, but its hard to imagine how McDonnell and his staff recruit players who look on one side of the street and see ice hockey's fabulous Whittemore Center and on the other side of the street see a glorified New Hampshire high school football field. (That's a glorified New Hampshire high school field.)

There's been talk since UNH football became a regular visitor to the NCAA playoffs and started winning at places like Northwestern, Rutgers, Marshall and Army of building a new stadium. Unfortunately for UNH, there's that little problem of money and not enough of it. If you are curious about what they might build if the money comes available, check out these UNH football stadium expansion drawings.

Someone whose opinion I respect has wondered if UNH might do what UConn did and build a stadium where the people live – in Manchester. It's an interesting thought. While an off-campus venue might be problematic for students, the majority of fans at a UNH game are not students. If you are wondering what such a facility might do for attendance, consider that when Dartmouth and UNH men's hockey teams skated against each other in the Riverstone Cup at Manchester's Verizone Wireless Arena last night (a 6-4 UNH win) there were 8,001 in the stands. Last year the game drew 8,654. Two years ago it was 9,640. In 2004 there were 10,104 at the game. A football stadium in Manchester – built in concert with a corporate sponsor or perhaps the city – could be used by high schools on Friday nights, for concerts and community events in the summer, and might just work.

It was noted here last week that Columbia would be playing Central Connecticut in football next fall. Chuck Burton over at the College Sporting News had a recap of the CCSU season with a factoid that I found interesting. He wrote that the NAACP Harmony Classic game between Central Connecticut and North Carolina Center was "the best attended game in NEC history (announced attendance: 8,522 fans)..."

There's no doubt that schools like Albany (9-3), Sacred Heart (8-3), Monmouth (7-4) and CCSU (7-4) are making strides on the field since the introduction of scholarships. Still, it was shocking to learn that a crowd of 8,522 was the largest in conference history when Harvard, Penn, Yale and Princeton averaged more than that per game this year.