Are You Ready For Some Football?

While other schools have already finished or are winding down spring football practice, Dartmouth starts its three-week session this afternoon. Good timing.

Contrary to what a writer for the Daily Dartmouth suggested in today's paper ("The weather finally warmed up this weekend, and the Dartmouth baseball team continued to bring the heat ...") yesterday was cold. Brutally, feet-freezingly, hot-shower-when-you-get-home, miserably cold for the stalwarts who sat through a wind-blown doubleheader split with Brown. While the mercury hovered just above freezing, the same could not be said for anyone in the stands.

Ah, but the meteorologist on TV this morning had nothing but good news in store saying this would be "the best week of the year so far." Temperatures each day should be between 50 and 60 degrees with virtually no chance of rain and little chance for clouds. Yup, timing is everything.

Speaking of The D, there was another story headlined, "Empty stands at Dartmouth: Fan culture stagnates despite teams’ successes." Freshman defensive back Chad Hollis told the writer:

“Dartmouth fan culture is really strange because, at most of the games, the student section is pretty docile. At our games, more of the support comes from the town and alumni. We kind of lack that hostile environment that throws off other teams’ games on the field.”

Also from the story:

Alex Rahmann ‘12 noted that football games fail to bring in many Dartmouth students, which she said is most likely due to the team’s repeated losses.

“The stands are usually empty,” she said. “It’s never good when the away stands are louder than the home stands, but to put it delicately, the quality of play is not capable of attracting a large number of fans.”

The story in The D also says, "...(A)lthough the women’s basketball team won the Ivy League this year, making it to the NCAA tournament, the team usually had significantly fewer fans than did the men’s basketball team." That didn't sound quite right to me so I checked the stats and found that the women's team actually outdrew the men's team this year, averaging 892 fans per game to the men's 855.

This will be kind of fun. If you've been following the blog you know that former Dartmouth tailback-turned-lacrosse standout Chad Gaudet is playing lax this spring as a graduate student at Virginia, the No. 1 team in the nation for much of the year. Wanna guess who the Cavaliers play Saturday in a nationally televised game? That's right. It will be Virginia and Gaudet playing against Dartmouth at noon on CBS College Sports Network.

And for those of you who were counting down the days until the spring practice kicked off and are wondering what to count down now, there are 159 days until the 2009 season opens against Colgate on Sept. 19. ;-)

---

Check Big Green Alert premium tonight for full coverage of the first day of spring football.