Are You Ready For Some Football?

It's been a long time coming, but the Dartmouth football team will be on the field this afternoon, starting with a walk-through at 3:45. No pads yet by NCAA rules. Full coverage tonight on BGA premium.

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Stop the presses. Someone finally picked Dartmouth to finish other than eighth in the Ivy League race. That honor (?) goes to Cornell. In the very thorough FCS Yearbook, available for download here, writer Chuck Burton projects the Ivy League to finish this way:

1. Harvard
2. Penn
3. Brown
4. Princeton
5. Yale
6. Columbia
7. Dartmouth
8. Cornell

Chuck includes Dartmouth in just one of his Ivy League games of the year, the Oct. 24 meeting with Columbia at Memorial Field. Chuck writes:

Both teams have to be circling this game on the calendar as a “must-win” in this 80th meeting. Dartmouth holds an amazing 61-17-1 lead in the series, but Columbia has won six of the last 11 games, including a 21-13 triumph last year.

Speaking of Oct. 24, Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens will be the featured guest in the Saturday Morning Playbook series at Alumni Hall (Hopkins Center) from 9-10 a.m. that day. It would appear that this series, featuring acting AD Bob Ceplikas before the football opener against Colgate on Sept. 19, will replace the Hanover Huddle that used to have Teevens each week.

Back to the polls, Cornell's Daily Sun has a story about the official Ivy League media poll that predicted a sixth-place finish for the Big Red.

Cornell, by the way, has launched a YouTube channel. There's a story about the channel here or you can sidestep the story and just access the channel here.

Green Alert Take: All the "in house" video services provided by the various colleges is nice, but if you want to get word out to the bigger world, tapping the YouTube audience seems to make a lot of sense. Kudos to Cornell for taking the leap.

Which brings us the long way around to a video of a tennis exhibition being held on the real grass of the Yale Bowl. There's a brief report about it on the Portal 31 blog and you can find the video here. It's a well-done piece that shows off The Bowl and coach Tom Williams doing a nice acting job complaining about a tennis court replacing his field. Again, toss that one up on YouTube and more people will see it.

Billy VandeMerkt, a quarterback at Riverside-Brookfield High in California, "is considering Dartmouth, Cornell, Army and a couple of Division II schools ..." according to this story. Last year VandeMerkt ran the bizarre A-11 offense. For a little info on that innovative offense, check out this link to last year's Green Alert blog.

Popular former Dartmouth assistant Matthew Smiley is now special teams coordinator at Eastern Illinois and there's a story here. Anyone who remembers Smiley, who came to Dartmouth when Buddy Teevens returned four years ago, will smile at this lede:

At Eastern football practice it is not uncommon to hear coaches yell. But one particular voice can be heard booming over all the others this season.

"Field goal one! Field goal one! Kick return two!" Or names such as "Weatherford! Austin! Cook!" These are just a few of the things that can be heard booming on the sidelines of O'Brien Field on a daily basis.

The voice belonged of course to Smiley, who told the writer:

"Dartmouth was my first opportunity to coordinate the special teams and it gave me a great chance to learn," Smiley said. "In an Ivy League institution the recruiting is different, there are some class concerns and stipulations to get in school are different because it's obviously very highly academic. That was something that really helped me to reinforce that it is a 'student-athlete.'"

Find Matthew Smiley's Eastern Illinois bio here.

Dartmouth has scheduled a game with Butler of the Pioneer Football League and has spoken with PFL member Drake about a game. On the off chance that the Patriot League goes scholarship in the near future, there could be more Ivy-Pioneer League contests. The Missoulian writes about the Pioneer Football League:

"There is an investment in travel," league commissioner Patty Viverito said, "but I think you'll find that in every other aspect of the program, it's far less expensive than any other model."

The PowerLine blog has a few thoughts and links to other opinions on the appointment of the acting dean at Dartmouth. This blog has never been much for the politics of the college and doesn't intend to be, but I thought to pass along at least one non-institutional viewpoint.

And finally, today is the first day of school in Hanover and this morning we shot the annual "waiting for the bus," and "get on the bus" photos at the end of the driveway. Hard to believe that it will be the last one with the two kids, but time marches on. That certain Hanover junior senior got another invitation for an "official visit" by a college yesterday and seemed pleased with the school. She's training away with the powerhouse Hanover cross country team these days. That certain freshman sophomore is playing each afternoon with the HHS golf team in his first fall sports season without football since fourth grade. Although it was a hard decision to make the switch, he seems happy and is not looking back.

And finally II: In the car yesterday a few thoughts were rattling around inside my brain (like a beebee in a box car to steal a line from a bad joke) and that got me thinking that I ought to write them down somewhere. Sorry, but I decided this is where I'm going to do it.

So today I'll kick off what will be a daily feature of the Green Alert Blog. I'm going to call it ...

And One More Thing
An announcer on the radio yesterday referred to next year as "Twenty-ten" and I wanted to stop the car and applaud. I could be wrong, but I blame the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey for the silliness of calling years like this one, "two thousand nine." I mean, did anyone ever refer to 1997 as "nineteen hundred and ninety-seven?" OK, maybe some people did, but not often. But it was 1997 and next year will be "2010."