Dartmouth players have no choice but to stay low as they go through a drill on Memorial Field Saturday afternoon.
A reward for climbing the stairs to get a bird's eye view of the first Memorial Field practice of the preseason is the row of plaques on the back wall of the grandstand celebrating Dartmouth's 17 Ivy League championship teams. This was one to remember.The New York Times Ivy League preview suggests that while the media poll had Harvard at the top, Penn might well spoil the Crimson picnic. The column says, "The Quakers’ trip to Cambridge, Mass., for the penultimate game of the season could go a long way to determining this year’s Ivy champion."
As for the team from Hanover, the Times wrote:
With so much uncertainty, many coaches are tempering their expectations for the season. But at Dartmouth, it will take very little to view this year as a step forward. The Big Green was 0-10 in 2008.Dartmouth football talk on the well-moderated Any Given Saturday board is infrequent so it's of interest whenever a few opinions are shared. If you click here you'll have to scroll down 5-6 posts to get to anything of substance, though.
The Big Green dodged a bullet when Indiana State coughed up a 17-0 lead and lost to NAIA Quincy, 26-20, in overtime on Thursday night. If ISU had held on Dartmouth would have had the longest losing streak in the nation at 12 games. ISU has now lost 27 in a row. The local paper has a story about the frustration at Indiana State that includes this:
More than one person I talked to wondered why they even bothered to hope ISU’s misery was going to end. Others said they won’t attend another game until they see meaningful on-field progress.Before heading out to practice yesterday I tuned in to a little bit of the ESPN broadcast of high school powerhouse St. Thomas Aquinas (Florida) against Upper Arlington (Ohio) at the Horseshoe in Columbus. As they say, if this had been a fight, they would have stopped it. Aquinas had a 28-0 lead in the first quarter and went on to a 52-7 win. (USA Today report). Interestingly, the game was yesterday, and this morning I find that the ESPN recruiting site is reporting an Aquinas player as having interest in Dartmouth (as well as Harvard, Princeton, Yale and ... Wisconsin?). ESPN lists Reynaldo Kirton as a 6-foot-2, 175-pound safety. Aquinas, of course, was the school that sent quarterback Dan Shula to Dartmouth.
Yale's intrasquad scrimmage was covered in the New Haven Register and it sounded a little sloppy in the rain. From the story: "Four quarterbacks combined to fumble seven times, five coming on botched exchanges with the center, and threw three interceptions in a span of seven plays."
Returning starter Brook Hart was 8-for-19 for 66 yards with one interception while Nebraska Transfer Patrick Witt was 3-for-5 for 19 yards.
Heading back to Vlad, the old (Mitsubishi) Expo yesterday after practice, I wandered through a reception for retired Dartmouth weights coach Carl Wallin, who has stepped down after 40 years at the college. Among those who traveled some distance to honor Carl were former defensive lineman (and Olympic shot put silver medalist) Adam Nelson '97, decathlete Andrew Hall '05 of "The Catch" fame and All-America thrower and three-year football lineman Ken Jansson '79.
And One More Thing (which will be retitled Extra Point from here on out because that's what it should have been called in the first place ;-) ... Staples used to run a back-to-school commercial accompanied by the tune, "It's the most wonderful time, of the year." (YouTube video) The contrast between the joy of the dad and the sadness of the kids was kind of funny, but really, is there an adult alive who can't remember how it felt to have the freedom of summer come to a screeching halt with the return to the classroom? What brings that to mind is that Hanover kids started school Wednesday and two of them are loaded down with homework this weekend. Somehow it just seems wrong for school to start before Labor Day.
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