Collector's Item?

In addition to being posted to the Internet as a PDF, the Dartmouth football media guide will indeed be printed this year. It is expected to be back from the printer late next week. To purchase a copy, send a check for $15 made out to Dartmouth College to:

Cindi Mansell
Athletics Communications Office
6083 Alumni Gym
Hanover, NH 03755

Nothing official has been decided, but it sounds as if the college is leaning toward making this the last year with a printed guide.

Green Alert Take: With seemingly everyone else going away from printed guides, I wonder if the value of having one actually is elevated. And if I'm a coach, I might just get that PDF printed up at the local copy shop next year to hand out to a few potential blue-chip recruits. It may not help but it certainly won't hurt. And trust me, I have it on extremely good authority that those PDFs look pretty good printed up that way.

Green Alert Take II: Interesting that athletic departments are cutting back on printing while admissions offices are going bonkers sending out unsolicited mailings of materials that cost a pretty penny to produce. Our junk mail since last spring has been overflowing with publications from colleges around the country, and most of it has never left the post office.

It's still 17 days until the Dartmouth opener, but not so for the Big Green's three non-league opponents. They each open this week. Find the notes for Game One foe Colgate's opener against Monmouth here. Game Two opponent New Hampshire's notes for St. Francis are here. And Game Five opponent Holy Cross' notes for Georgetown are here.

Speaking of Holy Cross, the Lehigh Football Nation site looks at the Crusaders' offseason developments here. The LFN posting offers an interesting note about a Holy Cross freshman running back from Toronto named Eddie Houghton. The 5-10/5-11, 220/225-pound (depending on the source) Canadian ran for 1,700 yards and 17 touchdowns as a high school senior, averaging 11 yards per carry. Houghton spent last year at Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts where he ran for 1,300 yards and 14 touchdowns. A Scout.com report quoted him before he signed with Holy Cross:

“The Ivy Leagues are recruiting me the hardest right now and Cornell has told me I am their number one back on their list. Harvard, Dartmouth, Columbia and Brown have told me I will be in their top three amongst highest recruited players.”

It will be interesting to see what kind of player Houghton ends up being. The last high-profile running back to come from Toronto to New England wasn't too shabby. You may remember him. Harvard guy by the name of Clifton Dawson who only broke the Ivy League career rushing record formerly held by Ed Marinaro.

This is kind of fun. Although Dartmouth is in New Hampshire, it is on the border of Vermont and a lot of us around here feel as much a part of that state – or more – than we do New Hampshire. Anyway, did you know Vermont has been one of just two states in the country without football at a public college or university? (Bonus trivia: Alaska is the other.)

That's about to change with Castleton State College kicking off its first year of Division III football this fall. The school of 2,000 students is one of five colleges in the country that will play their first game this year along with Old Dominion (FCS), University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio (DII), University of New Haven (DII) and Anna Maria College (DIII) of Massachusetts. Find a release from the National Football Foundation here.

All totaled 17 schools will be starting football between now and 2013 with Dartmouth's Football Championship Subdivision adding not only ODU, but also the University of South Alabama, Georgia State, Lamar, Texas San Antonio and North Carolina Charlotte. Hmm, do you think the phones are ringing at those schools?

By the way, an email hit my inbox announcing that the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame will, "relaunch and rename college football's premiere scholar-athlete award, the Vincent dePaul Draddy Trophy, in honor of William V. Campbell, the chairman of Intuit, former player and head coach at Columbia University and the 2004 recipient of the NFF's Gold Medal." If the NFF has put the story up on its website, I can't find it but this is a coup for the Ivy League and Columbia.

Princeton is going gung-ho with video and multimedia presentations on its website and offers this look at Princeton Stadium that is hard to beat:



Princeton also now has its own YouTube channel available here.

***

That certain Hanover High School senior runner has finalized her first official recruiting visit and has narrowed down dates to visit another. Timing is everything, though. A year ago we could have headed out there together in mid-September ;-)

Extra Point
Before Dartmouth practice yesterday I was waiting for the Hanover sophomore near the high school to cart him and his golf bag to practice. Maybe 50 kids went by before he showed up and every last one of them had a backpack over their shoulders. I'm trying to figure out what has changed since I was in school bringing books home with one of those rubber clip thingies strapped around them to keep them together. There are times when our kids' backpacks have weighed 35 pounds. They could hike the Appalachian Trail with those things!