Game Day!

It is a gray morning in the Upper Valley but the forecast for kickoff is temperature in the 50s with partly sunny skies. A great day for football!

Don't forget, the Dartmouth game was a late addition to the Sirius lineup and can be heard at 1:30 on Sirius channel 129.

For a little more background on Colgate's win over Stony Brook last week, check out the Colgate Maroon News game story.

The local newspaper has a nice story across the top of the front page today about Coach Buddy Teevens' initiative to have former players write to current players wearing their number or playing their position about the importance of their Dartmouth football experience. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the story is not on the web.

A couple more predictions have trickled in. Jake Novak over at the Roar Lions Roar blog follows the Ivies about as closely as anyone. Jake writes:

Colgate comes into Hanover pretty banged up, but the Big Green aren't ready yet to beat a superior opponent. However, I do expect a great close game like the 2007 contest.

Chuck Burton at the Lehigh Football Nation (and a columnist for College Sporting News) says it will be Colgate 38, Dartmouth 10.

Dartmouth-Colgate, of course, is an Ivy League-Patriot League matchup and such games could be in jeopardy if the Patriot League follows Fordham's lead and turns to football scholarships. The Harvard Crimson has a well-done story about that possibility and its ramifications with some thoughts from Crimson coach Tim Murphy. From the story:

... (I)f the Patriot League does step up the quality of its recruits, then necessary alterations will inevitably have to be made to Harvard’s non-conference schedule.

“We’ll have to adjust for sure,” Murphy admits, adding that the decision to schedule Fordham in an upcoming season was made “before we knew they were going to scholarships.”

Frank McLaughlin, the Harvard men's basketball coach from 1977-85 and now the Fordham athletic director, explained the pickle the Patriot League is in succinctly:

“We’re really being squeezed—all the Patriot League schools are being squeezed from two ends. One is, you can’t get anybody away from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or the Ivies. You know, with Harvard, Yale, Princeton increasing their aid packages, I think you’re going to see a tremendous boost across the board athletically at all three schools. And then the Northeast Conference, the Monmouths, the Wagners, Central Connecticut and stuff, they’re giving scholarships.”

Murphy remembers well what it was like before Harvard opening-day opponent Holy Cross gave up scholarships:

"The last time any Patriot League school had scholarships in that league was Holy Cross in the ’80s and ’90s. They dominated Eastern football at this level in a way that wasn’t seen before and hasn’t been seen since.”

(Between 1986 and 1991, Holy Cross was 60-5-1 with records of: 10-1, 11-0, 9-2, 10-1, 9-1-1 and 11-0)

The battle of the onetime Dartmouth assistants (scroll down this link) has gone to former offensive coordinator John Perry and his Merrimack College team over former defensive coordinator Rob Talley and his Stonehill team. (Story) Merrimack piled up 630 yards in doubling up Stonehill, 42-21.

(An aside: Watching the news on a local station the other night, a young sportcaster referred to a team winning a baseball game, 2-1, as "doubling up," the opponent. Argh! Mathematically, that's correct of course. But it was a ONE-RUN game for crying out loud. 42-21 is doubling up.)

UNH has the weekend off after beating Ball State for its fifth win over an FBS team in a row. That streak won't last forever. In fact, it probably won't last much longer at all. The Wildcats play at Pitt next year, at Minnesota in 2012 and at Boston College in 2014.

Extra Point
Driving to practice yesterday I spotted a copper wire strung from a house to a tree and couldn't help but smile. When I was a kid I leaned precariously out a second-floor window to hang a copper wire from one part of the house to another, and then hooked up a Hallicrafters shortwave radio to tune in the world. Crackling interference punctuated by by ear-piercing screeches and whistles was the price paid to bring in voices from some faraway country. How many times did I go running for my Copenhagen-born and raised mother to tell her I'd finally gotten Danish radio only to have her tell me that what sounded Danish to me was actually Norwegian?

If a program came in clear enough and didn't fade before I could jot down the required information, I'd send a letter off to the station and get a QSL card in return. Tucked away somewhere I have postcards from mysterious locales including Kiev and Cairo, The Netherlands, South Africa and Quito, Ecuador, whose omnipresent station HCJB enclosed a thumb-sized straw doll that I imagined was made by some old woman in a hut at the edge of the Andes. For years I'd get a Christmas card from Radio Havana Cuba and worry that the mailman thought I was a closet communist.

I can't help but think some of the romance of "prospecting" the airwaves alone in your darkened room in the wee hours when the signal comes in best has been lost when you can just click on a link and there's radio clear as a bell from Denmark at any time of the day.