Colorful Contests On Tap

While the Green-White Game is still a week away, three other Ivy League schools will be having their "colorful contests" today.

Cornell will broadcast its Red-White game live on the internet with live stats. Find a story about the goings-on at Ithaca here. Defending champion Brown got its championship rings before its final practice and will hold the Brown-White game today. And Yale will end Tom Williams' first spring practice with the Blue-White game.

UNH will hold its version of the Blue-White game on May 9 according to this story.

Speaking of UNH, they do things the right way over in Durham. For all the success the Wildcats have had on the field, they pay attention to what goes on off it as well. Kudos to UNH for being one of only 23 football teams in both the FBS and FCS for receiving a NCAA Public Recognition Award in the classroom. Find a story here.

And belated kudos to Dartmouth for finishing tied for second in the nation with Brown for most teams recognized by the NCAA APR. Find a story here.

Dartmouth dedicated the new Red Rolfe Field at Biondi Park yesterday and hopes to put the exclamation mark on the celebration by clinching the Rolfe Division championship this weekend. With a two-game lead over Brown, the Big Green's magic number is three. With each team having four games remaining, any combination of Dartmouth wins and Brown losses that add up to three will bring the Ivy League Championship Series to the new park in Hanover. Dartmouth plays a pair of doubleheaders against Harvard while Brown has a pair against Yale.

And finally, we'll be headed over to Beaver Stadium at Penn State shortly. The parking lots open at 8 a.m., for the 2 p.m., game if you can believe it. With the forecast in the mid-80s, there could possibly be 80,000 people turn up. Amazing.

Fun Friday

Greetings from Bellefonte, Pa., about a 12-mile straightaway from Penn State's Beaver Stadium. Two things of note:

1. The internet at our KOA campground is a world faster than the internet we have up on Moose Mountain. Pretty sad.
2. Sadder yet. I'm blogging to you from a campground. That campgrounds have wi-fi and that I'd be taking time to do this? Ugh.

First order of business, today's scrimmaging schedule has changed a few times. As of 9:45 this a.m., the team will be on the field at 4:15 with the scrimmaging set to begin sometime thereafter. The timing is dependent on the dedication of the new baseball stadium, also taking place this afternoon.

The Dartmouth sports information website has a thorough look at spring football so far here. It includes this thought:

Coach Teevens is adamant not only about making a commitment to running the ball much more in 2009, but also in defending the run much better.

Senior linebacker Andrew Dete and senior punter Brian Scullin have been honored by the National Football Foundation as scholar-athletes. Find a story here. From the release:

The National Football Foundation & College Hall of Fame (NFF) announced today the members of the 2009 NFF Hampshire Honor Society, which is comprised of college football players from all divisions of play who each maintained a 3.2 GPA or better.

Former Dartmouth tight end Casey Cramer of the Tennessee Titans joined a couple of teammates visiting wounded soldiers at Fort Campbell army post in Kentucky. A short blurb is here.

Harvard's spring football game will be played tomorrow night, the third year in a row it is being played under the lights. The Crimson has a story. An aside: Wouldn't it be fun if Dartmouth could do the same thing? Hmmm, how about over at Scully-Fahey now that it is FieldTurf?

Maine is dropping men's soccer and volleyball "to preserve the overall integrity and competitiveness of University of Maine athletics during these difficult economic times." The Bangor Daily News has the story. Although the first reaction is a shudder when you hear about dropping sports, I'm here to tell you I've had a number of people suggest Dartmouth needs to think along the same lines. Don't shoot the messenger; I'm only sharing what some of the readers of the blog have written.

Princeton sports information often pioneers new ground and it seems TigerTown is up to its old (new?) tricks by purchasing an inexpensive FlipCamera and turning it over to folks for quick and dirty (not that kind of dirty) video reports. Find a TigerCam report on spring football here.

The Daily Dartmouth has a story about the closing of two Hanover restaurants in the same building; Carpaccio and Quiznos. Location is cited as an issue by both managers and I can understand why. I never even saw the first restaurant and while the second has been closed for a month, I didn't even know it because it was hidden away on the second floor of a building. Whoever heard of a fast-food restaurant on a second floor in a town the size of Hanover?

The story notes that the nearest sandwich shop is now an 8-mile drive away. I'd love to see Hanover land a Jimmy Johns, where we will have lunch today. Great college-town business. Cheap and fast, fast, fast, exactly the way a sandwich shop should be.

And finally, for some reason Athlon Sports has reprised a preview of one of Buddy Teevens' Stanford teams. It's interesting reading because it shows whether he's wearing Cardinal or Green, the man is true to his color.

OK, one more thing. The drive out to Penn State in the '84 VW bus went off without a hitch. We stopped for about an hour at Bucknell, which we had visited about a month ago and confirmed the earlier impression of that certain Hanover High junior. It's a pretty neat place.

Will He Or Won't He?

A sportswriter in Austin, Texas offers up "the best games that I have seen in my two years at the American-Statesman" in this column. One of the 10 best games he's seen features quarterback Nyk Mckissic, who commited to Dartmouth, then de-commited but could still end up in Hanover.

The Portal 31 Yale football blog of the New Haven Register has a story about the "crowded backfield" in New Haven.

From a Dartmouth release: "This year 21 of Dartmouth College's varsity teams will receive public recognition from the NCAA for having Academic Progress Rate scores among the top 10 percent nationally in their respective sport." Find the full story here.

Now we're off to State College for Penn State's Blue-White Weekend.

Draft Dreams

You'll have to excuse Dartmouth freshman center Austen Fletcher if he seems a little preoccupied this weekend. His older brother Alex, a fifth-year senior last year at Stanford – where he was a Buddy Teevens recruit – is an NFL draft prospect who is hoping his phone rings Saturday or Sunday. Scott Wright's well-regarded Draft Countdown has the 6-foot-2 1/4, 297-pound Alex Fletcher rated as the ninth-best center available and a possible late-round choice. Wright's site even mentions Austen here. FoxSports has him as a "likely second-day pick."

The ESPN draft site has an in-depth look at Fletcher that notes his "brother, Austen, is an offensive lineman at Dartmouth University." Where is the person who wrote that from? Kazakhstan?

Find Alex Fletcher's Stanford bio here.

Dartmouth gets a mention in a Rivals.com story about a 6-foot-4, 205-pound receiver from Montana. Matt Miller (who had 932 yards receiving and 15 touchdown catches along with 663 rushing yards and six TDs on the ground) "has scholarship offers from Stanford, Boise State, Oregon State, Arizona State, Wyoming, Colorado State, Washington State, Oregon, Montana, Montana State, Harvard and Dartmouth."

No wonder Harvard's been so good the last few years. Scholarships! Glad to see Dartmouth is catching on ;-)

There's a heartwarming story out of New Haven where the Register writes about the Yale football team joining the growing bone marrow donation effort. From the story:

Thursday, the Yale football players will discover there are some things more important than beating Harvard, something more precious than a game-winning touchdown catch. They will be given a crash course in the game of life.

Leading the game plan will be a soft-spoken, eternally optimistic member of the women’s hockey program, who is in the midst of the battle that has captured the hearts of the Yale athletics community.

Mandi Schwartz will not be at the Yale Commons between 11 a.m.-3 p.m. on Thursday as countless volunteers show up to take part in the marrow donor donation drive. She will be nearly 2,000 miles away in a hospital bed near her Wilcox, Saskatchewan, home undergoing her fifth and final round of chemotherapy as she continues her fight against leukemia.

However, as each willing participant allows his or her cheek to be swapped with the hope it will be a match for Schwartz and others like her in need of a stem-cell transplant, her presence will be hard to miss.

And finally, the blog and Big Green Alert premium will be on semi-hiatus (is there such a word?) from tomorrow morning through Sunday as those two certain Hanover High School kids and I head out to Penn State for the Blue-White Weekend festivities. Working every single football Saturday since well before they were born, I've never been able to share what a regular season game at Beaver Stadium is like with the kids, who seem to have inherited some blue blood (not that kind of blue). So for the fourth year in a row, we'll get up at "0-dark-30" tomorrow morning and make the long drive out to Centre County, Pa., (with a stop for a second look at Bucknell mixed in).

We'll camp at the exact same site at the same Bellefonte KOA we've camped at each year, shop at the same Weiss Market we've shopped at each year, hit all the same souvenir shops we hit each year and once again have stickies at The Diner. Traditions, you understand.

We'll catch a PSU baseball game against Illinois Friday night and then walk through the midway on the adjoining Beaver Stadium parking lot. On Saturday we'll tailgate for a few hours and then join perhaps 70,000-plus others at the Blue-White game. If the line isn't too long after the game we'll get some Peachy Paterno at the Creamery and then make the long drive home on Sunday.

Mom, meanwhile, will have four days of peace and quiet sans her, ahem, three kids.

In case you are wondering how they do it in the big-time, find the schedule of events for the Blue-White Weekend here.

Hopefully, some of my "spies" will share a few observations about Friday's first real scrimmaging of the spring that I will be able to post from the campground Saturday morning – if the wi-fi is working. I'll revisit the scrimmage with Monday's BGA, and have full coverage of the final week of spring football next week.

Scenes From A Practice

A quick clip from Monday afternoon is a reminder why watching football practice is like trying to catch all the action at a three-ring circus.

Jake Novak at Roar Lions Roar continues his series of looks at 2009 Ivy League teams with his analysis of Harvard as a possible title contender and his look at Brown as a team that might have lost a little too much to repeat.

News & Notes

With the planned reconstruction of the stands at Memorial Field on hold, the concrete structure is being powerwashed, patched and otherwise made ready for next fall. The college is going ahead with the new $45 million Visual Arts Center according to this story in the local Valley News. That project was originally budgeted at $52 million.

Speaking of the impact of the economic downturn college sports, the Brown Daily Herald has a story headlined, "Hiring freeze may hit athletics hard." The story begins: "The Department of Athletics expects to lose about 30 coaches and staff this summer." That doesn't sound quite right, but the story makes it clear there will be a lot of belt-tightening going on in the Brown athletic department, as there surely will be everywhere.

Freshman tailback Chris Hardy is pictured in a Valley News story about how more running backs (and receivers) may be involved in the Dartmouth offense next fall. Hardy says:

“We're going to run the ball more than we did last year. That's one of the main things – you look at our (stats), we didn't run much. Any carries are obviously going to go to the number-one guys, which was Milan (Williams). This year, though, we've got a new O-line coach and new system, so it’s going to be real nice for the run game.”

Also mentioned in the story is junior Matt Dornak, a converted corner who is proving to be a load at running back this spring. He was just elected social chair at Gamma Delta Chi. Teammate and classmate James O'Brien, a former corner whose soft hands are now being employed at wide receiver, was elected GDX president while former teammate Alex Stonehouse is the new vice president.

Chris Hardy, by the way, won't be the only college athlete in his family next year. A College of Charleston web posting reports the school has signed his younger sister Cathryn Hardy, a 5-foot-11 forward who scored 1,303 points and grabbed 810 rebounds as a high schooler. Charleston head coach Nancy Wilson says, "She is a player that goes hard all of the time – She knows no other way." Sounds like it runs in the family.

There are school newspaper stories today about a couple of Ivy League spring games and both point out that making judgments based on what you see on the field can be a little tricky when the contests aren't full contact. The Columbia Spectator writes that quarterback Millie Olawale couldn't really show his strength and elusiveness because the defense was forced to play two-hand touch with him.

A little to the south, the Daily Princetonian wrote that star tailback Jordan "Culbreath received the LaDainian Tomlinson treatment and was not used at all. Because defensive players were not allowed to tackle the quarterback in the backfield, many plays ended prematurely when a defensive lineman grazed the opposing quarterback."

At Holy Cross quarterback Dominic Randolph wasn't tackled or even touch in the spring game because he didn't play in it. While he wasn't on the field he wasn't exactly forgotten, being selected a Holy Cross captain for the third year in a row. From a school release:

Fifth-year senior quarterback Dominic Randolph (Amelia, Ohio) will serve as the captain of the 2009 Holy Cross football team, it was announced by head coach Tom Gilmore. Randolph, who was one of three captains during the 2007 campaign and one of two captains in 2008, becomes the first player in school history to serve as a team captain for three seasons.

Linebacker From Texas To Hanover

Add linebacker Miles Gay of Clear Book High School in Friendswood, Texas, to the list of incoming football players. According to MaxPeps, Gay had 40 tackles and 20 assists last fall for the Wolverines, including nine individual stops and six assists against Clear Lake, and 10 individual stops and five assists against Alvin.

The Clear Brook standout was named to the all-district first team, was the school's linebacker of the year, a team captain, winner of the program's academic award, and first-team academic all-state.

Scout.com calls him, "a 6-0, 205-pound headhunter with 4.6 speed." (As always, your mileage may vary with regard to size and speed.) Find a head shot here.

In the spring Gay throws the shot put and discus for Clear Brook.

Today's Daily Dartmouth has a story spun out of the first week of spring football practice. While the occasional story in any student media will have you scratching your head, this one summarizes one problem the Big Green endured last fall with clarity:

Statistically, the most glaring problem with the 2008 Dartmouth team was the lack of an effective running game, as the team’s 27.1 rushing yards per game and 1.2 yards per attempt were by far the lowest in the Ivy League. The second-worst rushing team averaged well over two times the Big Green’s total yards, and bettered Dartmouth’s per-attempt output by one yard.

The offense’s inability to rush the ball helped the Big Green’s opponents average roughly ten more minutes of possession per game (again, the Big Green was last in the Ivy League in this statistic), which in turn tired out the defense, and put an inordinate amount of pressure on the success of the passing game.

3 Foes Celebrate End Of Spring Drills

While Dartmouth is just one week into spring practice and still two weeks away from its Green-White game, three opponents held their end-of-spring intrasquad scrimmages yesterday.

At Columbia, junior quarterback Millie Olawale engineered an 80-yard, two-minute drive that lifted the White team to a 28-20 win over the Blue. Olawale completed 16-of-30 throws for 228 yards, two touchdowns and one interception. An interesting spin on the Columbia game as reported on the school website:

Special teams was dictated by the luck of the draw, literally, as the public address announcer selected various scenarios blindly out of an envelope, giving the offense and defense different situations to maneuver. Each scoring drive in the first half was aided or affected by one of these situations.

That's interesting on two accounts. First, with kickoff and punt returns seldom live in intrasquad scrimmages because of the potential for injury, a random drawing adds a little fun mystery to the game. And second ... they had a PA announcer? Maybe I'm forgetting, but I can't ever remember Dartmouth having someone call the action. Music, yes. But not an announcer. Nice touch.

Columbia also named a whopping six captains, including Olawale and standout receiver Austin Knowlin among others. Six???

At Princeton, the Tigers held their White-Black game with White taking a 17-2 victory. Silly me, but I would have thought it would be the Orange-Black game. (Help me here. Does anyone have a name for its spring game that is more original than two colors?) Not a whole lot of detail on the Princeton website. Princeton announced four captains including standout tailback Jordan Culbreath. It's the first time the Tigers have had four captains.

In Worcester, Mass., Holy Cross had just 155 yards of total offense – the Crusaders usually do that in a little more than a quarter – but a look at the game statistics gives a hint why. All-American quarterback Dominic Randolph did not play. Or if he did, he didn't have any stats. It's not completely clear from the report, but it looks as if it was just the offense against the defense with no official score kept. Holy Cross, of course, trumped Columbia and its PA announcer by having its spring festivities broadcast on the internet.

No word yet on whether anything special is planned when Dartmouth's spring game is played on May 2. Last year former coaches Jake Crouthamel and Joe Yukica were welcomed back to coach the Green and White teams. For a look back at last year's Green-White game, check out the Big Green Alert story.

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The Dartmouth men's lacrosse team had a 6-5 lead over No. 2 Virginia early in the fourth quarter yesterday before the Cavaliers used a big final period to take a 13-6 win. Interestingly, the Big Green made it a difficult afternoon for Chad Gaudet, the former Dartmouth tailback who, as a graduate student at UVa, has been one of the best faceoff men in the nation. Gaudet won just a so-so 8-of-19 on the faceoff X against his old teammates. A picture of Gaudet defending a former teammate can be found along with the Daily Progress game story.