WR Recruit Catches On at Oil Bowl

Incoming receiver Joe Dowdell of Bishop Kelley High School in Oklahoma was the leading receiver in the 73rd Oil Bowl in Wichita, Texas, on June 12. Dowdell hauled in four passes for 54 yards as his Oklahoma squad dropped a 13-12 decision to Texas.

Dowdell was one of a whopping five Ivy League-bound players in the Oil Bowl. The others:

Texas
Dillon Farley, Princeton
Taylor Pearson, OT, Princeton
Ricky Zorn, QB, Harvard

Oklahoma
Mike Major, T, Tulsa Princeton. (Major was a high school teammate of Dowdell.)

Find a note about Dowdell receiving an offer from Dartmouth last year here, and a Tulsa World story about him "signing" with Dartmouth in February, here.

Dowdell will also be playing in the Oklahoma All-State game in Jenks on July 30 as a member of the East team. Find the game roster here.

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If notes from early Green Alert Premium subscribers are any indication, there is indeed a sense of growing optimism among Dartmouth football fans this summer.

That optimism carries over to a columnist for the Daily Dartmouth who writes:

Two years can make a huge difference, and the shifting destiny of the Dartmouth football team is a clear-cut example. Two seasons ago, the team fought hard, but wound up with a winless season. Last season, the team demonstrated to its fans how it developed as a whole and the success that was yet to come.

Now, less than two months away from the kickoff of the 2010 season, I am a believer.

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What FCS (I-AA) team has the most players in the NFL? Unless you read Craig Haley's piece on The Sports Network site it will probably take you a lot of guesses to get it right. I know I would have named a ton of schools before I came up with the University of Maine (where Dartmouth's Buddy Teevens began his head coaching career). That's right, the answer is UMaine, which had no fewer than seven players on NFL rosters last year.

Standout Maine fullback Jared Turcotte, who dreamed at one time of playing for Dartmouth, could join those ranks in a couple of years. Before then, however, this Portland Press Herald story says the bruising preseason All-America – who missed all of last season with injury – will become a husband and a father.

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While drilling USC for the Reggie Bush/OJ Mayo mess, Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan takes a mini-swipe at the Ancient Eight. He writes (italics are mine):

The NCAA exists because at the turn of the 20th century colleges couldn’t trust each other to play fair in terms of just who was wearing these uniforms and what was being done for them at their schools. Nobody has ever trusted anybody, and with good reason. This means you, too, Ivy League. You’ll all do whatever you think you can get away with.

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Away from the playing field ...

From today's Daily Dartmouth:

Dartmouth’s total projected budget for the 2010 fiscal year shows a $5.6 million surplus despite original projections of a $2.5 million deficit, according to Senior Vice President Steven Kadish. While the College of Arts and Sciences is expected to break even, the sum of the professional schools’ budgets will likely account for a “modest” surplus, he said.

And this ...

More than 80 percent of the projected budget gap through fiscal year 2014 has been resolved, Kadish said.

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And finally, today was the long-awaited day when DSL was finally supposed to arrive at this outpost on the shoulder of Moose Mountain. The countdown to what a friend jokingly referred to a,s "last century's technology," is on hold for a few days because our phone service went out at midday yesterday. Word is the phone company won't be able to look into the problem until tomorrow :-(

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And finally Part II, if you are trying to track me down between now and Sunday evening it will be hit and miss as I work as a media coordinator of sorts for the Tommy Keane Invitational golf tournament at Hanover Country Club. You can visit my TKI blog here. If there's one thing I enjoyed almost as much as covering football when I was at the newspaper, it was golf. Just keep your fingers crossed that the weather holds. The forecast as we speak is calling for a 40 percent chance of rain on championship Sunday.